Hissing mushrooms, no lie!

I don’t know about you, but when I think of mushrooms, I don’t think about what sound they make. So I was thrilled when I captured a delightful video of Urnula craterium hissing quite audibly as they sent out a cloud of spores, after I blew on them. I’ll prepare you as best I can for what you are about to see.



I found out they do this because I wanted to take a picture of one and there were little pieces of leaves and things inside the cup (and springtails, seems like there’s always springtails in them), so I was trying to blow the stuff out of it to clean it up a little. There was about a one-second delay, and then it poofed out a cloud of spores. I’d read about this, but didn’t think it was going to be so obvious! This tickled me, and I wanted to capture it on video, so I started trying to make them poof out spores. It wasn't until I got home and watched the video that I could hear it. Maybe, when I was in the woods, I thought I was imagining it.

“Devil’s Urn” is one of their common names. It’s a cup fungus. Here’s more (a rotten image, I know—oddly, I do not have dozens of images of these to choose from, like I do every other thing I take a picture of--). When this cup fungus is young and fresh (above), it’s smooth and velvety, a little floppy, and a nice open shape, almost a cocktail glass. These (below) are starting to show their age and curl inward a little. Right about now is when their spores will poof out if you blow on them. And you can hear it.



So, they come out in spring, they’re pretty common, and are considered harbingers of morels, as in, when these are out, morels should be, too.

They’re usually about 2” tall and maybe 1-1/2” across (occasionally a lot bigger, we found a few honkers that were almost 4” across), with a stalk, and they grow on sticks and smallish logs, and even though it can look like they're growing out of the ground, there’s always a stick down there somewhere.

As they age, they start to toughen up and turn brown and get a cool scaly texture on the outside, and the top starts to close up and magically gets a nifty zig-zag edge (faeries with pinking shears).



They don’t poof out many spores when they’re this old. I know, because after I made the first ones do it, I hyperventilated my way all over the forest for days, trying to make other ones do it.



They’re also called “black tulip” fungus.




Now we’re talkin’! That’s some hot crackle-finish zig-zag Urnula action!

But, we need to talk about this audible spore shooting.

Here’s the video, it’s only 5 seconds long; the first sound is me blowing a blast of air on it, and the next sound is the cloud of spores being released.

I posted this video on Facebook (man, there’s a lot of mushroom people out there), which generated more comments (64!) than any other thing I ever posted, and people with a lot more mycological education than I chimed in with some really great input. My favorite, from Kathie Hodge of Cornell University (there’s a link to her blog on the left), was a link to the Biodiversity Heritage Library, which is digitizing hundreds of thousands of works of “legacy literature” (old research books) from natural history and botanical libraries all over the world, and you can just read them, right there online! And she steered me to a book, Researches on Fungi,  by A. H. Reginald Buller, written in 1934, with one chapter titled “Puffing in the Discomycetes” (which are now called “Ascomycetes”—see here), and another titled “The Sound Made by Fungus Guns”!!!   First he thinks he heard it, while puttering around in his lab while there was a specimen on the table, then he applies himself like a rat terrier to seeing if he can hear it again: lying next to them in the woods, holding fungi to his ear and finding “…when it puffs one can not only hear the sound of the puffing but also feel the spray from the asci as though the ears were being sprayed with a fine atomiser.” A man after my own heart! It’s really charming reading. But, I think I would draw the line at letting a mushroom spray spores into my ear. I think.

He wrote really great explanations of the mechanics of all this, which I didn’t have the patience to read. Maybe if I had the actual printed matter in my hands I’d read it. I’m just happy to know that some mushrooms make hissing sounds when you blow on them.

To help you calm down after all that excitement, here’s a few more images of Urnula craterium.



(Some of us think the smaller ones in the photo above are a different species, and I finally got a real live mycologist to confirm it--probably Pseudoplectania.)





With a human thumb for scale.



I've never seen any mention of these taking on the same color as the surface of the wood they're growing on, but it seems to happen fairly consistently.

Anyway, I’m just trying to tell you that some mushrooms make noise. Not all mushrooms release their spores in such an extravagant fashion, but these do. I feel lucky to have witnessed it. Now you can, too!

