A Few More Mushrooms

I’ve had a hard time getting to this mushroom post because so many other things have been showing themselves, but things are calming down now so I’ve finally put this one together. I say finally because I found most of what you’ll see here in August when it rained frequently for a week or so. I’m starting of with these cute little orange unicorn mushrooms (Entoloma quadratum.) Though I don’t see any orange in them my color finding software does, so I believe the name is correct. The unicorn part of the name comes from the tiny knob at the top of the cap. These mushrooms aren’t common here but I see a handful each year.

I’ve seen lots of coral fungi lately, especially yellow spindle coral (Clavulinopsis fusiformis) like that seen here. They always remind me of tiny flames coming up out of the earth. I often see them coming up along the sides of hard packed trails.

Quite often when looking for mushrooms you’ll find at least one that can’t be identified and this is one of those. You have to look at branching or forking and tip formation in coral fungi but there was very little of either going on here so all I can say is it’s a type of club or finger coral. At first I thought they were a worm coral but a close look showed a bit of branching going on.

Purple cort mushrooms (Cortinarius iodeoides) are covered with a bitter slime that keeps critters from damaging them. I’ve tried unsuccessfully for years to get a photo of the slime so I could show it to you. This year I finally pulled it off; you can see the liquid like reflections on this cap, though there isn’t really any liquid there. If you picked it you would find it cold and slimy; that’s the only way to describe it. The slime does dry as they age and then slugs will start eating them.

Butter wax caps (Hygrocybe ceracea) are usually one of the most photogenic of all the smaller mushrooms but these were ragged, and I’m not sure why. I didn’t see any real good examples of how beautiful this mushroom can be this year.

I saw just a single hen of the woods mushroom (Grifola frondosa) this year and this is it. It was young and not well developed but it was interesting just the same. They are also called ram’s head or sheep’s head in this country and in Japan they are known as the dancing mushroom. They are said to look like the back of a brown hen’s ruffled feathers, and that’s how they come by their common name. I’m a little baffled by mushrooms this year. We had more rain than I can remember so I thought there would be mushrooms everywhere, but that hasn’t been the case. Can we have too much rain even for mushrooms?

I know that Indian pipes (Monotropa uniflora) aren’t mushrooms but since they always appear along with mushrooms I usually include them in the same posts. It is fitting that the plant appears in a post on fungi because according to the University of Texas Indian pipes are associated with a fungus which obtains nutrients directly from the roots of green plants. That makes Indian pipe a parasite, with the fungus acting as a “bridge” between it and its host.

Another plant that is similar to Indian pipes is called pinesap (Monotropa hypopitys) It would be hard because of its color, to confuse these examples with Indian pipes but they can often be very light colored and can look the same at a glance. The surest way to know which plant you’re looking at is to count the flowers. The word uniflora in the scientific name of Indian pipes means “one flower” and that says it all; there is a single flower per stem. But on pinesap plants, as can be seen here, there are multiple flowers per stem. These plants receive nutrients from fungi that are associated with the roots of oaks and pines. They aren’t as common as Indian pipes so some years I don’t see them at all.

Hemlock varnish shelf fungi (Ganoderma tsugae) are probably the most easily found in this post. This was a good year for them and I saw trees with a dozen or more on them. Though they’re usually the size of saucers, I’ve seen them reach dinner plate size. This mushroom is considered the most important of all the herbs and substances used in Chinese herbal medicine, including ginseng. In China it is called the reishi mushroom and scientists around the world are researching its anti-cancer potential.

I’ve seen a lot of slime molds this year but almost all of them have been insect egg slime molds (Leocarpus fragilis) like that seen here. Each “egg,” about the same diameter as a common pin, is actually a fruiting body of the slime mold. Each one is on a stalk that can’t be seen here, and as they age they will blacken and harden, and start to crack open before releasing their spores to the wind.

