When is a fungus not a fungus?

Dog Vomit, Wolf's milk... there are some very imaginative names for things that look like a fungus.  But appearances can be deceptive.  Here is an example of something I saw whilst walking round Loch Imrich (Newtonmore) yesterday. It was growing on a rotting tree stump and although it was quite small it was an startling colour:

The tree stump

Getting closer

A closer look showed it was made up of lots of small fingers and looked a bit like a sea anemone or coral. My guess is that this is a slime mould.  These are fascinating organisms which are neither plant nor fungus but single celled organisms which spend most of their lives separately and invisible to the naked eye, but then come together when there is plenty of food available and produce these fruiting bodies like the one in the photo.  Soon it will change its appearance and produce spores ( I might go and have a look tomorrow!).  Looking at photos online, this one might be Tubifera ferruginosa, Raspberry slime mould.

I think I found the Dog Vomit slime mould in the woods by Wolftrax - another startlingly bright colour.

I did go and look at the Loch Imrich slime mould again and it has now changed to a muddy brown. I assume it will be releasing its spores soon.

Slime moulds have fascinating behaviour. Although they have no brain, collectively they can solve mazes in search of food, and can learn. You can read more about them here and see some amazingly beautiful photos of them here

And there is even a video from the BBC here

Fruits, fungus and flies

 Autumn is coming at last, after what has felt like an extended summer with no frosts yet.  Some of the birch leaves ae turning yellow and many of the plants have gone to seed or are bearing fruit.  This post will be heavy on photos as I have been capturing some of the different fruits I have seen locally.

But before then, a bit more on the fungus I mentioned in my last post (Amanita crocea). One of the toadstools became food for another fungus and grew a cap of white hair:

And I thought no fungus post would be complete without a photo of Fly Agaric, the archetypal fairy toadstool, which is quite plentiful locally.

The toadstools are actually the fruits of the fungus and are grown to distribute its spores.  The rest of the plant is beneath the ground as a network of threads. 

The bright red colour of many fruits seems particularly attractive to birds and in October the migrating Fieldfares and Redwings will strip the Rowan of its berries.

Rowan

Nothing seems to eat the red rosehips though.

Rosehips

Honeysuckle berries

Some of last year's leeks have been left to flower and are providing food for several bees and flies.

Finally, it always seems like autumn when the conkers appear on the Horse Chestnut.

There aren't many Horse Chestnut trees locally.  This one is on Glen Road, Newtonmore.

A few Fungi

 There are several fungi appearing in my garden and in the woods.  They grow quite quickly to start with so I took a series of photos of one by my veg patch:

Day 1@ 9am, Day 1 @5pm, Days 2,3,4,5

The most interesting part is the first couple of days and then it looks much the same apart from the cap turning up. I think this particular fungus is Amanita crocea as it has a bright orange-yellow colour.  It emerges from a sac which stays as a ragged  collar at the base of the stalk which has felty orange scales. The underside of the cap has a series of gills which produce spores. My book says "Widespread but locally distributed and nowhere common" (except perhaps in my garden!).

It prefers growing under birch which is exactly where it is. I was clearing some grass to make a flower bed and found lots more at different stages.

Around Loch Imrich is a good place to find fungi.  There is a large brown downy one that reminds me of pancakes. 

 

You can see  the edge of the cap rolls under, so I think this might be Brown Roll-Rim which is poisonous.

This pale yellow one, I think, is Larch Bolete which grows only with Larch trees.  Instead of gills, the underside of the cap has lots of little pores .  Having pores rather than gills is a characteristic of the Boletes, most of which are edible - but not necessarily tasty..  

I would not recommend eating anything unless you are 100% sure of  the species.

Lichens by water

If you are not interested in lichens, then this is not the post for you!  During the spell of hot weather when family were visiting, we went  to the Falls of Truim for some swimming, paddling, and lichen hunting.  I remember swimming there in the 1970s,  but it was not exactly as I remembered it (maybe some changes over 50 years...). The descent to the river was much steeper than expected (one approach even had a rope to hang on to!) and the dry, dusty surface was slippy.  Once down there though, the rocks were pleasantly warm to sit on, the water deliciously cooling, and there were several lichens to intrigue me.

The rocks that would normally be under water were scoured clean of any growth

Just above the sloping  rocks was a vertical step and several lichens grew there. 

A variety of different lichens on the vertical "step"

Most white crusts are too difficult for me to put a name to, unless they have some distinguishing features. One looks a possibility as it is covered in round fruiting bodies.

There was also a blackish one above it and an orange one below it.

There are several lichens that grow by streams and are often submerged when the water level rises so I am wondering if these might be some of them.

The most interesting lichen was on a vertical face higher up the slopes and was abundant.

 It looked like a complicated bundle of little leaves, quite contorted and a grey colour when dry.  I tried spraying it with water and it turned a muddy green - which turned out to be a useful characteristic.

Lichen when wet

A closer photo showed each lobe to be covered with tiny black pimples.

The black "pimples"

Some of the pimples have a small hole in the centre:

I think this is Dermatocarpon intestiniforme.  The muddy green colour when wet distinguishes it from a very similar lichen called Dermatocarpon luridum which goes bright green when wet.  The pimples are the fruits, called perithecia, mainly underneath but with the top surface emerging from the lobes to release the spores.

