Contribution from a fun-guy

My old friend Dr. Chips lives in a place with only two seasons, cold wet and cool wet, so he sees a lot  of different things than we do here in the upper midwest.  Time to share an image that he sent along.  Shaggy mane or inky cap are common names of this Coprinus mushroom.  It's pure white inside when fresh, and edible, but it doesn't stay that way long. These are dissolving from the bottom up, a process called autodeliquescence, turning into a black spore-laden liquid.  These mushrooms tend to pop up in groups after a rain. Thanks Dr. C.

Electric mushrooms

Fungi illuminated; this is one great photo essay of mushrooms. While TPP admires these photos he's quite envious about those little LED lights. Several years ago, one of my students had a nifty idea about using tiny lights to illuminate white flowers that appeared to have other adaptations for hawkmoth pollination. A lot of these flowers open in the early evening, and she wondered if flowers that were more conspicuous by illumination if they would get more visits and set more fruit. However the lights proved a technical problem in terms of the wet tropics, an environment that doesn't get along well with electricity. At any rate now the LED revolution gives us another chance to try this field experiment. Maybe this time the flowers will cooperate.

Fall Fungi - Fly Agaric

Here's a link to some nice images of fly agarics (Amanita muscaria). They are a very spectacular mushroom, large, colorful!  TPP's best advice; don't eat them. They are extremely toxic and while hallucinogenic, way too scary for even an adventurous botanist. A mild fall and quite a bit of rain have been very good to the fungi. 

Much rooms

June was the 5th wettest on record, most because of a couple of inches of rain right at the end of the month. The gardens, new plants, and some replants got plenty of water, and the lily pond even had to be drained a little. Wish it could be kept for later. Of course, our gardens have lots of mulch, which means lots of nice organic material to decompose, so the fungi have been busy too. The shredded wood mulch has provided us with some nice fungal fruiting bodies. Remember, the fungal organism is a filamentous mycelium, and sometimes you forget they are present except when the reproductive structures appear, and appear they have. Lots of areas have bird nest fungi by the hundreds, little cups with little egg shaped packets of spores (probably a species of Cyathus, but not exactly the species shown). The cups cause rain drops to rebound dispersing the packets of spores. 

Some Boletus bicolor, the two-colored bolete, have appeared here and there. They have a rusty red cap and yellow spongy looking pores beneath. When bruised they turn a green-blue color, and they are edible. A large mushroom has appeared in several places and it has a creamy-white cap, white gills, a veil around the stem, and a cup-like bulbous base.  OK, that's not a good combination and not a good bet for trying its edibility; most likely suspect is Amanita bisporigera, the so-called destroying angel. Most interesting of the recent appearances, and most curious, has been dog phallus stinkhorns (Mutinus caninus), which tells you pretty much what these look like, a red-orange phallus. Mutinus was a phallic deity for somebody.  The muddy-brown spore mass is wet, and the odor attracts flies to disperse the spores. Most fungal spores are dispersed by wind. There was a time when TPP was very good at fungus identification, but it's a secondary subject for him and he hasn't taught mycology in about 20 years, so you lose your edge.  Images courtesy of madjack74 and Roberto Zanon (respectively), wikimedia creative commons).

With June rains come mushrooms

There was a time the Phactor was quite good at the identification of fleshy fungi, but alas, not enough practice of late. The near record rainfall of June has begun producing quite a diverse array of mushrooms. This morning several Boletus bicolor had appeared over night along with a very handsome Russula emetica (dull red cap, snow white gill, white flesh, very brittle). Several others are not known by sight. Had to practice my fungal ID skills for a vet who was worried that a dog might have been poisoned by mushrooms in his owner's yard. And you always must worry about IDs when something is on the line. In this case it was a pretty easy one, Coprinus atramentarius, an inky cap mushroom that is edible unless you're drinking something alcoholic at the same time, and then it produces some most unpleasant symptoms (sometimes this mushroom is called the Tippler's bane). You can also make ink from this mushroom as they dissolve themselves into a black inky goo. Coprinus is quite well known for popping up quickly after rains. Unfortunately this provided no assistance to the vet because the dog was a non-drinker, but you feel bad for not having an answer.

Like many people he regarded most wild mushrooms as poisonous, toadstools. Now what do toxic mushrooms have to do with amphibian furniture? While in grad school a grand old man of mycology told the Phactor that "toad" was really "tod" (German for death), and stool was being used as in "stool pigeon", a decoy, thus implying that non-edible mushrooms were "death-decoys". Some people are way more mycophobic than others. A few years back the Phactor scored quite a harvest of horse mushrooms (Agaricus arvensis), a close relative of the mushroom of commerce as it's picture shows, except these grow in your lawn and bruise yellow. Some guests were treated to a wonderful mushroom sauce, and when one woman asked where these delicious mushrooms came from, and yours truly gestured to the side lawn, and said, "From under than oak tree.", she almost became physically ill from the thought of being accidentally poisoned. Well, as they say, you know they were good mushrooms if you wake in the morning.