In this view of another insect egg slime mold it has come together from the more liquid plasmodium stage and is in the process of separating into individual fruiting bodies. You can see just a few have separated out from the main mass. When finished the mass will look like what we just saw in the previous photo.

In this view of a slime mold taken earlier the slime mold is in the plasmodium stage, which happens before the stage in the previous photo. In this stage it is close to liquid and moves over the forest floor looking for yeasts, mushroom spores or bacteria to feed on. This movement is called “streaming” and happens at about 1 millimeter per hour. The plasmodium is made up of networks of protoplasmic veins and many nuclei which move to seek out food. Once the slime mold finds something it likes it comes together and surrounds it, and secretes enzymes to digest it. The easiest way for me to think of slime molds is as a single celled organism like an amoeba, with thousands of nuclei but in truth nobody can say what they really are. Though it can spread itself out over a large area the slime mold’s parts all move together as one, as a flock of birds or a school of fish would. They are fascinating and beautiful at the same time.

I have traveled backwards through a slime mold’s life cycle with these photos, so this photo would show stage one. Stage three, the final stage before spore production, would actually be two photos ago, if that makes sense.

I can’t swear to the fact and I have no scientific proof but experience has shown that when I see leaves colored in this way I am more likely to find slime molds; especially if the leaves are oak leaves.

The black tooth fungus (Phellodon niger) is easy to just pass by but it is an interesting mushroom that can vary in color. I’ve seen them almost black as these were and I’ve seen them in maroon. If they grow close enough together their caps can fuse together, creating a large misshapen mass. Of course they also grow singly. Another odd thing about this mushroom is how the caps seem to split open as they age. If you pick one you notice immediately how tough and dense it is; almost as if it has more weight than its size would permit. Finally, when it is turned over you see the black “teeth” that give it its common name. The teeth are really just folds of tissue and spores form on them. It’s interesting how the spore bearing surface increases when a mushroom grows pores or spines on its cap. All in all this ho-hum mushroom that people walk right by with hardly a glance really bears a second look, because it’s quite an interesting mushroom.

When I see a mushroom that looks like this I immediately think “chanterelle” but would I eat them? Not a chance. I’ve read and heard so many conflicting arguments for and against chanterelles and false chanterelles, summer chanterelles and winter chanterelles that I don’t know if I’d eat them even if an expert gave them their blessing. One of the most striking things about the mushroom in this photo is its hollow stem. But chanterelles have solid stems, right? Well, yes and no; yellow foot chanterelles have a hollow stem. In fact, DNA analysis has shown over 20 chanterelle species are at least partially hollow, and that’s just in the U.S., so the old solid stem argument doesn’t really hold water.

From the side this sure looks like a chanterelle but do we know the difference between false gills and true gills? Do the gills branch or do they run straight? Are they blunt where they meet the stem or do they just kind of fade? Are they the same color as the cap and stem? What color should the stem be?

Rather than trying to discourage anyone from eating mushrooms, I’m trying to show people what they should know so they can be sure what you’re eating is safe. In the case of chanterelles eating a big dish of false chanterelles won’t kill you, but it will make you sick enough to never want to do it again. The simple point is, know what you’re eating. If you can’t be 100% sure, don’t eat it; and that applies to not just mushrooms but any wild food. The best way to learn in my opinion, is to find someone who leads foraging hikes and tag along with them. You’ll learn more in an afternoon than you would have thought possible.

On the other hand, there are edible, choice mushrooms that you can be sure of just by their looks, and the purple trumpet (Craterellus cornucopioides) is one of those. I usually find them on south facing forested slopes under deciduous trees like beech, oak, and maple. They are also called black trumpets, blue trumpets, or blue chanterelles. They appear in this area near the end of August and are considered a delicacy. I’ve met foragers at this time of year whose first question is often “Have you seen any purple trumpets?” That’s because, if you walk into a restaurant kitchen with a bag full of these, you’ll likely walk out with a pocket full of cash, and that’s how professional foragers earn their living. Last I heard they were going for $50.00 per pound, but that was a couple of years ago I think. Purple trumpets are especially prized by chefs because they dry easily and they hold their flavor when dried, and they can be chopped, powdered or what have you. I’ve seen hillsides covered with so many of them you could hardly walk without stepping on them, but since I’m not a forager I just let them be.

