This is the penultimate of the two batches I have, so why not get your wildlife photos together instead of snoozing after that big Christmas feast? Today we have the final installment of Holiday Mushroom photos by reader Rik Gern from Austin, Texas. Rik’s captions are indented, and you can enlarge his photos by clicking on them.
Here is the final batch of mushroom pictures taken in northern Wisconsin last September.
I saved this batch for last and am a bit chagrined to send them because most of these pictures are of species I was unable to identify. I’ve been using iNaturalist, but it jammed up a few times. It would seem to identify the genus and species, but then I would get the infamous spinning wheel, which would persist until I exited the application. I thought it was recording the data, but later discovered that it wasn’t. I hope you will be willing to let your more knowledgeable readers weigh in on the species identification. [JAC: yes, please, if you know the species, do weigh in]
The cap on this mushroom has a woody look. This was the only example I ran across.
This one has nice, delicate looking gills. I think it might be a Destroying Angel (Amanita bisporigera), but the pictures I saw showed some kind of flap on the stem which this specimen lacks.
Whatever this is, the small cap looks like a cookie dusted with cinnamon.
Something sure found this mushroom tasty!
This mushroom is in an intense tug of war with a thick spider web!
You can see from this image that the web is layered in three sheets.
I’ve see time lapse films of orb weavers weaving their webs, but I can’t imagine how this web was constructed.
Mushrooms are so often associated with psychedelia that I couldn’t resist closing this series by playing with a closeup image of the pores on the underside of the Chicken fat mushroom (Suillus americanus) to give it a trippy psychedelic feel.
Just as an interest in Photoshop led to an interest in photography, the thrill of having pictures on whyevolutionistrue alongside those of learned naturalists and scholars has piqued my interest in learning more about the world of fungi. I’ve been asking friends to recommend books that give a broad overview of fungi. Guide books only make my eyes glaze over and tie my brain in knots, as I don’t seem to have a good mind for that kind of detail, but I can grok the big picture when it’s presented well. There’s a book coming out in May called The Complete Fungi: Evolution, Diversity and Ecology by David S. Hibbit that looks fantastic. I have pre-ordered it, and thought some of your readers might be interested as well, so here is a link.
Thanks for the clever psychedelia and the link to the fungi book, Rik. Though as I age, planning a six-month delayed gratification until its May 2026 publication is risky for me. I have come to appreciate Amazon’s “order today, delivered tomorrow” service.
Probably better to plan for the future and have it not happen than to not plan and have it be boring!
Thanks. I enjoyed seeing and reading your comments.
I think that “web” is fungus
They can grow rapidly overnight in moist areas (as I’ve noticed).
I always thought they were spider webs.
If I am correct. Sometimes maybe hard to tell.
I’d love to know if some edible mushrooms ever made it into a dish – I’m not ready to do that yet personally, but if I find – unequivocally – chanterelles I’ll be all over it!
I don’t know of a fungus that does that. But there are sheet web spiders (funnel web spiders and others), and they quickly spread out an entangling sheet of dense web. The thing to look for is a webbed funnel near one edge, and at times spider toes sticking out.
I’ll check for that cool detail – thank you!
That triple web is fascinating! There’s a spider book, heavy on the web aspect, that you would probably enjoy: Spider Silk (Brunetta & Craig).
And the flap on the stem that you mention is called and annulus. For quick mushroom ID, there’s a FB group, Mushroom Identification, that is quite good, with a moderator(s?) that seems to know a lot.
How are spider webs discerned from AFAIK sorts of fungus that can appear overnight, and have a thin wavy form to them? This one above seems not to have a regular cell geometry – more of a continuous .. branching..?… If I poke these kinds, they don’t stick like webs. I was always interested in finding out more.
Thanks for the recommendation. I just ordered it!
Free PDF of this book is at: https://www.softouch.on.ca/kb/data/Spiderwebs%20and%20Silk.pdf
Second the recommendation of the book Spider Silk. It’s excellent.
These are great, thanks. I especially like the woody one.
Globular Springtail photobomb in the first picture!!! Those are one of the cutest of all arthropods, when seen up close.
There is a very creative niche of mushroom photography out there, where people spend time putting out led lights to enhance the mood. One trick is to lay down some steel wool and colored led lights in the background to give sparkly, colorful bokeh . There are lots of YouTube videos on this, and it looks like a lot of fun.
Awesome pictures. Some of those mushrooms look oh so familiar, from my childhood in upstate New York.
The spinning wheel of death at iNaturalist. I feel your pain.
Rik has really opened my eyes to the amazing world of mushrooms! ….so much beauty to be found there! Thank you for passing these on for all to appreciate and enjoy!
Neat shrooms and neat triple web as well. Thanks!
Excellent. I always enjoy the nature pics at this site.
best and thank you,
D.A.
NYC
Thank you for the beautiful photos! David Arora’s “All That The Rain Promises” is a slim pocket-sized mushroom guide with an easy-to-use key to major groups just inside the cover. That being said, mushroom ID is tough. Just forget about IDing the many that are grouped as ‘little brown ones.’ 😺
The mushroom you noted as appearing to be “tasty”, with a smooth whitish stem, white gills, and a red cap, I will venture to be a member of the genus Russula. Russulas are fairly common in the woods here in SE Ohio. And I often encounter them with notches apparently bitten out of the cap. Twice I have come upon Eastern Box Turtles (Terrapene carolina) feasting upon them, and the notches match well with the shape and size of their beaks. A suggestive (not definitive) test of this identity is that the stem (stipe) is solid, not hollow, and breaks cleanly like a piece of chalk.