Salmon-pink Ramaria coral fungi ftw!

I never tire of these. Why? Novel color, not expected in the woods, not expected of a mushroom? I saw them in the distance and thought it might be flagging tape or something else man-made. Was delighted it turned out to be beautiful orange-pink Ramaria coral fungi, very fresh and in fine form in the spring rain, not a single broken branch.

I can recognize a Ramaria generally, I think, but I don’t know what species this is. Lots of resources call this pink-orange coral Ramaria formosa, but that doesn’t make sense—why would someone name a North American mushroom a word that means “Taiwan”? Or maybe it's another case of someone finding a new species in a new place that looks just like one they know from another country, so they just assumed it was the same. It happens. Also, descriptions keep saying R. formosa has “yellow tips,” which I just don’t see. Anyway, somebody who knows a lot more than me just told us that R. formosa is not known to occur in N.A., and what with the current ready access to DNA testing and FREE barcoding for some projects it looks like we might finally, definitively, identify these glowing beauties. A pal who has a lot more initiative than I do is sending in some samples for sequencing. Thanks, Mike!

They don't glow forever, though, and soon fade to shades of tan, but they always hang on to a little whisper of that pretty orange-pink, in the base. 

Above, an older Ramaria found near the highly colored ones, faded to tan and brown.

This is the older, faded one from the previous photo, rudely torn in half. There's the pink whispers I was talking about. It has a fat, roundish, fleshy base from which the branches grow. The shape of the base, the way the branches are arranged on it, and the shapes of the branches themselves are basic identifying features of coral mushrooms, but sadly so far there aren't a lot of resources for identifying them. I've got a 1974 Dover publication (!), "The Club and Coral Mushrooms of the U.S. and Canada," it's a reprint of a 1923 book from the U of NC, and that's it. It has four pages of color illustrations and the rest is black and white photos and WORDS!

Suddenly I wasn't sure if they were salmon-colored or tuna-colored so I had to look up those fish.

I don't know what else to say. They're really pretty, and hopefully soon we'll know their true identity (which will not impact their beauty).

Moving on to other finds of the day:

The split gills on the underside of "common split gill," Schizophyllum commune, sharing a stick with a toothy polypore, I'm going with Irpex lacteus.

It's been a long, cool, wet spring. I kept finding logs covered with more S. commune than I'd ever seen.

Click and zoom, click and zoom, my friend!

More often than not, I find them on smallish sticks. Probably should send samples in for SEQUENCING since they're probably a NEW SPECIES like EVERYTHING ELSE that's been sent in that was thought to be something known and common! 

I'm exaggerating, but there is some truth in it.

This is more typically how I find common split gill:

Now look at the colors of these moss sporophytes! It's the capsules that hold their little mossy spores. I don't know my mosses but I gave it a shot, by searching "orange sporophyte moss," and maybe this is Plagiomnium cuspidatum, "baby tooth moss"! The nodding capsules and bright orange color is what I'm going by, I didn't examine the leaves, I forget what excuse I had at the time.

I thought these next ones were parrot wax caps (a big-time personal favorite), which start out as green as an Amazon green parrot, then fade to dull orange. Turned out to be rogue Mycena leaiana, growing atypically NOT from a log. My guy Kuo says, "I have on rare occasions found it growing alone, binding leaf litter under hardwoods," which seems like what's happening here, although these were pretty hard to pull up so I wonder if there's actually some wood under them.

To add to my confusion, fresh bright orange M. leaiana fades to dull orange over time, and occasionally develops olive green shades.

I also didn't know what that rich orange was on the caps of the larger ones that seemed to be bleeding off from the smaller one next to them, but nobody's got bright orange spores like that! The orange color of the cap can come off on your hands when you handle these--but what is it? "Pigment"? The late, kind, marvelous Tom Volk said, "...if it's been rainy, the orange color in the cap can actually wash out and fade to a pale tannish orange."

I pulled up some older, deteriorating ones to see what I could see, and there they were, the tell-tale marginate gills, which is when I knew what these were. The color had super-intensified as they started to dry and contract. 

"Marginate" at its most basic means "with a distinct border." With mushrooms it's usually referring to gill edges being a different color than the sides.

I picked a fresher one and put it on my palm to examine it more closely and it was so slimy it SLID on my hand. Here's the famous marginate gills of a nice fresh Mycena leaiana:

Okay listen. The orange on the gill edges is from bright orange cystidia, "special, sterile cells" with shapes and sizes that are specific to the species (and so are useful identification features), and they can appear on many different parts of a mushroom (not just gills), and they get different prefixes depending on where they occur on the mushroom (if they occur at all--their absence is also an ID feature). You've got your caulocystidia on the stem, pileocystidia on the cap, pleurocystidia on the sides of the gills, etc.