Jelly babies (Leotia lubrica) helped me see that forests are full of small and beautiful things. Once you train your eyes to see small things, before long a previously unseen side of nature will suddenly appear. Despite their name jelly babies are sac fungi rather than jelly fungi.

I saw lots of red painted suillus mushrooms (Suillus spraguei) this year. For about a month they were everywhere I went. They are also called the painted slippery cap and red and yellow suillus. The caps are dark red when young and develop yellowish cracks as they age. They also have mats of reddish hairs on the cap as can be seen here.

Cotton like hairs on the underside of the painted suillus cap are actually a partial veil that covers the spore bearing surface when the mushroom is young.

In this shot taken previously you can see the yellowish elongated pores that are revealed when the partial veil pulls away. All of these features combined make this a very pretty mushroom that can indeed look like it was painted. These features also make it very easy to identify and the fact that it is a common mushroom makes it easy to find. That means it’s a good starting point in mushroom identification. They start to appear in mid-August and will be around through October, usually. Look for them near and under pines.

It’s hard to miss a Russell’s bolete (Boletellus russellii) if you look at its shaggy stem with its deep grooves and angular ridges. Why would a mushroom evolve a stem like this? The only thing I can guess is to impede slugs crawling up the stalk. The “yellow-brown to reddish-brown to olive-gray cap” is often scaly and sometimes cracked.

Though there are gilled boletes most have pores, as can be seen on the underside of a Russell’s bolete. The color or the surface is yellowish, becoming more yellow if it is bruised. You can see brighter yellow around the edges of the cap in this shot. The pores or tubes are very angular.

One recent morning I went out into the yard and found these crimson waxcaps (Hygrocybe punicea) under a hemlock tree at the edge of the forest. They were glowing with the light that is in all things, and I took several photos from different angles, trying to show you that glow. I do these mushroom posts in the hope that you’ll see their beauty more than their usefulness. To me they’re every bit as beautiful as flowers, but I’m noticing that people don’t seem to be as interested in mushroom posts as they once were. I thought the other day that if people could see nature just as it is before opinions and suppositions cloud their view, then they might discover the pure joy of seeing nature as a child does. If you’re lucky enough to have a two year old just walk through nature with them and watch and learn what seeing truly is, and what true joy and love are, and then find the child within yourself.

I love nature, I just don’t want to get any of it on me. ~Woody Allen

Thanks for coming by.

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Summer Fungi (And Friends)

Mushrooms are 90-95% water and since we’ve had plenty of rain they’re popping up literally everywhere I go right now. When mushrooms appear you can’t dilly dally like you can with flowers; you’ve got to get to them relatively quickly, because animals like deer and squirrels will eat all they find in a matter of hours. What mushrooms animals don’t eat slugs and molds will. Nothing is wasted in nature and everything gets eaten in one way or another eventually, like the mushrooms in this photo; mold had started to cover them before they could even release their spores.

Here are a couple of slugs eating this mushroom; a common sight. Mushrooms don’t stay around long, so I’ve been in the woods every chance I had to get the photos that follow. I show them here not so you’ll run out and pick mushrooms to eat, but simply so you can see what is happening in the woods right now, and so you can enjoy their beauty as much as I do.

A jelly fungus called Calocera cornea covered this log. This tiny fungus appears on barkless, hardwood logs after heavy rains. The fruiting bodies are cylindrical like a finger coral fungus and it looks like a coral fungus, but microscopic inspection has shown it to be a jelly fungus. This photo shows only part of what covered this log. The huge numbers of what looked like tiny yellow flames licking out of the log was quite a sight.

