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Tag: Fungi

Midwinter on the Fleurieu’s southern edge: monster mushroom

 

Even collectively, yesterday’s three heroes were comprehensively dwarfed by any single one of the adjacent, large leaves.

This post’s mushroom is enormously bigger and heavier.

My unscientific guesstimate is that its mass would exceed that of all three of yesterday’s ‘shrooms by at least several thousand percent.

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Midwinter on the Fleurieu’s southern edge: petite ‘shrooms

 

 

Most of the world’s fungal mass are mycelia –  tubular filaments/threads which “network”, forming mycelium.

Reminiscent of hair or neurons, those filaments/threads are called hyphae.

You won’t see mycelium in this series – it is an invisible presence, within the earth, timber and leaf litter.

However, it is worth remembering that fungi are like icebergs – what we see is only a small portion of their selves.

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Midwinter on the Fleurieu’s southern edge: bark, moss, fungi & leaf litter

 

 

If you are partial to mosses and fungi, the premier South Australian place is the floor of the old-growth stringybark forest in Deep Creek National Park.

The best time to go there is midwinter, in a cool, wet winter.

It is less than two hours’ easy driving away from Adelaide, but in a “proper winter” this forest “feels” like another planet.

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Mushy magic (#2 in “Deep Creek” single image teaser series)

 

 

The pictured mushroom (i.e. fungal “fruiting body”) has a cap so shiny that parts of it act like a “funhouse mirror”, yielding what look like distorted reflections of its forest home’s canopy.

To see them, you probably need a good quality screen – bigger than a phone’s…and/or you may need to zoom in on/enlarge the mushroom’s shiniest surfaces.

In any event, you should have no difficulty “discovering” an ant who made a fatal mistake.

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Karri forest: macrofungi in winter

 

Southwestern Western Australia is rightly renowned for the extraordinary diversity of its flowering plants.

Its fungi are even more diverse.

Fungi species comprehensively outnumber the combined total of plant and animal species.

Macrofungi are the ones with fruiting bodies big enough to be visible to an observant, naked human eye, in the wild.

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