I found all kinds of sources saying what they are, but nothing saying what they do. I found some relief reading Alden Dirk saying their function is largely a mystery.

As long as I'm stuffing science down your gullet I may as well also tell you that in the 1800s some guy named Lea in Cincinnati sent a big collection of fungi to an English botanist to identify, and they wanted to recognize his efforts by naming this one after him, so what you do is you take the person's name and add "iana" to it. That explains a lot, a least to me. But he was DEAD already when that happened.

The end.

Carrion beetles like alcohol flux

Let us think for a moment about how many rotting carcasses would be around for a lot longer if not for carrion beetles and their fellow “corpse fauna.”

I thought this was going to be kind of a quick post of some photos of cool insects on tree sap, but then I found out a lot more stuff connected to this seemingly simple event.

I’ve seen carrion beetles in the woods lots of times, on poop or dead things, and I’ve discovered they are very wary beetles. When I approach to try to get photos they quickly scurry to hide under something. But I have developed some sneaking ability over the years from trying to take pictures of things in the woods that don’t want you that close. I think when you have a camera covering your face you register more as a collection of weird shapes, not very threatening, rather than your big two-eyed face moving in. Then all you have to do is not make sudden moves while you try to sneak in as close as you can—although what you think is slow might not be slow to our more sensitive animal friends.

Anyway, I came across a phenomenon: dozens of American Carrion Beetles congregating on a tree afflicted with “alcohol flux.”

American Carrion Beetles congregating on alcohol flux

There’s more than 50 Necrophila americana beetles in that photo (click to view large! Keep zooming!). As soon as I started walking towards them (from more than six feet away!) they started dropping off and diving under leaves. I thought I’d have a little more leeway than that—I was figuring on more like three feet before I had to really start sneaking! I’m going to guess that the ones that remained were too drunk to sense danger.

So. Bacteria and yeasts can get into wounds in trees and start fermenting the sap. Fermentation produces gases which creates pressure which forces the juice out through the wound (called “fluxing”). Depending on which microorganisms and what location inside the tree, this causes a couple different kinds of flux diseases (some are called “bacterial wetwood”). This smelled very strongly of fresh beer, so I’m going with “alcohol flux.” One publication said, “The exudate has a pleasant alcoholic or fermentative odor,” and it really did. They used to try all kinds of things to cure this stuff—flooding it with bleach solutions, drilling holes and inserting drain tubes, etc. Apparently that just prolonged it or made it worse. Now they recommend just leaving it alone, as it isn't really implicated in tree decline.

Necrophila americana beetles, with a few phoretic mites

Wasn’t sure why these meat-eaters would be attracted to alcohol, and while trying to get more info about what carrion beetles do I ended up wandering down the path of forensic entomology, and learned some things I never thought about before. In the first phases of flesh decomposition, when it’s all putrefying and liquifying (and getting stinky), flies are the first visitors. When things die all kinds of exciting chemical reactions start to take place immediately (or stop taking place), and the resulting odor is detected by flies within minutes. They lay eggs, and the larvae eat the flesh.

Were the carrion beetles fooled by the odor and thought there was a flesh-eating party about to start there, or do they simply like fermenting tree juice? They seemed excited. Much congregating!

As close as I could get without scaring them. There's an ant and maybe
a Glischrochilus sap beetle there too.

I've seen the foaming, bubbling version of flux, too, with lots of different species all over it, all quite close to each other—butterflies, ants, bees, wasps, hornets, assorted beetles and flies. They, too, seemed excited (because they were drunk!), lots of darting around and flying about, and ignoring each other and me.

So, I had just assumed that since they’re called “carrion beetles” that they eat carrion, but that’s not quite accurate. Along with learning some of them like rotting fruit, I learned another unexpected thing. What they’re mostly eating on a carcass is the eggs and larvae of the flies that were there first! And they carry phoretic mites around with them, which also eat fly eggs. You can see a few of the mites in the second photo, small tan spots on the beetles (click to view large). Sometimes there’s a whole lot of mites per beetle. And the flies just keep coming and laying more eggs, and the carrion beetles and their mites just keep eating them, and when the carrion beetle eggs finally hatch, the larvae eat some fly eggs and maggots and the flesh that remains because their parents and parent’s friends kept eating the competition. Later the larvae drop off and pupate underground all winter, and there's speculation that maybe some mites go with them? That’s one idea about how the mites end up on the adults—they were with them as pupae.