Calocera cornea is called the small staghorn fungus, for obvious reasons. Each fruit body comes to a sharp looking point.

These are a good example of a coral fungus called spindle or finger corals (Clavulinopsis fusiformis.) They look quite different from the jelly fungus we just saw. The taller ones might reach an inch and a half high and their diameter is close to a piece of cooked spaghetti. They have the odd habit of growing in the packed earth of trails so I often find that they have been stepped on and broken. One fact helpful in identifying these yellow finger coral mushrooms is that they always grow in tight clusters, while look alikes do not.

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. I don’t see these as often as I do other types of coral fungi.

I’ve seen photos online of slime molds very similar to this one but the people who took the photos didn’t have any more luck identifying it than I did. For now all I can say is that it is a white slime mold, possibly a Physarum, in the plasmodium stage. I should also say that I had to use a flash for many of these photos because of the cloudy days and forest darkness. This plasmodial slime mold, like many others, moves using cytoplasmic streaming, which is basically a contracting of “muscles” by all of the separate nuclei until they come together in a single mass, when they shift from the growth to the fruiting stage.

One of the most fascinating things about slime molds is how they 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 as they have on this tree.

As slime molds go, this many headed slime (Physarum polycephalum) is usually large and easy to see. This one covered a beech log. According to Wikipedia “A plasmodial slime mold is enclosed within a single membrane without walls and is one large cell. This super cell (a syncytium) is essentially a bag of cytoplasm containing thousands of individual nuclei.” Slime molds aren’t plants and they aren’t fungi. They come closer to being amoebas than anything else and are believed by some to have simple brains. My question is how they know what the others are “thinking?” They seem to have the same “group think” abilities as a school of fish or a flock of birds, and that is quite amazing.

People will tell you that there aren’t any blue slime molds but I tend to believe what I see over what people tell me so here is a blue slime mold that I’ve seen each year for the past three. These tiny things are so small all I can see is their color, like a blue smudge on a log. 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.” From this blue stage they go on to become white.

NOTE: A helpful reader has identified this as a fungus called Chromelosporium coerulescens.

We go from the tiny to the huge; this tree stump was about 7 feet tall and was absolutely covered with oyster mushrooms (Pleurotus ostreatus.) The fallen part of the tree was also covered with them. I’ve never seen so many growing together.

Oyster mushrooms are pure white and seem to always grow in overlapping clusters like those in the photo. Oyster mushrooms have off center stems that usually grow out of the side of the log and are hidden by the cap when seen from above. That little insect might want to be careful; scientists discovered in 1986 that oyster mushrooms “exude extracellular toxins that stun [nematode] worms, whereupon the mycelium invades its body through its orifices.” What this means is that oyster mushrooms are actually carnivorous. They also consume bacteria (Pseudomonas and Agrobacterium) in order to get nitrogen and protein.

I’ve read that large amounts of water will cause deformation in chanterelle mushrooms (Cantharellus cibarius) and I wonder if that’s what is going on here. We have certainly had a lot of rain lately. Chanterelle mushrooms are considered a delicacy.

From the side chanterelles look like trumpets, but so do many other mushrooms including the false chanterelle. That’s why mushrooms should never be eaten unless you are absolutely sure you know what you’re eating. I’ve had mushroom experts tell me that you can never be 100% sure of a mushroom’s identity without examining its spores under a microscope. Since I don’t have a microscope that means you can never be sure of my identifications either, so please don’t eat any mushroom you see here until you have an expert examine it first. There are mushrooms so toxic that one or two bites have killed. We have mushroom walks led by an expert or experts here. If you want to become serious about mushroom foraging they are a good place to start.

If they’re small, sticky and orange with bell shaped caps and grow on a cluster on a log they must be orange mycena mushrooms (Mycena leaiana.) These little (less than an inch across) mushrooms fruit from June through September and are fairly common. If you touch them the orange color will stain your fingers. Mycena mushrooms also come in bright red, pink and purple. Some also bleed a blood colored latex when cut.

