08 Friday Nov 2024
After a week when our skies have been grey and damp and low-cloudy due to something the weather forecasters have labelled ‘anti-cyclonic gloom’, and when voters’ choices have darkened the world around us even more, I feel the need for some colour for fungi Friday. So, here are more lovely waxcaps, photographed during another recent cemetery visit and at my local country park.
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).
30 Friday Aug 2024
Posted in fungi
≈ Comments Off on Cordyceps fungus
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.
15 Friday Mar 2024
Posted in fungi
I’ve never been able to work out which of the Scutellinia species the Eyelash fungi at Cosmeston Lakes Country Park belong to but it’s always a joy to spot these tiny orange-red gems in the grass.
23 Friday Feb 2024
Can you see it?
I don’t mean the rubbish – sadly, this is very typical of what comes floating down the River Ely in to Cardiff Bay and on out to the Bristol Channel, and thence to the Irish Sea. I’m talking about the two blobs of orange on the large log.
Obviously I couldn’t get very close to these fungi but they are distinctive enough to identify with confidence – these are Velvet shanks (Flammulina velutipes). I can’t help but wonder where they will end up. It’s certainly a perfect example of how easily flora and fauna can spread around the country, the globe.
09 Friday Feb 2024
I haven’t found much fungi lately so it was nice, during a walk earlier this week, to spot this little colony of Stump puffballs (Lycoperdon pyriforme).
I had a chuckle at this explanation of its scientific name from the First Nature website:
The genus name Lycoperdon literally means ‘wolf’s flatulence’ and just begs the question who got close enough to a wolf and stayed there long enough to become an expert on such matters. For most of us, surely such an odour cannot be a practical diagnostic feature for identifying the Stump Puffball, Lycoperdon pyriforme.
Nothing at all to do with funeral pyres, the specific epithet pyriforme comes from Latin and simply means pear shaped.
12 Friday Jan 2024
Tags
Ash key fungi, British fungi, Diaporthe samaricola, Flagelloscypha minutissima, fungi on Ash keys, Neosetophoma samarorum
When I’ve searched Ash keys (seed pods) previously for fungi, I’ve found the two most common, which are Diaporthe samaricola (the small black dots on the upper, seed portion of the ash key, in the image on the right below) and Neosetophoma samarorum (the much smaller, black speckles on the lower, wing part of the key, in the same image) (see Ash key fungi, January 2021).
During recent checks, however, I found a third fungus, the three all flourishing quite happily side by side on one set of keys. The third fungus is white, slightly woolly and minute, and it might be something like Flagelloscypha minutissima, but without examining it and its spores under a microscope (which I don’t have) I can’t be sure.
05 Friday Jan 2024
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≈ Comments Off on Fungi keep fighting back
Back in October, I posted about two species of fungi colonising human-built structures, Jelly ear growing on the painted sides of a PortaCabin and an unidentified wood-loving species sprouting from the boardwalk railing at Cardiff Bay Wetlands Reserve (Fungi fight back, 27 October 2023).
During one of my circuits of Cardiff Bay in December, I found another example of fungi fighting back, these lush Oyster mushrooms on a finger post alongside the path to the Bay Barrage.
10 Sunday Dec 2023
Posted in fungi
I have never seen as many earthstars as I did during a visit to a Cardiff Cemetery a few weeks ago. There must have been over 50 Collared earthstars (Geastrum triplex) growing under the pine trees at the entrance to the cemetery, a location where I’ve never before seen them despite many visits over several years, so it was a very special sight indeed. And as these are the fungi that originally inspired the name of this blog, I felt I had to include them in this end-of-year countdown.
