Fusion.
A Bolete of some sort.
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Are You a Fun Guy or Girl?
- Thread starter sinnerjohn
- Start date
Fusion.
A Bolete of some sort.
Expert??Armed with my trusty Fungi id book, I will endeavour to identify those that can’t be identified by the photographer. I can always resort to Google.
I loaned my good mushroom ID book to someone a couple of years ago and it never came back. A book will only identify the visually unique varieties. Many are much too similar for a book to be much use beyond general family grouping.
One thing I can tell you about identifying mushrooms is it is very difficult to accurately identify them from a single photo. You may need several angles, including a view under the cap to see if it has gills or spore tubes, plus a spore print. If the gills are attached to the stem or not, etc. The colour of the spores can help a lot. A microscope to examine the spores is the only way to differentiate many of them. A microscope with an inner scale so you can measure the size of the spores.
Green wood fungus, generally found in broken branches laying on the forest floor.
This I believe is the fruiting body associated with this fungus.
A row of Russulas heading off in single file. No doubt growing on a dead root just below the surface.
I expect this is some Vermilion Hygrophorus just emerging.
I think this might be Polyporus Alveolaris (just off the top of my head and no, I didn’t spend hours searching through thousands of images of orange North American fungi with mesh-like gills!
).
Don’t you just love fungi.
sinnerjohn
IOTM WInner - April 2022
I always find it slightly creepy when you think some of those guys if eaten, can lead to a slow agonising death, with no known cure and they’re just sweetly growing there in the woods pretending to be all innocent.Don’t you just love fungi.
I always find it slightly creepy when you think some of those guys if eaten, can lead to a slow agonising death, with no known cure and they’re just sweetly growing there in the woods pretending to be all innocent.
I knew a Dr., a pathologist, (since passed away) who spent his days in a lab looking through microscopes at tissue samples and one of his hobbies was mushrooms, the other was birds. I learned a lot from him about picking mushrooms.
Every year in season he would go out and pick a good selection of typical mushrooms and put them on a serving tray and take them to the hospital where he worked and do a little educational survey. He would ask people, “if you were lost in the woods and hungry which of these mushrooms do you think would be safe to eat and which might be poisonous?“
Invariably, people selected the most poisonous as the safe ones and assumed the edible ones were poisonous. He did his best to make people more aware of which ones were poisonous and that it really is very difficult to tell without a lot of experience.
Even experienced people make mistakes now and then and get very sick, mostly from poisonous mushrooms that look very much like edible ones. There are a couple of mushrooms that are sought after in Europe as edible but in North America are considered poisonous.
Another interesting thing, the “high” that people experience from certain magic mushrooms is really a low grade of mushroom poisoning.
The main rule of thumb: your experience at the grocery store will steer you wrong in the woods. For instance, white mushrooms growing in a field might be safe while white mushrooms growing in the woods are most likely to be deadly poisonous.
A beautiful white Amanita mushroom in the woods, for instance, known as the Death Angel.
Through the years I have learned to recognize many distinctive mushrooms and many of them are poisonous.
I learned to recognize only 2 or 3 mushrooms in my area that are distinctive enough to feel safe picking them to eat. But after all that, many edible mushrooms are not good tasting so it isn’t worth collecting them. Only a few are. Edible + good tasting is a much smaller list.
What a fabulous bunch David. You are definitely a Fun Guy!
I always find it slightly creepy when you think some of those guys if eaten, can lead to a slow agonising death, with no known cure and they’re just sweetly growing there in the woods pretending to be all innocent.
You certainly have some fantastic fungi in your neck of the woods Brian. These are awesome.
The Chanterelle is one of the few I know well enough to feel safe eating. All yellow with thick rubbery looking gills that run down the stem. You need to also know the look-alike that isn’t edible. After you see them both often enough the differences become more obvious.
I’ve always thought it would be wonderful to harvest wild mushrooms, but I’ve never gotten the training. And even then.... as you say, just the slightest error and...
I’m not sure I’d ever feel quite confident enough.
What a vibrant image! Super. Even though I might be confident in picking a field mushroom, I really wouldn’t eat one. Apparently, when my mother was pregnant with me, she was served mushrooms on toast in a cafe in Stamford (England). She wondered what the crunchy things were in the mushrooms and then saw that they were maggots!!!
Maybe something transferred to me whilst I was still forming. I do like to eat bought mushrooms though.
There are several cute little cup fungi. These ones are less than 1 cm across.
These yellow ones are less cup shaped and just a little bigger than 1cm across.
Fabulous. This thread was made for you.
Wow, you have such a variety!
The familiar Puffball, seen here later on when it gets dried up and ready to spread spores.
The Gem-Studded Puffball, newly emerged when it looks its best.
The Spiny Puffball, also very fresh.
It is often when making close-ups of mushrooms that I most feel the lack of an adjustable aperture on the iPhone lens. There is never enough depth of field to get the whole mushroom in focus. I keep looking for a good focus stacking app but so far none are all that good.
Most often mushrooms only look their best for the first day or so. After that they get nibbled on my mice or slugs and have pieces missing.
I loved these as a kid!!! Liked stepping on them to see the black “smoke” come out.
Me too.
Me too.
[emoji1373]
Fabulous. It’s wonderful to see all of these images of yours that I haven’t seen before.
Edit: Ahh, clapping hands.
I don’t know what sort of fungus this is and haven’t spent time trying to find out. Each one is quite small, about 5 or 6mm.