01 Friday Nov 2024
Who knew slugs liked disco? Lemon disco, that is. The fungus, not the John Travolta – Saturday Night Fever – Bee Gees – strobing lights type of disco. This particular slug certainly did, as it had paused its slithering to taste the delicate little yellow cups.
25 Friday Oct 2024
Tags
autumn fungi, British fungi, Clustered bonnet, Common inkcap, Coprinopsis atramentaria, inkcap fungi, Mycena inclinata, Oak bonnet
For Fungi Friday, here are just a couple of the little flocks of fungi I’ve found during recent walks hither and yon.
These, I think, are Common inkcaps (Coprinopsis atramentaria) that had sprung up beneath the trees near the Norwegian Church in Cardiff Bay. There one day, gone the next, as is usual with these transient fungi.
And, as they were growing from an old fallen Oak tree in Cosmeston’s Cogan Wood, I think these are the appropriately name Clustered bonnet, also known as Oak bonnet, (Mycena inclinata).
11 Friday Oct 2024
Posted in fungi, plants, wildflowers
I was photographing the flowers of a roadside Tree mallow for a mid-autumn wildflowers-in-bloom blog that will be publishing this coming Sunday when I noticed the subject of today’s blog post, this new-to-me rust, Puccinia malvacearum. Its common names, Mallow rust and Hollyhock rust, provide the perfect indication for which plants are host to this fungus.
As is typical with rusts, this species had created yellow-orange spots on the upper surface of the leaves and brownish lumpy pustules on the lower surface and on the plant’s stems. The rust would eventually reduce the plant’s vigour, leading to stunted growth and leaf loss, though, as this particular plant was growing in a location very likely to be mown regularly by council workers, the plant will probably be cut down long before it could succumb to the rust’s damage.
04 Friday Oct 2024
These Scarlet waxcaps (Hygrocybe coccinea) are the little gems I was hoping to find during my last visit to Cardiff’s Cathays Cemetery a couple of weeks ago but they hadn’t yet popped their little gorgeous heads up through the mossy grass.
This week some had, though many more were still just tiny scarlet bumps about to burst through.
Sadly, Cardiff Council workers were in the middle of cutting the grass at the cemetery so the chances of these, and any other waxcaps I didn’t manage to spot, surviving are about zero.
The cemetery is a SSSI precisely because of its rare waxcaps, and I know from speaking to a local ecologist that the Council has been given information on how they should be managing the cemetery to conserve and enhance the waxcap population. Sadly, like so many councils in the UK, they choose to destroy the environment rather than protect it.
20 Friday Sep 2024
With the recent launch of its campaign #WaxcapWatch, the environment organisation Plantlife is asking for the public’s help to record waxcap fungi this autumn. As they state on their website:
Britain is home to some of the most important waxcap grasslands in the world. However many species are becoming rare and declining; they need identifying and protecting.
You don’t need to be a fungi expert to help out. The webpage provides all the instructions you need, including a link to an app you can use to record your finds, and a handy video on how to use the app. So, no excuses! Waxcaps are some of our most beautiful fungi and seeing these little gems growing in a field is a truly wonderful experience.
The waxcaps shown here are all Parrot waxcaps (Gliophorus psittacinus), and were found during a wander around one of Cardiff’s old cemeteries last week.
30 Friday Aug 2024
Posted in fungi
It was tiny and, at first glance, I thought it was one of those madly shaped egg sacks created by sputnik spiders (see The sputnik spider, 6 July 2017), but no. This is my first ever Cordyceps fungus, which is erupting from the body of an insect.
In his publication Fascinated by Fungi, author Pat O’Reilly explains: ‘The Cordyceps mycelium colonises the living insect and mummifies it, keeping it alive just long enough to generate the biomass necessary to produce another Cordyceps … fruitbody.’ I discovered a very similar example to my find, with an excellent detailed explanation of the process, on the Project Noah website here.
16 Friday Aug 2024
Posted in fungi
In the nicest possible way, here’s wishing you all a sublimely slimy Friday!
21 Friday Jun 2024
Posted in fungi
Tags
British rust fungi, British wildflowers, Puccinia pulverulenta, rust fungus, rust on willowherb, Willowherb, Willowherb rust
I’ve probably ignored the yellowing leaves of various willowherb species when I’ve seen them previously, thinking they were just drying out or perhaps diseased, but this time I turned a leaf over and discovered a new fungus (and lots of tiny orange grubs – likely fungus gnat larvae – feasting on that fungus).
This is Willowherb rust (Puccinia pulverulenta) (luckily, most rust species are host specific so are easy to identify if you know what the host plant it). The tiny orange rings, which, with their white fringing look a little like miniature flowers, are aecia – it’s from these that the rust releases some of its spores. Later in their complicated life cycle, the rust also produces the brown uredinia that can be seen in the photo on the right below. (Rust fungi have five different spore states – if you want to delve in to that life cycle, Science Direct has a good explanatory, though very technical article on its website.)
28 Tuesday May 2024
Tags
Bladder plum gall, British galls, gall caused by fungal pathogen, gall on Blackthorn, gall on plum tree, Pocket plum gall, Taphrina pruni
I’ve looked for these galls for some time, and, like that saying about buses (‘you wait ages for one, then two come along at the same time’), I’ve now seen them twice in the past couple of days.
Though you’d be forgiven for not recognising them, these are the fruit of the Blackthorn or Sloe (Prunus spinosa) but they have been attacked by a fungal pathogen. That pathogen changes the shape and the colour of the fruit and, if you were to split one open (which I did), you would find that there is no stone inside (or, rather, there is a miniscule speck of brown matter that would have developed in to a stone). The gall is sometimes referred to the Pocket or Bladder plum gall and can also affect domestic plum trees.
19 Friday Apr 2024
Posted in fungi
Tags
British slime moulds, Lycogala species, Red raspberry slime, slime, slime mould, Tubifera ferruginosa
This fallen log was half covered in slime, balls and balls of orange-red-coloured slime. At first I thought they were all the same species but, after looking more closely at my photos, I think there are two. The majority were these Red raspberry slime balls (Tubifera ferruginosa).
And the others were one of the Lycogala species of slime. Both looked delicious … but you wouldn’t want to eat them.
earthstar 
You must be logged in to post a comment.