Fungus ID please

[Nettle Runner]

Clumber Park (10A) 11 August 2007
Found growing from beech litter. Velvet textured cap, dia 45mm height 65mm. Smell is fusty, not of mushrooms.







Spore print is pink

Your comments and suggestions welcomed
Les

[Mike O'Risal]

What you have there is a deer mushroom, Pluteus cervinus. The pinkish spores and the gills free from the stipe are a dead give away. I've eaten these before and don't care for them myself, but my wife enjoys them and I frequently bring them home for her from my field work (I'm a mycologist). P. cervinus is a wood decomposer, although it's not unusual for the wood it's growing on to be buried.

[Nettle Runner]

Greetings Mike, and welcome to WAB. Your expert comments will be appreciated on this forum.

Thanks for your suggestion for an ID. I don't wish to eat them, with my ID skills it would be foolhardy but something obviously had been having a meal.

Interesting that you point out that the substrate is unusual, it being more commonly found on stumps, branches etc. (looked up in Philips).

I look forward to reading more of your commentaries on the forum.
Thanks,
Les

[chazzpott]

I tend to agree with Mike. Pluteus cervinus looks likely, but could it be P.diettrichii (syn P.rimulosus)?

[Fungus Ken]

One quick check in the field would be whether the mushroom has a smell. Pluteus cervinus tends to have a distintive smell described as raphanoid, which is sort of radishy. Pluteus dietrichii is not supposed to have a distinctive smell. Mind you, I have only seen it once (it is quite uncommon if not rare in this country) and I can't remember whether it had a smell or not!

However, the specimen in the photos appears to have a radially fibrillose cap. The fibrillose appearance arises from chains of radially-elongated hyphal cells. In the field you can usually differentiate this type of Pluteus cap from one made up of roundish cells which give a very different appearance to the texture of the cap surface. Pluteus dietriechii has the latter "hymeniform" type of cap cuticle, so the specimen in the photos is not P. dietrichii. Also, in P. dietrichii, because of the nature of the cells in its cap cuticle, the cuticle tends to crack showing the pale flesh underneath.

But to sort out Pluteus species definitively you do need to look at the cystidia on the gill face and the cells in the cap cuticle. Pluteus species tend to have such distinctive features that they are relatively easy to sort out microscopically ... relatively being the operative word because nothing is straightforward in the world of fungi.

Ken

[Nettle Runner]

The fungi goes have a distinctive smell, even now. I would not associate the smell with radish, though. The gills have dried to a light brown colour, as also has the spores, which were originally pink.

Les

[Fungus Ken]

The only smell that counts in this case is the smell of the fresh mushroom. Never forget that Fungus Forayers do it in the field, whenever possible.

Drying or aging mushrooms often have a strong or peculiar smell but this is generally not much help in narrowing down to species. It's worth sniffing all mushrooms that you find as soon as you find them, and when you know what the species is, checking what the books say it should smell like.

That way you get a feel for what terms like raphanoid mean. It's not much help when the field guide tells you something should smell like Scleroderma if you have never smelled Earthballs. I always make a point of smelling my Sclerodermas ... and all the rest for that matter.

Sometimes you might need to scratch and sniff (eg in some species of Cortinarius you need to scratch the base of the stem), and in other cases it helps to cut the fungus in half to appreciate the full smell.

An article in an early edition of the magazine Field Mycology listed the peculiar smells that can be found in the world of fungi ... which often say more about the Victorian gentlemen who put a name to the smells than the fungi they supposedly apply to (eg smells like a nurse's blouse?!).

Ken