The fungus season begins to get some steam up!

There are starting to be a good crop of fungi around the area generally.  On our morning walks I have noticed a good array of Rooting shanks (Oudmansiella radicata) and Fairy-ring Champignons (Marasmius oreades).  This morning we found a small crop of the ones imaged below, which I had not seen before but believe to be Amanita umbrinella.  This is based upon the description in Fuhrer's Field Guide to Australian Fungi, noting the striated annulus (see second image).

When I use the word 'crop' I was merely searching for a collective noun.  I am not about to start munching on something which I suspect to be an amanite!

On a trip to Tallaganda SF later in the day I noticed one large clump of Gymnopilus junonius growing beside the road,  I also found the following weird item growing in a moist gully.  As I haven't really been able to get close to identifying it I am now wondering if it is something other than a fungus (but have no idea what).  It was growing in soil as far as I could tell.  The comment by Denis Wilson shows this to be Podoscypha petalodes, a bracket fungus growing on a subterranean wood substrate.

In April myself and the small dog walked around the lake formed by the weir in Quanbeyan.  When we got back level with the weir I noticed this huge fungus about 3m up a very large eucalypt.  My guess is the fungus was at least 250m across at the widest point.  It has been identified as Laetiporus portentosus or White punk.

Comments

Denis Wilson said…
Hi Martin
I believe I can help with the last one.
Try Podoscypha petalodes. Page 281 of the Fuhrer book, but it doesn't look the right colour. It is a bracket fungus type thing, (not a Jelly Fungus). The form is interesting as they form a convoluted rosette - which looks right for your Fungus.
However, the Sydney Fungal Studies Group is helpful. Their gallery, P. 17 has a good match for yours
.
Cheers
Denis
PS with recent rain, we are expecting a fungal bumper crop soon.
25 March 2011 at 23:58:00 GMT+11
Flabmeister said…
Denis

Many thanks. The SFSG example looks spot on. As there was no wood substrate I didn't think of bracket fungus. Apparently it is underground in this case!

Martin
26 March 2011 at 05:37:00 GMT+11
Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

A tour of the West (part 1)

Image
A friend from my time in the UN sent me some photos of her family trip along Route 66.  They did this is a large camperwagon rather than a Chevy Corvette (apparently the kids jacked up about being offered a trip in the trunk).  It seems to have been a very good trip for them and most interesting to see their photos.  It was also educational for me, as I found out the German for rocking chair (schaukelstuhl, since you ask). They did 7200 miles in 30 days - a pretty serious bit of distance. This made me think of the trips we did in 1981 when living in Denver.  Frances initiated that idea by getting a book about the National Parks of the West  and marking interesting places.  I then worked out a route on a Rand-McNally Road Atlas (GPS was unknown then  - as were iPhones, personal computers and the internet).  From memory, taking nearly the whole Summer school holidays we covered about 10,000 miles in 70 days.  Here, approximately,  are our routes: That map comes from Google Maps (G
Read more

Insects from pine trees

Image
This afternoon (13/1/2015) we were looking out of our sunroom and noticed a strange bit of mist.  On getting my binoculars on the case I found it to be a cloud of tens of thousand of insects.  They appeared with naked eye to be flying away, but with binoculars I thought they were circling. Here are some images In the second one it may be possible to see there are two streams coming from the top of each tree. There was a loud buzzing noise but that could just be several thousand wings. Earlier in the day Frances had been to some nearby willows and they were infested with many little black soft bodied insects.  Perhaps they shifted to the pines and were swarming? Help!! Any information welcome. A colleague, from Wamboin, had noticed a similat phenomenon, but involvng eucalypts rather than pines!  Here are the photos he took with his phone. I have consulted some expert friends.   Their responses were: I would have gone for chironomids. I recall years ago driving al
Read more

Maslins beach rules

Image
Anyone who was in Adelaide in the 1970s will be having a good nudge nudge at that title.  However the beach is really nice even though it is the haunt (in Summer ) of naked people.  (As an aside one of the 'van park staff was talking to some other guests and commented that the sights on the beach in Summer were not at all exciting.)  In April it is the haunt of seniors, many of them exercising their dogs, and thus a far more attractive place. Getting to the beach was a walk of about 1km along roads, from our van.  The second half of this went past a rather daggy looking paddock with many formed ridges in it, as though it was irrigated, although a water sources wasn't evident.  The paddock got interesting towards the end as some green parrots appeared.  Thanks to Frances eye for detail we have subsequently identified these as Elegant Parrots: my first lifer for 2014.    The locale is indicated by the red lines in this mudmap: Here are the birds: The view from the top of
Read more