Thursday 2 June 2016

"Chesser Group", 31/05/2016

No mushrooms in sight for this meeting but plenty of interesting material all the same.

First up the flowery spores of a smut Urocystis eranthidis on the back of an Eranthis flower


Next is the hyphomycete . These hyaline-ended spores are blastospores, which are produced by budding off the end of the conidiophore (conidio-spore producing structure).If only I could remember which species and from which substrate ...



Another hyphomycete, this time with spores which break off from the tip of the conidiophore. From a blackened carrot - Thielaviopsis basicola


 A pathogen of fern this time, with these spores coming from Milesina murariae  on Asplenium ruta-muraria (Wall Rue)


Next up was a coelomycete on Typha (bulrush) which produces its spores out of acervuli (Latin derivation "little heap"), which are saucer shaped receptacles where the conidiopheres grow. A coelomycete is like a hyphomycete but it has a fruit body of sorts ("ceolum" is from the Greek work "cavity"). The cavity could be an acervulus or it could be a pycnidium.

Technically I suppose these cavities aren't really receptacles - transmitacles?



A large and profusely sporulating Peziza went under the knife next and after some deliberation proved to be Peziza micropus, with a little foot/stipe as the name suggests, though this was only obvious on the smaller of the two fruit bodies. The larger fruit body demonstrated the size that a sporocarp can reach when on wood chips - fungus steroids.


Paraphyses shot with ornamented spore contamination!
little stipe