Fun with fungi

November 07, 2018  •  Leave a Comment

Some of the mushrooms are big and obvious, but other members of the Kingdom Fungi are easily overlooked. Of course, it's not their color that makes these so-called disc or cup fungi hard to spot—they certainly stand out on the dark oak wood they mushrooms call home. Rather, it's their size, which, at most, is no bigger than the nail on my littlest finger. However, when I'm in fungus mode, which is to say, when I'm hunched over low to the ground, I find lots of things I'd have missed in normal bipedal mode, so when I scanned a local log, these "discos"—the name comes from Discomyceta, the mushroom taxonomic class that was once used to place these mushrooms in the Tree of Life—really jumped out at me. I wasn't at all sure what to call them, but fortunately, I'd recently had a wonderful conversation with mycologist Tim Baroni about his recent field guide, Mushrooms of the Northeastern United States and Eastern Canada, and the good professor pointed me to a section of his book that described the "Yellow Fairy Cup", a.k.a. "Lemon Disco," which, to those in the know, goes by the name of Bisporella citrina. By any name, the tiny organism is a stunner.


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