Young purple cort mushrooms (Cortinarius iodeoides) are very purple but lighten as they age. Squirrels and chipmunks won’t touch this one, possibly because it’s covered with a very bitter slime. This slime often makes the young examples look wet. Slugs don’t have a problem eating it and I often see white trails on the caps where they have eaten through the purple coating to the white flesh below.

Considering the weather we’ve had red hot milk caps (Lactarius rufus) seem appropriate. Milk caps get their name from the white milky latex they exude, which is said to be extremely hot and acrid. Though it looks like it has a ring on the stem just under the cap in this photo I think that must be slug damage to the stem itself, because this mushroom has no ring. Of course, I could also be wrong about its name.

To see very small things you need to re-train your eyes. (And your mind, somewhat) Jelly babies (Leotia lubrica) are what led me down that path years ago. One day I sat down on a stone to rest and looked down, and there they were. I was surprised by how tiny they were, but they helped me see that forests are full of things just as small and sometimes many times smaller. You need to be ready (and able) to flatten yourself out on the forest floor to get good photos of jelly babies. Each one in this group was smaller than a pea.

My Mushroom books don’t say much about club shaped fungi but I think this might be Clavaria ornatipes. This fungus is described as spatula or club shaped and greyish to pinkish gray. These fungi shrivel when they dry out and revive after a rain. They grew directly out of the ground and there were hundreds of them.

I’ve seen little orange mushrooms all over the place and they all seem to differ slightly is size, shape and color intensity. I think these might be chanterelle wax cap mushrooms (Hygrocybe cantharellus.) This type of mushroom is considered one of the most colorful and also one of the most aesthetically pleasing, according to mushroom identification books. One of my books even has them on its cover. I have to agree; they even look good broken.

What I think are horsehair parachute mushrooms (Marasmius androsaceus) look a lot like their cousins the tiny little pinwheel mushrooms (Marasmius capillaris,) except for the dark spot in the center of the cap. These mushrooms grow on leaf litter on the forest floor and help break down all the debris that falls from the trees. They usually grow in large groups but are so small many don’t see them. The caps on the largest of these might reach pea size on a good day.

By far the biggest mushroom that I’ve ever seen is Berkeley’s polypore (Bondarzewia berkeleyi.) I put a quarter above and to the right of the center of this one so you could get an idea of how big this monster was. It must have been 2 feet across at its widest point. This mushroom grows at the base of hardwoods in the east and in the west a similar example, Bondarzewia montana, grows at the base of conifers.

If you happen to see a mushroom that looks like it stuck its finger in a light socket you’re probably seeing something rarely seen. Called a “mycoparasitic mucorale,” Syzygites megalocarpes pin mold has been found on about 65 different mushrooms, but it will only appear when the temperature and humidity are absolutely what it considers perfect. It has multi branched sporangiophores that make the mushrooms it attacks look like it is having a bad hair day. This pin mold can appear overnight and starts off bright yellow, but as it ages it becomes paler until finally turning a blue gray color. It looks on the whitish side in this photo because I had to use a flash. It’s best not to get too close to these molds because inhaling their spores can make you very sick.

That’s all I have for mushrooms right now and for most of you that’s probably more than enough. I’m sorry for putting so many photos in this post but once you get bitten by the mushroom bug you can’t seem to stop looking for them, always hoping you’ll see something as adorable as these butter wax caps (Hygrocybe ceracea.) I hope you find all of them as beautiful as I do but if not I hope you will at least find them as interesting. I also hope you’ll see some of them for yourself.

Wild mushrooms and carpets of moss and bumblebees turning figure eights in the slashes of sun in the woods, as if they too are stupefied by the beauty of the place. ~Smith Henderson

Thanks for stopping in.

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