Got Mushrooms

Got Mushrooms?

Rain may make it difficult to get out and enjoy hikes outdoors, but it adds another element to the natural world. The recent round of voluminous rain is part of what supports our impressive local biodiversity. Besides the abundant plants and animals that flourish because of these life-giving rains, the fungi use rain as a key to reproduce.

The mushrooms popping up all over town, trails, and tree stumps are just the reproductive part of the much larger mushroom body. Mushrooms are the flowers of the fungus world, usually appearing for only a few days to release spores, and then disappearing until next season. Some of these mushrooms are even specialized, like some plants, to attract animals that disperse their seed-like spores. In many fungi and plants, those seed and spore dispersers are flies and beetles.

The elegant stinkhorn is, well…, elegant, especially for a mushroom. This pink, conical mushroom is shaped like a goat’s horn, a gently curved taper from base to tip. It is about 6 inches tall, pushing up vertically from the ground. It is usually enveloped with a white veil draped enchantingly around its middle portion, like a dancer’s short skirt. An elegant horn it is, and stink it does! A strong smell emanates from the spore mass, which is a slimy green cap on the tip of the horn, attracting flies as well as carrion beetles to the smell of decomposition. They crawl around over the sticky surface, become covered in spores, and then fly off, rubbing off stinkhorn spores on whatever they touch next. Some of the insects even eat the spores and then deposit them, unharmed, with a load of rich compost a few hours later.

Elegant stinkhorns occur in yards, fields, and forests during July and August. They are equally likely to appear suddenly in a manicured park or garden as in the forest, and can expand from invisibility to erectness in just a few hours. The horn hatches out of a ball of tissue that looks like an egg, and remnants of this white egg are often visible at the horn’s base.

Like other fungi, the main body of the fungus remains underground. A fungus is composed of strands of tissue that merge and tangle together in a network, like a mass of thread or wet spaghetti, but the individual threads are so small that a magnifying glass is usually required in order to see them. The entire mushroom body, however, can be huge, and one soil fungus in the northeast is estimated to be miles in diameter. At the right time of year, and with the encouragement of enough rain, the fungus body produces mushrooms that arise above ground. The function of the mushroom is to hold the spores up where they can be dispersed to new locations by wind, water, or animals, an important part of the life cycle for an organism that lives underground.

Use your nose while hiking and get a look at these interesting fungi, but take along a camera. They progress quickly from elegant to just plain stinky, and you probably won’t get the chance to see the same mushroom even one day later.

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