Fungus

They never are. They seem to trust and rely on the poison in and awful taste of their skin and their ability to inflate themselves with air to make them indigestible and/or impossible to swallow for predators such as birds and snakes.

Cassian, Concerning your remark on Aphyllophorales, these are Basidiomycetes without gills (with gills = Agaricales), but with a smooth (f.i. Jelly fungi, Stereum, Peniophora, Sparassis), poroid or meruloid (f.i. most bracket fungi, such as Trametes, Ganoderma, Phellinus, Fomes, Inonotus, Fistulina, Polyporus, Merulius, Serpula, etc.), spiny or dentate (f.i. Steccherinum, Hericium, Hydnaceae), ribbed or pseudo-gilled (f.i. Cantharellus, Schizophyllum, Gloeophyllum) hymenium, to which I think the species above depicted also belongs. So my question is : does the 3rd fungus have a smooth hymenium, pores and tubes or pseudo-lamellae on the lower side of the brackets, are the FB's annual or perennial and what colour do the ripe spores have ?

Tom, Gefeliciteerd (congratulations), this is not an Armillaria species, but the very rare Lantaarnzwam (Omphalotus illudens), a necrotrophic parasite of roots of Quercus species and Castanea sativa, which FB's glow in the dark because of bioluminescence of the gills.

David, At the final moment, I think the mushroom will have whitish gills, which turn to salmon pink after ripening of the pink spores. If so, it's Pluteus salicinus. And good luck with the moving.

Guy, See David's post for excellent pictures of the mycelial sheet or felt of Laetiporus sulphureus, which has forced an acute fork limb of a beech to split off and fall.

Nice , especially the toad. Did you collect some bufotenin from its skin to make a witches' brew or ointment with Fly Agarics to complete it ?

Fishing for credits and compliments then ? O.k., especially those made by a certain mister Humphries .

Correction : - There is a fifth type of wood rot, i.e. a third type of white rot, which ...

In Mattheck's "Stupsi explains the tree" (3rd enlarged edition, 1999), you will find the basics of buckling and wrinkling of tree trunks, whether caused "mechanically" or by wood degrading fungi. Also see this post on simultaneous white rot and my thread on the body language, i.e. buckling of Quercus caused by Laetiporus sulphureus.

Rob, As this information on white and soft wood rot caused by fungi is only partially correct, I think it's best you buy Fungi on Trees. An Arborists' Field Guide by Guy Watson & Ted Green (Arboricultural Association, 2011) and read the text on page 7 under Decay. To the text, I add the following remarks and answers to your questions : - (simultaneous) white rotters have to decompose the lignin first, which costs energy, to get to the energy rich cellulose hosepipes or fibres (tension), which are enclosed inside the lignin chimneys (pressure). This process changes the flexibility-stiffness ratio of the wood in the direction of the tree trunk becoming more flexible and at the same time becoming more loaded with the weight of the total tree, which causes certain types of buckling (life belt, wrinkling) to develop because of the formation of (over)compensating year rings, which are pressed downward and outside while "creating" bucklings or wrinkles. The second phase of (simultaneous) white rot implies total decay of the remaining cellulose, after which only the "empty" cellulose fibres or strings (ropes) remain. - There is a fifth type of white rot, which is caused by the mycelia of saprotrophic wood decomposers, such as Bjerkandera adusta, Mycena species such as M. galericulata and Hypholoma species, such as H. fasciculare and H. sublateritium, which produce high concentrations of organohalogens or polyaromatic hydrocarbons to decay the wood. - Because brown rotters only decompose the cellulose fibres, the cubical "bricks" of the lignin chimneys remain. - Not only ascomycete Sphaeriales such as K. deusta cause soft rot, there are also some annual bracket fungi such as Meripilus giganteus and Inonotus species, which combine white and soft rot in their wood degrading strategies.

Nice veteran survivors :thumbup1: .

Again, great documentation of a both tree (Castanea sativa, Quercus robur) and fungus species specific association .

I couldn't agree more .

I hate to spoil the fun, but the dark brown to blackish dots on the stipe are characteristic for L. rufum (= L. aurantiacum s.s.), the stipe of L. albostipitatum (= white dotted) looks like this.

