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.
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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!
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.
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.
