Fall Fungi (and Friends)

There are many types of coral fungi in the woods at this time of year. They can be very hard to identify without a microscopic look at the spores but I think this one might be cockscomb or crested coral (Clavulina coralloides.) Crested corals have branches that end in sharp tips and these tips will often turn brown as the ones in the photo have done. I don’t see these as often as I do other types of coral fungi.

The branch ends on this coral fungus are blunt and yellowish so I think this might be a golden coral (Ramaria aurea.) These are common here and can get quite large. This one was 4 or 5 inches across. It’s always exciting to find such beautiful things coming up out of the dead leaves.

 

Turkey tail fungi (Trametes versicolor) start to show up when the leaves that hid them fall off the lower branches of shrubs. They come in many colors, the most common being shades of shades of brown, but sometimes you can find purple or blue ones like those pictured here. Turkey tails are bracket fungi that always grow on wood and they are always worth looking for.

Dyer’s Polypore (Phaeolus schweinitzii) is also called the velvet topped fungus because of its hairy appearance. These fungi are parasitic on the roots and heartwood of living white pines in the eastern U.S. and cause root rot. I usually find them on logs though, and have never seen one on a live tree. This fungus changes color as it ages. If found when young it can be used to dye wool a soft yellow or orange and older examples will dye wool brown.

This is what a young dyer’s polypore looks like. As you can see the color difference between young and old examples is dramatic.  Some of these mushrooms can get quite large but this one was only about 3 inches across. Though they sometimes look as if they’re growing on the ground as this one does, they’re really growing on conifer roots or buried logs.

 

Golden pholiota (Pholiota limonella) mushrooms grew on a beech log and looked like scaly puffballs, so it took a while to identify them. They can grow on living or dead wood in the summer and fall and usually form clusters. Their orange-yellow caps are slimy and covered in reddish scales. The late afternoon sun really brought out the golden color of these examples.

Lemon drops (Bisporella citrina) look like tiny lemon candies that have been sprinkled over logs, but they are sac fungi with stalked fruit bodies. The term “sac fungi” comes from microscopic sexual structures which resemble wineskins. There are over 64,000 different sac fungi, including cup and “ear” fungi, jelly babies, and morel mushrooms.

Lemon drops start life as a tiny yellow disc and look as if they lie flat on the log, but a closer look shows that each disc hovers just above the surface on a short stalk. As they age each disc will become cup shaped. The “citrina” part of the scientific name comes from the Latin citrin, and means “lemon yellow.” Lemon drops live up to their name and great clusters of them can often be seen on stumps and logs from quite a distance. Single examples are extremely small and very hard to get a sharp photo of.

I’m not sure what this misshapen mushroom was. It looks more like a truffle than anything else but it was growing above ground and truffles grow underground.

NOTE: Two visitors have identified this fungus as an aborted entoloma (Entoloma abortivum). Thanks guys!

When the remains of the 5000 year old “Ice Man” were found in the Ötztal Alps in 1991, one of the things he carried were dried pieces of tinder polypore (Fomes fomentarius.) Treated strips of the fungus made exceptional fire starting material. Because it burned slowly it could also be used to carry fire from one camp to another and it even has medicinal properties, so it would have been a very valuable possession in 3,300 BCE.

I found these odd shaped black fungi on a white pine log. I don’t know if they started life black or if they turned black as they aged. They were very rubbery like a jelly fungus.

 

September has been a dry month so I haven’t seen many slime molds, but I do have a few shots of some that I found. I think this one might be Badhamia utricularis forming fruit bodies before going on to produce sporangia, which simply means that it’s going through the process of releasing its spores. Some slime molds consume fungi and this one seems to prefer crust fungi.

One of the most fascinating things about slime molds is how they can move. They are thought of as a giant single cell with multiple nuclei which can all move together as one at speeds of up to an inch per hour. They can also climb and often do so to release their spores. In this photo the sporangia (fruiting bodies) of Leocarpus fragills have climbed a twig so the wind might better disperse their spores. The twig was little more than the size of a toothpick, so that should give you an idea of how small the sporangia are. They are often so small that I can’t see any real detail by eye, so I have to let the camera see for me-quite literally “shooting in the dark.”

One of the frustrating things about slime molds is that there seems to be very little in print about them so they can be very hard to identify. However if you can get beyond that and just enjoy them for their beauty, then a whole new world that you never knew existed will open up for you. But wear your glasses; each of the tiny white “pearls” pictured was barely bigger than the period made by a pencil on a piece of paper.

Stuff your eyes with wonder … live as if you’d drop dead in ten seconds. See the world. It’s more fantastic than any dream made or paid for in factories. ~Ray Bradbury

Thanks for stopping in.