For those of you, who can (also) read German : - Breitenbach & Kränzlin : Ganoderma carnosum Pat. (= G. atkinsonii Jahn, Kotlaba & Pouzar) wurde von Jahn et al. (1980) als eigene Art mit den Nahmen G. atkinsonii publiziert. Diese Autoren vermuten vorerst, dass der vor allem an Abies vorkommende Pilz , bish ebenfalls als G. lucidum (Fr.) Karst benannt, mit G. valesiacum Boud. oder G. tsugae Murrill identisch sein könnte. Diese Auffassung wurde aber fallengelassen. G. lucidum unterscheidet sich durch etwas kleinere Sporen (10,7 x 7,1 µm), sowie das Vorkommen an Laubholzern, vor allem Quercus, von G. carnosum. Nach Untersuchungen von Typusmaterial haben Kotlaba & Pouzar (1983) festgestellt, dass G. atkinsonii mit G. carnosum identisch ist, so dass dieser als ältere Name gültigheit besitzt. - Ryvarden & Gilbertson : The taxonomic status of Ganoderma valesiacum is uncertain as noted by Jahn (1980). Its microstructure is similar to that of G. lucidum and the only seperating characteristic seems to be the white punky context under a cracking crust. However, in shadowy places the crust does not crack and such specimens are very difficult to seperate from those of ordinary G. lucidum. It may be that the host is distinctive, but cultural studies are necessary to solve whether this is only an ecological race or form of G. lucidum and to establish its relationship to G. carnosum, differentiated here primarily because of its preference for Abies and Picea. - Jülich : G. valesiacum ist eine seltene montan-subalpine Art die nur auf Larix wachst. Frk. sitzend oder mit kurzem, dicken Stiel. Sporen ellipsoid, braun, 9-12 x 6-8 µm. Ganoderma lucidum wachst meist auf Laubbäumen, seltener auch auf Nadelbäumen (Larix, Picea, Pinus, nicht auf Abies). Sporen hell braun, 7-12 x 6,5-7,5 µm. - Ellis & Ellis : Ganoderma carnosum with laterally stalked FB's, mostly on Abies, spores 11-13,5 x 7,5-8,5 µm, G. lucidum with laterally stalked FB's, on deciduous trees, spores 7-11 x 6-8 µm, G. valesiacum with sessile FB's or almost so, on Larix and Taxus, spores 9-12 x 6-8 µm. - And also see my earlier post on the length of the stalks of annual Ganoderma species. So if anyone, after digesting all of this contradictory and overlapping information, still can distinguish G. carnosum, G. lucidum or G. valesiacum from one another, he or she is a real and true champ .

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Rob, One of the Marasmius species with a whitish stipe top and a reddish brown to black stipe base.

Apart from the Gano's, these are the other fungi : 1/9/30 : Scleroderma citrinum 2/11/31/32 : Amanita fulva 4/5/6 : Pleurotus ostreatus 7 : Russula mairei (beech) 20/21 : maybe Inonotus cuticularis 24/25/26/27/29/35/36/40 : probably all Russula ochroleuca 28 : Lycogala epidendrum 33 : moulded rotting Boletus 34 : Russula species 37 : Hypoxylon multiforme 38/39 : Macrolepiota rachodes 48/49 : Calocera cornea + Hymenoscyphus species. From the photo alone, I can not determine what the choclate goo is underneath the Gano.

No, as far as I know, this was the first time ever brackets of P. schweinitzii were present.

In a last year's storm, this Pinus sylvestris, which is in one of my monitored field research plots in a mixed forest on poor sandy soil, was uprooted and fell because its major roots had been brown rotted by Phaeolus schweinitzii. This week, for the first time the mycelium of the root decayer fruited with three brackets from the vertical root plate to the left in the first photo. ---

I showed my wife, who is a textiles teacher, this and she says it's an international phenomenon called wild knitting.

No problems with the identification of the fungi , but I keep wondering how they got the muff around the tree, did they knit it on site ?

Correcting and completing : Chondrostereum purpureum (without the a), a species of which the mycelium is only a pathogen in Prunus and Sorbus because of causing silver-leave disease.

Will & Baxter, I would advise to take a sample and sent it for identification by a professional mycologist to Kew. David Humphries can tell you how and to whom to address it.

No, I mean the small greenish one to the far left of both other pinkish FB's, of which one grows underneath the other. And I keep correcting Latin names, because otherwise incorrect spelled species are hard to find using the search function .