Sprouting acorns—who knew?

I’ve been stalling on this post for quite a while, wanting to give it special attention, because I was so struck by these. Couldn’t decide which images to use, in what order--real hand-wringing!

I was wandering around in the woods as usual, in mid-April, looking for things (mushrooms, if possible), and I noticed all these RED things on the ground, deep red spots all over the place. At first I just thought it was some leftover pieces of acorns, I don’t know, changing colors like a piece of fading fruit, until I got my face down closer, and found yet another whole new thing going on.

These look innocent enough, except for that startling red…

       

               
I don’t know what I thought about how acorns sprouted in the woods, but it certainly wasn’t this! I guess I thought a bunch of nice pale brown acorns fell, most were eaten, and a few sprouted like any other run-of-the-mill seed. What surprised me were the colors (many), and the shapes (as usual). Also, there were a lot of them. Every several inches there was another one! I took precisely one million pictures, then kicked myself later (only a little) for not taking more, and for not spending just a little more time getting better shots…tricky to get everything in focus with shoots up there and acorn down there…       



I wonder what those tiny white spots are (above). Nice touch!

Then I started to run into stuff like this:


Okay, here is when I began to realize things were getting a little out of hand. Which is the shoot and where is the root, and what are those sea-slug-like-like ruffles? And everything’s all tangled up and wild colors!



The wiggly red things are not the first leaves! They’re connected to the cotyledons. The shoot with the first true leaves is between the two flat wiggly things.

Why is everything red?



I actually had to stop and look at this for a while. If that’s the leaf/shoot sticking straight up, then what’s all that other stuff? I had to discuss it with a friend, who helped me untangle the structure.



This one (above) is waving one cotyledon in the air.

As near as I can figure, with acorns (at least this model) everything happens at once. Maybe since it’s got so much food available from the big fat nut meat (and it needs to move fast before someone eats it), it puts out a root and shoot with true leaves at the same time, ready to go, all the while taking sustenance from the big acorn nut (the cotyledon, which is like a placenta, really), so it’s all just *blam!*, get everything going all at once! It’s pretty much like any other seed sprouting, but the cotyledons are extra large, and they seem to not have to leave the shell for everything to work out.

The term “cotyledon” was coined by 17th-century physician Marcello Malphigi (“bad piggy”).

But, the operating words here are “as near as I can figure.” I don’t know any acorn experts yet.

A few more:



See, the shoot is already up, and those red arms are attached to the cotyledons, still in the shell.

Lastly:



Take that, Georgia O’Keeffe! Kids, go ask your parents what that means.

So you walk around thinking you have a basic idea of what’s going on out there, until you look closer. Well, good luck with that! Look where that got me.

More forest offerings, spring 2011 (almost everything up to late April)

After these there’s still a few more installments coming, of things that deserve their own posts, before I’m current. In the meantime here’s even more of the late leftovers. I can’t help it if there’s so much going on out there!

Here’s this year’s Virginia bluebell buds:

I tell you, I can’t stand it. The buds are this other-worldly opal/purple color, in that great unexpected shape, and then the flowers open very nonchalantly in a completely different color. But it’s the bud shapes that really get me.

Here’s some Goldenseal (Hydrastis canadensis). First time I’ve seen it. Then, of course, I started to see it everywhere.


Oh, and check this out:

Blooming even before the leaves are unfurled!

Here is a Gray Tree frog (Hyla versicolor).

Or it could be Cope’s Gray tree frog, H. chrysoscelis, but you can’t tell them apart in the field (well, their calls are a little different), but H. versicolor has an extra set of chromosomes! So they sometimes call it Tetraploid Tree frog! But never mind that, they can camouflage themselves, like chameleons (but slower)! I’d like to see that, but I think I was pretty lucky to get this close at all.

From a little distance I thought it was a lump of woody polypore or something, on a dead tree. I walked up to see it and it was a frog instead. I actually got this close (this isn’t a zoom shot), through sneaking.
He finally broke, and jumped away, which is when I discovered the yellow on his hind legs:

Yet another thing I had no idea about.