Different species of carrion beetles like different stuff. Some like snakes, some like feathers, some specialize in reptile eggs (viable or not? I don't know). Some do eat primarily wet flesh, and some like more leathery skin. I have seen them on stinkhorn mushrooms (but they might have been fooled by the smell). Some are attracted to rotting fruit. Still not clear if they're eating it or playing in it.

Then there's the burying beetles…besides what you can see them doing, like dragging a little corpse more than 200 times their weight up to 15’, and excavating the ground underneath it until it’s completely buried, both parents care for the larvae, guarding them and feeding them regurgitated food. Isn’t that nice? That's more than hummingbirds do, and everybody thinks hummingbirds are so cool.

From now on I'll always go investigate trees with weeping wounds to see who's there. I hope to find more carrion beetles and improve my sneaking to get better photos. Carrion beetles! Their larvae eat rotting flesh so you don’t have to!

Entoloma abortivum—shrimp of the woods

When Entoloma abortivum attacks Armillaria, "shrimp of the woods" is the result.

I’ve known about these for a while. For whatever reason, they never really grabbed my attention. I’d found a few before, but they were way past their prime, squishy and discolored. This year, though, I found some real beauties, so I wandered a little further down the path of aborted Entoloma. These things are cool!

A bunch of them fused together

That’s a pretty big clump. Usually they’re smaller individual units, not much bigger than styrofoam packing peanuts, which is what they look like at first glance when you find a whole bunch of them all over the place.
Click on any image to view large.

Not packing peanuts--shrimp of the woods!

Aborted Armillaria. Also just noticed a bonus caterpillar poop at 
lower left, from one of the big silkworm moths.

For a long time it was thought these were simply malformed Entoloma abortivum (but didn't anybody wonder why?). Then, in the 1970s, some guy noticed that there were Armillaria mellea cells in them (maybe spurred to study this by the fact that they kept finding both species and the malformed ones growing near each other, like, all the time), so everybody assumed the Entolomas were being parasitized by Armillaria, probably because Armillaria has a reputation for relentlessly ravaging trees. Then more people did more studies in 2001 and concluded the exact opposite—that Armillaria was being parasitized by E. abortivum. Any of these theories are fine with me.
If you go with the latest one, you might call them “abortive Entoloma.”

Inside is the same color as outside, marbled with faint pink. Why I didn't cut one in half and take a picture of it, I'll never know.

Aborted Entoloma has some great common names—“shrimp of the woods” is the one I see most often, but there is also “hunter’s heart” (I don’t get that one), “pig snoot” and “ground prune.”

So I found some nice ones this fall, and had the presence of mind to actually look around to see if I could find some honey mushrooms (Armillaria) or Entoloma nearby, and I did.

Honey mushrooms in foreground, and Entoloma abortivum 
next to aborted Armillaria at the back.

Entoloma abortivum with aborted Armillaria

Entoloma abortivum isn’t all that thrilling, but it’s a perfectly nice mushroom, a tasteful warm grey, with slightly decurrent gills. It does have surprise pinkish spores.

                           

Entoloma abortivum has dropped its pink spores on the cap beneath it.

I always like finding a ready-made spore print! I say thank you. It's a lot more convenient than bringing the mushroom home, getting it set up for a spore print and hoping the cat doesn't knock it off the counter.

The Entolomas I found were in the company of A. gallica.

Armillaria gallica, with characteristic cap scales.

A. gallica doesn’t grow in big tight clumps like A. tabescens, the honey mushrooms you often see in huge numbers in midsummer. They grow singly or in loose clusters near a tree, but not always at the base. Their partial veil is delicate and soft, sometimes nothing but a ring zone on the stem. They’re also generally smaller than A. tabescens.

While we’re on the subject, both the Armillaria and this particular Entoloma species are edible, but I have not eaten the Entoloma because it scares me. There’s some nasty poisonous Entolomas out there.

Hopefully I’ve lost some of my audience now by boring them with facts so they won’t be reading the next part (read: “starting to hunt for aborted Entolomas now and finding my spots”), which is that these things are delicious! Might be my new favorite! I poked around looking up suggestions on how to prepare them, and ForagerChef said they’re best when caramelized, so I did that. I just kept eating them as they came out of the pan. They’re nutty and sweet, with a kind of bouncy texture, a little grainy--like shrimp. Another mushroom that isn’t really anything like what you think of when you think of eating mushrooms.

That’s a big beautiful bowl of raw freshly rinsed ones.