The Glomeromycota are unusual and poorly understood organisms. Fungi from this division rarely produce easily visible structures and cannot be grown without a plant host, so investigating them is very difficult. Glomeromycotan fungi are some of the most important fungi on Earth because they form arbuscular mycorrhizas, which provide essential nutrients to the vast majority of terrestrial plants.
Fomes fomentarius is the Swiss army knife of the mushroom world: it has a variety of uses that are important in many different contexts. It is used by survivalists, fly fishermen, and even some hat makers. Although it isn’t edible, the mushroom is considered medicinal. Humans have used F. fomentarius for well over 5,000 years (more about that later) and probably much longer than that. The polypore grows from dead or dying trees and is shaped like a slightly irregular horse’s hoof. It has a variety of common names, which is not surprising when you consider its many uses. The two most widely used names are “Tinder Polypore” and “Hoof Fungus.”
For some reason, the strange little mushrooms produced by the ascomycete Leotia lubrica are called “Jelly Babies” (or “Jellybabies”). They do look a little like the mushroom version of gummy fruit snacks, but that’s as close as I can get to understanding their common name. When fresh, these small yellow and brown mushrooms have a smooth but wrinkled and slimy cap held aloft by a gently curving stalk, so they do look somewhat like a gelatinous morsel on a stick.
So, is it an agaric or a bolete? At first glance, the answer seems obvious: it clearly has gills and therefore must be an agaric. However, if you spend enough time around mushrooms you might get a kind of uncanny valley feeling about this mushroom; its coloration, its stature, the way its cap looks somewhat puffy, the way the cap cracks as it dries out, and other subtleties just don’t look quite right for an agaric. When you ignore the gills, the mushroom looks for all the world like a bolete! Phylloporus rhodoxanthus, commonly called “the Gilled Bolete,” is actually closely related to the boletes and evolved gills independently of the true agaric lineages.
The gilled mushrooms, informally referred to as ‘agarics,’ are the type of mushroom with which we are most familiar. The most common edible mushrooms (white/button/portabella mushrooms, oyster mushrooms, and shiitake mushrooms), Amanita muscaria – the most recognizable mushroom in the world and the inspiration for almost all mushroom art – and the ‘magic mushrooms’ are all gilled mushrooms. All these mushrooms share one feature: vertical plates of spore-producing tissue stacked under a sterile cap.
Cortinarius contains umbrella-like agaric mushrooms that are mycorrhizal, have a brown spore print, and produce a cobweb-like partial veil. It is the largest mushroom genus on Earth, with over two thousand species crammed into it. While the genus itself is fairly easy to recognize, identifying anything down to species is next to impossible. Most of the species listed in field guides are actually species groups and the field guide descriptions apply to a handful of closely related species.
Fungi appear in the news with surprising frequency. However, many of those stories do not provide any new information. Below is a summary of what we’ve learned about fungi from March through April 2017. Read below to learn about: C. auris in the U.S., aflatoxin-destroying corn, viruses defying fungal incompatibility, fungus-farming ant evolution, bat and salamander diseases, and more! Visit the associated links to get the full story.
The stropharioid mushrooms include agarics from the genera Stropharia, Hypholoma, Psilocybe,* and Pholiota. Mushrooms in this group produce a brown to dark brown spore print, have attached gills, and form a partial veil. There are actually quite a few mushrooms that can fit this description, so you might have to check some microscopic features to be sure your mushroom belongs to this group. Stropharioid mushrooms should have a cap surface composed of thread-like cells and have smooth spores with distinctive germ pores.
The family Pluteaceae contains umbrella-like agarics with pink spores and free gills. Within the group, most mushrooms are divided among the genera Pluteus and Volvariella. Pluteus mushrooms grow only on wood and never produce a volva, while Volvariella species grow on a variety of substrates and always form a volva.
The Entolomataceae are agarics with pink spore prints, attached gills, and spores with sharp corners or bumps. This family is very diverse and morphology varies widely from one species to the next. The mushrooms range in size from small to large, though most are on the small side. A majority of the Entolomataceae are just boring mushrooms, so they are not collected very often. This is probably just as well, since identifying these mushrooms down to species is a herculean task.
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