Here’s a tiny little snake I also sneaked up on:


No, I mean tiny, he was barely as thick as a pencil--

Storeria dekayi

He saw me first, and started to go away (made noise in leaves, gave himself away) but then slowed and stopped, so I began my sneaking. I don’t know why he let me get this close.
Its common name is "brown snake." Just "brown snake." Or "Midland brown snake," or "Dekay's brown snake." They don't get much longer than 12", and they eat mostly worms, and slugs, snails and soft-bodied insects. I know from his round pupils that he is not venomous (at least, that rule works in Missouri, barring someone's venomous pet snake having escaped). Here I confess that I did not know until recently that there are several tiny Missouri snakes, just because they're small doesn't mean they're babies.

One last thing. I keep finding may apples that have grown through a hole in a dead leaf as they emerge in spring, and they get pretty tall with this leaf stuck around them:


And yes, of course I free them by taking the leaf off, but not before I take a look at this:



 Cameras with macro-settings are the best thing in the whole world.

Young Mayapple leaf surprises

Once again, I am struck by how much I missed in all my earlier days in the forest, before I got completely consumed with macro photography and started to see things differently. "Oh, look, there's a mayapple," I'd say, having what turned out to be a sort of vague vision of them. I had seen the emerging young leaves before, when they were still twisted around the stem like a little rod ("candling"), but I had never noticed that sometimes there is one leaf, and sometimes there are two.

A single "candling" mayapple leaf, cool in and of itself

 But the double-leaved ones are pretty awesome:

Podopyllum peltatum, two leaves.

Double-leafed mayapple, with fuzzy leaf edges.

 

Don't know what to caption this, I am tongue-tied.

Here's a thing I read somewhere: "On plants with a single leaf, the petiole joins the leaf blade in the middle, creating an umbrella-like appearance; on plants with a pair of leaves, the petioles join the leaf blades toward the inner margin of each leaf blah blah blah blah blah." Well, that just says that sometimes there is one leaf and sometimes there are two, sorry. There was more info from the U. of Arkansas Agriculture Extension Service: "During the first several years, the mayapple leaf is round and unbranched, too juvenile to flower. When adulthood is reached, the stem...terminates in a "Y"-shaped fork with two leaves." So it has to do with how old the plant is. Now I know.

There's some other cool stuff about their lives on that site--mayapples don't just germinate, show up in spring and *poof* there's a flower and then fruit...it's a bit more complicated. I'll just say that they can count to four.

Rue anemone, Dutchman's breeches

Here's more of the backlog of emerging spring flowers.

Thalictrum thalictroides. Last year I saw a lot of Rue anemone leaves, but missed the flowers. Well, now I love the flowers. They're about 1/2" across, and they range in color from white to a luminous pink. They're also called Anemone thalictroides, if anyone asks.
False Rue anemone, which looks very similar, only comes in white, has a more deeply lobed leaf, and has tiny little tooth-like white things on the tips of the leaf lobes  ("mucro").

These may not look like much at first glance, but  they're pretty good viewed large (click on them).

Found March 31, 2011

Dutchman's breeches (Dicentra cucullaria) get me because their shape is so crazily atypical of what I think when I hear the word "flower". Who would think of such a thing! I would expect these kinds of antics from a tropical orchid, but not a spring woodland flower in the middle of Missouri. Give a kid a crayon and tell them to draw a flower and most of them wouldn't come up with something like this.

The top flower (above) isn't open all the way yet--

Very young flower stalks are all flushed pink like this

I must have taken a million pics of these. And next year I'll probably take a million more.

The leaves are pretty nice too

Toothwort, trillium, Virginia Bluebell

I had big plans to do a series of posts rounding up some nice spring finds, and publish them over several days, but who am I kidding. I've been on several hikes since the last of these images were taken, and each hike generates more images...

So here's a whole bunch of spring woodland posts, published separately but all on the same day, or I'll never get caught up.

Toothwort--Dentaria laciniata. A purple dragon when this young.

Trillium sessile (this is a pale form of the typical maroon ones)

Virginia bluebell--Mertensia virginica. The young leaves lose this luscious purple color as they develop.

Virgina bluebell, bird's-eye view. Emerging buds visible upper left.

A selection from the forest floor in April.

