Do send in your photos if you have good one; we are missing many regulars, though I won’t drop names.
But today we have some plant photos by Rik Gern of Austin, Texas. Rik’s captions and IDs are indented, and, as always, you can enlarge the photos by clicking on them:
Here are some pictures of a mushroom that isn’t conventionally attractive, but is interesting nonetheless. This Hairy Hexagonia ( Hexagoia hydnoides) has been growing on the stump of a Hackberry tree (Celtis occidentalis) in my front yard for some time now.
This mushroom has no stem and hardens over time. I tapped on it, and it appears to have the density of balsa wood. The underside has striped bands and you can see the small cylindrical spores.
Before it hardened, the mushroom was soft enough for blades of grass to grow through, and poke out the top:
The cap is convex and in addition to being banded like the underside, is covered with small hairs:
This closeup makes the hairs look wet, but they are dry and brittle:
Another closeup gives the impression of a hilly, arid landscape:
The impulse to anthropomorphize must really run deep, because when I look at this picture of two Hairy Hexagonia caps touching I think of courtship and a gentle reaching out!:
I use the app Seek by iNaturalist to identify species, and the next mushroom shows the limits of relying on that app. These popped up on the ground next to the Hairy Hexagonia during a rainy spell. Unlike the Hexagonia, they lasted only a few days. iNaturalist consistently gave me two different answers depending on the vantage point I used when talking pictures. The choices it gave me were Pale Brittlestem (Candolleomyces candolleanus) and Coprinopsis strossmayer, for which I could find only the Latin name, but no common name. Of the two, I’d pick Pale Brittlestem because an image search shows mushrooms that look more like the ones I saw, but it serves a reminder that any identification made thru an app is provisional.
Anyway, I thought the gills on these two looked cool, so I accentuated them a little:
Thank you Rik. These are very interesting as is the ai/iSeek confusion. I do not do photography, but if I were to, mushrooms would certainly be high on my list of priority subjects. They are so varied in appearance here in the woods of Southeastern Virginia…and the full story of fungi is so fascinating.
Last year one of Jerry’s readers recommended a new book called “The Complete Fungi: Evolution, Diversity and Ecology” by David S. Hibbett. It’s well organized and beautifully illustrated. I’ve been perusing it and will commence to reading once I finish the epilogue to the book I’m currently reading (the eighth Marx Brothers book in a year and a half–yeesh!). It looks like it’s going to be a really entertaining education.
https://press.princeton.edu/books/hardcover/9780691265261/the-complete-fungi
Thanks, Rik.
Mushroom and slime molds (not related to each other) have become quite an attractor to macrophotographers.
On a recent field trip with an ecology professor and a batch of 3rd graders, he found a bracket fungus, which he immediately identified. He then whipped out a pen knife and cut off a small piece and passed it around, explaining that it will smell like a mixture of cucumbers and watermelon. An unlikely combination, but he was exactly right.
Making a spore print is easy to do, and would have made it easier to distinguish the two species, one with black spores and the other with purple-brown spores.
Beautiful pictures and interesting commentary. I would have walked by this mushroom without giving it a second glance. This is a reminder to me to pay more attention to things that may seem mundane.
Nice! Whenever we go on a hike, my wife notices the fungi—even the ones that are not “conventionally attractive.”