More September mushroom fun after the drought broke--heavy on Flammulina velutipes.

I’ll keep plowing away at these older images because wait’ll you see the current spring stuff! But this older stuff must have its day.


Sept. 2012, found these Flammulina velutipes peeking out from behind a big slab of loose bark on a dead tree. Being a big dumb lurching human, I had to investigate, so I pulled the bark away.

I’m glad I did. Every stage of growth there, like a kind of fine botanical illustration (as always, click to view bigger!).




Above, hey, don’t some of those look a lot like those enoki mushrooms sold in grocery stores? Well, that’s because they are. They’re the same mushroom. The same. (***Edit, 11 years later: seems DNA sequencing has shown the cultivated Asian species is Flammulina filiformis, oops! But now we know.) When grown in cultivation they are grown in very low light, and in a “carbon dioxide-rich” environment, and instead of developing a black stem of decent thickness and a lovely, sticky, tawny-orange cap, they stay creamy white and grow very, very tall and slender, with a tiny little runty cap. Here, under the bark, it is dark with low air circulation, but are you trying to tell me as soon as it reached the edge it was going to morph into the typical form, below? I don’t know what’s going on anymore.

Here’s a prime example of wild ones on a tree, outside (they like it cold, by the way), with normal levels of CO2 (you can also see how they got their common name, “velvet foot”):



I have absolutely no idea why high CO2 would affect their growth like it does.
Below, a close-up of the very young growths from under the bark, the caps are just little smears! These were about an inch long.



Sure is a lot going on out there that we hardly ever see.

Below, pear-shaped puffballs, Lycoperdon pyriforme. I mostly cannot resist taking pics of these whenever I see them. One way to keep track of these, compared to other small, whitish puffballs, is these always grow on wood.



Below, no idea what kind of mushroom, but photogenic in my book.



Below, a nifty example of a partial veil, the thing that makes the ring on the stem. As the cap expands it will tear away from the outer edge and leave that circle of tissue attached to the stem.



I went around and around about the ID of this one and finally mostly landed on Agaricus placomyces, but not 100%. That bit of yellow on the edge of the cap helped with diagnosis—it bruised that color after I touched it--but there were other things that would have narrowed it down further, which I missed. One guy asked me how it smelled, because A. placomyces is supposed to smell terrible. I didn’t smell it. But since then I’ve made a real point of sniffing everything.



I see a box turtle just about every time I hike.

I’m always trying to get a look at their hind feet, so I can count their toes and see if it’s a Three-toed or Ornate, and they almost always suck into their shells so I can’t see their hind feet at all. Here, a front foot will have to do. Very nice claws!



Since then I’ve learned there are other ways to tell those two kinds apart but I still want to see those hind toes.


Above, in one of the state parks 10 minutes from where I live.

September Missouri mushrooms and more, the backlog resumes

If you’re just tuning in, we’re in the middle of a bunch of late posts.

There was a terrible drought and heat wave last summer (2012), I didn't bother hiking at all for nearly 3 months (no precipitation = no mushrooms to speak of), then there was some rain in early fall and some nice fall mushrooms did show up, but I had lost my blogging momentum. Now I’m trying to catch up so I can start posting this year’s spring finds! More pics, less talk!

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Pretty sure the young cream-colored one is Agaricus placomyces. The big wildly-cracked one might be A. placomyces, too, but it's too deteriorated for me to tell. All I know is it's cool.

That’s some ring! The rings on mushroom stems are from a sheet of tissue that used to cover the gills in the developing mushroom (a “partial veil,” they call it). As the cap expands, that sheet of tissue tears away from the edge of the cap, and stays attached to the stem.

I found an area that had a lot of this next stuff--Spongipellis pachyodon. First I found it on this log, and then I found it all over a tree on the other side of the trail.

Here’s how big it was.

Whoa!

This is the non-boring version; apparently it can also be just a toothless crusty patch.

Right across the trail, it was  different again, but the flat teeth, just like on the log version, gave it away. Please hold for teeth.

Pretty great shapes…

At the base of the tree I found very young growths. Here is one eating a leaf.

Just thought I’d toss some color in here, since all the other pics in this post are beige. This was a little mushroom, maybe 2” tall, and I should know what it is as it’s quite common, but I forget. But what about all that fuzz at the base of the stem? That is normal. ***Edit, two years later (10/10/2015): it's Marasmius sullivantii.



I was going for some shots of that reddish stuff which is a favorite slime mold, when this millipede showed up. I didn't realize it was actually a mating pair! They wouldn't stop rolling along on their million legs, and it was quite a dark little corner so I couldn't get a really good shot. But, “Seen millipedes mating: check.”

That bright white ball dead center is a puffball, Lycoperdon pulcherrimum. My shoe for size reference.

An older specimen, spines wearing off.

This seemingly undifferentiated mess on a rock had me stymied for a year. During dry times it was leathery and hardly noticeable. After a good rain, things got weird.

It’s a jelly lichen!

I didn't even know such a thing existed. My knowledge of mosses and lichens is slim to none, so this really didn't compute. Finally I posted it in the right place and some helpful soul piped up and offered some possibilities. It’s either Collema or Leptogium, that much is sure. I started looking both these up trying to
narrow it down and got hopelessly confused, so I quit.



I feel better knowing at least a little something about it.