Here's some things I found.

Claytonia virginica

Spring beauty (that's its common name, not me trying to write cute). Once again, I seem to favor the buds over the flowers.

A hole.

There were a whole bunch of these right next to the trail in one area. The hole was about the diameter of a pencil. If I had to guess, like, if someone was holding a gun to my head and screaming at me to tell them what I thought made that hole, I'd say, "Worm?" But there's some bees and wasps that do pretty interesting things in the ground. I don't know what made that hole.

Based on those little pellets of soil being there, it's something making a tunnel into the ground, not something emerging from the ground after pupating or whatever.

Viola pubescens var leiocarpa, maybe.

I like violets.

Urnula craterium

A nice devil's urn, showing the scaly outer texture and fancy edges they get when they get older. Word on the street says that when these are out, conditions are right for morels, too.

I hope you like them, because I sure do, so you're going to be seeing a lot more of them.

Erythronium albidum (pretty sure it's not the yellow kind)

 An elegant White Trout Lily bud and its two leaves.

Coming soon: sprouting acorns and a mushroom movie!

Winter-spring shells

I am about 9 hikes behind on posts. Once I started to get out there, when winter let go, I couldn't stop, and the pictures kept building up, and here I am. Now I see I better get on it, as the woods are bursting with everything! There's no going back now. All the spring wildflowers were on cue, we're actually in the second wave of arrivals. So it's post now, or never get caught up.

We'll talk about morels in a few posts. Yes, they're up here, and yes, I (finally) found some. Haven't found the mother-lode or anything, but I'm finding them, and I actually do feel something like electricity when I spot them. Then I eat them.

The following several days I'll be putting up a series of posts covering the last 6 weeks or so, starting the minute I thought there might be signs of life out there.

A snail shell. I just read that there's 106 species of land snails in Missouri, so no ID from me here...named or not, it stood out nicely against the dead leaves, and when I got my face down on it, there was beauty. Looks good big.

An acorn with a perfectly-drilled hole in it. Faeries up to more nonsense. Why would they need to drill a hole in an acorn?

A sloppy little snail, one of the first forest-floor citizens I saw this spring. I was honored.

Extra-fancy striped acorn on a soft bed of spring moss and lichen.

Ever-marvelous Trametes versicolor, Turkey Tail mushroom--this one in an unusual ribbon-like growth pattern. Fresh, supple new growth. A very happy sign even though the day was cool and the sky was dark and low.

Nothing says "spring" like Sarcoscypha dudleyi!

Scarlet cups are the very first spring fungi to show up here (not including the crazy little ones that try to out-smart winter, and emerge in little protected crevices in fallen logs and then get all jacked-up and frozen), and I am very happy that they are a bright happy scarlet red. They pop out against the carpet of winter fallen leaves.

Sarcoscypha sp.

About 2". There's some old walnut husks next to this one for scale (I didn't put them there--it was probably faeries).

Also, this happened:

Sarcoscypha emerging in woven grass

And here's the whole field, with a happy Sarcoscypha right in the middle of it. Click to view huge so you can see it. They are bright.

Scarlet cup just off center in field

Okay, I was ready to plunk the name Sarcoscypha coccinea on this (from my Audubon Society's field guide) until I read more than one source (hint, hint). Michael Kuo's key says S. coccinea is found in the Pacific Northwest and California, and I am not in either of those places (although I dream of Oregon rainforests, the mecca of mushrooms in the U.S., and I would move there in one minute). So that means that what we find here in Missouri is S. dudleyi, or S. austriaca, and you can't tell them apart except by looking at their spores through a microscope, and as we all know, I don't HAVE a microscope. I'll just call them Sarcoscypha and be done with it.

I've only found these in one spot (well, one more over in this other spot), but this is only my second spring of mushrooms, so they may be all over the place but I haven't found them yet.

Oh, and these puff out spores when you blow on them--seems like there's always little pieces of stuff inside them, and when you blow it out to make them nice for a photo, there's about a 2-second delay and then a wisp of smoke-like spores comes out!

Anyway, now I believe that spring is here. Even if I still have to wear layers. And have the heat on. And can't open the windows yet. But it's here.