Sometimes it helps to go back to basics if you find something you can't identify. The gill attachment and spore colour can be a good clue to help narrow things down. There is also no ring or ring zone on the stem, and no volva at the base of the stem, which rules out some options.
You can't always tell spore colour from a photo but on this specimen, which seems fairly mature, I'd assume it was going to be pale spored because the gills still look white. This would rule out all the pink, brown and black spored species.
Next the gill attachment. This isn't absolutely clear from the photo but I think they are actually slightly notched close to stem ie in the up-turned cap you can see that they dip down just before they reach the stem, although they are not free because they are still attached at the top of the stem.
Clitocybe would tend to have decurrent or broadly adnate gills ie gills that run down the stem or are broadly attached for the full width of the gill. For me this would rule out
Clitocybe in this case. It also rules out other pale-spored groups such as
Lepiota and
Macrolepiota because these have gills that are free from the stem.
There are several pale-spored groups which could have notched gills but there aren't any hard and fast rules. With a chunky mushroom (sorry to use such a technical term
) like this one you can rule out small white spored species such as
Marasmius and
Mycena which can have a wide range of gill attachments.
Collybia is getting bigger, but there are a limited range of species in
Collybia and once you get to know them, you can get the jizz. This isn't a
Collybia.
Collybia species tend to be intermediate in size between
Mycena and
Tricholoma or
Melanoleuca but the size ranges do overlap.
With chunky pale-spored species with notched gills you are likely to be looking at a
Tricholoma or a
Melanoleuca. These aren't easy to separate by eye, although
Melanoleuca species do tend to have an umbonate cap, and tend not to be fibrillose on the cap, but again these are just clues not rules because there are plenty of species of
Tricholoma with smooth caps. But an important ecological factor is that all
Tricholoma species are ectomycorrhizal and so would be found growing in woodland, or certainly near to trees, though the tree roots with which they are associated can be some distance from the tree itself.
Melanoleuca species, on the other hand, are saprotrophs and so you can have species that feed on woodland litter or grow out in grasslands.
From the habitat and the jizz, my gut feeling is that this is a
Melanoleuca, possibly something like
Melanoleuca strictipes but since I don't find these unusual species of
Melanoleuca very often I can't confidently narrow it down on the basis of a photo.
Melanoleuca is, in any case, a genus that needs a lot more work by the professional mycologists to characterise the different species. You tend to have to do the microscopy to separate the individual species.
Ken
Linear Mode
