Summer Oyster
Today I encountered to very beautiful summer oyster. The fungus was not at all what I had come to expect. It had large and flexuose caps.
Today I encountered to very beautiful summer oyster. The fungus was not at all what I had come to expect. It had large and flexuose caps.
Today I encountered Pisolithus tinctorius in the park. This fungus was once the source of a brown dye that was used in the ancient world. It is a spectacular and very ugly fungus. Amazing to find it. Ir is one of the earth balls and fairly hard to spot.
Jelly babies (Leotia lubrica) is an ascomycete in the order Helotiales with Morels and the like. These appear t range from yellow to green in color. The one I encountered was yellow with some green areas on older fruiting bodies. These have a rubber-like texture. These are apparently saprophytic, although I could not see the substrate under the moss.
Epichloe typhina is an endophytic fungus of family Clavicipitaceae (Ascomycota). It is found within tissues of leaves and stems of cool-season grasses. The stroma forms on the developing inflorescence and traps primordial inflorescence in a mycelium. The conidia (spermatia) and ascoma form on this stroll mycelium. The fungus populations consist of 2 mating types. Flies of genus Botanophila vector spermating between mating types of the fungus, effectively fertilizing stromata to produce perithecia with ascospores.
Balansia nigricans (Clavicipitaceae; Ascomycota) is an endophytic fungus (endophyte = microbe that inhabits living plant tissues) of warm-season grasses. It grows inter-cellularly (between cells) in leaves and stems and proliferates in nodal meristems to form a stroma on/in living nodes. These fungi are common endophytes in tropical and subtropical areas. My collections of this fungus come from Florida and Costa Rica. We published on this fungus years ago. For more on this fungus see link: https://www.jstor.org/stable/3760787.
This is the first time I have encountered Globifomes graveolens (sweet knot). It is rarely encountered by collectors. I don't think it is listed in most guidebooks. My daughter and I saw a couple of people looking for mushrooms and they mistook this sweet knot for the 'chicken mushroom' or 'sulfur shelf'. Not really close! We also encountered some milky caps scattered in the woods. Good to see these too. They produced plenty of white latex when the gills were cut.