In August, I went down to the Durham Dales to meet up with my daughter and family.  Not much botany got done as I had an almost 3 year old to enjoy, but we went on plenty of walks.  On one walk near a village called Wolsingham, we enjoyed going over a stream via stepping stones. Some of the rocks in the stream had vivid green patches which we noticed and thought it might be a liverwort.  I didn't take a photo unfortunately... When I got home, I saw a very similar photo in a lichen book - it is probably Dermatocarpon lucidum which is the greener form of the Dermatocarpon by the Truim.  You can just about make it out on the photos. It is amazing how much detail is captured on a phone.

And the moral of the story is ALWAYS take a photo of anything interesting!

Creeping Lady's-tresses

My second find this week was very serendipitous. I was planning to walk the dog in a particular spot but someone else was parked there, so I went to another spot where I had walked many times before along a minor road.  I decided to wander at random in the pinewood plantation there, not expecting to do any botanising or find anything new, when a small white orchid growing on a tree stump among heather caught my eye. It was just a few inches high and there were no others nearby.  I got rather excited and took several photos.

The first find

 Walking on, I found a few more, and a few more and in the end I found hundreds throughout the wood!

I thought it might be Creeping Lady's-tresses which I had only seen once before at Loch-an-Eilean.  Checking in my Wild Flower book when I got home confirmed it.  Its scientific name is Goodyera repens.

I went back the next day and found even more of these tiny white spikes in the spaces between the rows of pines. A  long description of the plant can be found here and here.  It is mainly restricted to the Highlands in old pine forests, more than 95 years old.  It can spread by runners (hence the name- Creeping) so often appears in clumps, or by seed when it is pollinated by a bumble bee.

A group of Creeping Lady's tresses in a Scots Pine wood

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The flowers are arranged in a spiral but turn so that they all face one way.  This makes the back of the stalk look like a plait which is why it is called lady's-tresses.

The plaited back of the stem, also showing the scale like leaves up the stem.

The outer parts of the flowers are covered in sticky hairs.

The base of the stalk has oval leaves which have noticeable cross veins between the main veins.

Close up of basal leaf showing veins and cross-veins

Some of the runners give rise to rosettes of leaves which do not have a flower stalk - yet.  Unlike other orchids, the leaves are evergreen and persist over the winter.

I am always amazed at how even familiar places can reveal a new discovery, even when you think you have seen everything.  It certainly made my day, especially when I found that no one else had recorded this lovely rare plant growing there.

Fumitory

In the last few days I have found flowers locally that I don't see very often,  The first one was Common Fumitory (Fumaria officinalis) by the Tennis Courts in Newtonmore. It prefers chalky soil - which we don't have locally- or sand, so it is not as common here as the name suggests.  There are several Fumitories which are tricky to tell apart as you have to look at the shape of the sepals and the fruits.

Common Fumitory

A close-up of the flowers.  The sepal is the white mini-leaf at the base of the flower.

The narrow sepal of Common Fumitory

This fruit has a blunt end - Common Fumitory

I have also found another Fumitory up at Ballachroan.  This was Fumaria muralis - which sounds as if it should be called Wall Fumitory, but it is called Common Ramping-fumitory.  This is one of the commonest species found in the North. It has a wider sepal, though it is tricky to tell, and the fruit is more rounded with a narrow neck.

Common Ramping-fumitory

The wider sepal of Common Ramping-fumitory

The fruit of Common Ramping-fumitory

The name is a bit of a puzzle but Collins dictionary says:

 

C14: from Old French fumetere, from Medieval Latin fūmus terrae, literally: smoke of the earth

A Sticky End and my Unusual Job

 You could be forgiven for thinking I was obsessed with stickiness from my last few posts, but yet another sticky plant seemed worth writing about.  I delayed writing this post because I was looking for a particular document - which I failed to locate - so I am writing it anyway.

At the end of June I went to look for lichens in the trees at the base of Creag Dubh, near the lochans below Craig Dhu House (and yes they spell it differently).  I had foolishly forgotten my insect repellant so did not stay long - too many irritating midges - and I abandoned that spot and went to look at the plants by the lochans instead.  I particularly wanted to check on a different kind of sundew, Great Sundew (Drosera anglica), which I had seen several years ago at the edge of the loch but could not find last year.  I did find it this year.  It grows on the stony ground that is flooded in winter but is exposed when the loch level drops. I have never found it anywhere else.

 It differs from the more common Sundew (Drosera rotundifolia) which has round leaves (as its name suggests). This one has elongated spoon shaped leaves.

Great Sundew (in flower)

It is still a small plant, just a few centimetres high. like the other sundews, it catches flies.

A fly stuck to the Sundew - look carefully to see the club shaped projections (halteres) on the thorax

Two unfortunate flies have become stuck to the sticky drops.  I am no fly expert but they may be a kind of midge, and my insect book says that the feathery antennae are just on the males so they can detect the whining noise made by the females.  It is just the females that  are the bloodsuckers as the males just feed on nectar.  

Most insects have 2 pairs of wings - think of dragonflies or butterflies. The term "fly" refers to a class of insects called Diptera which have one pair of wings for flying and the second pair of wings have been reduced to two short club shaped projections.  You can see them in the photo near where the wings emerge from the thorax.   

I was once more adept at identifying flies.  Between leaving school and starting at University, I worked for an engineering firm called Henry Simon that was developing the "Insect-o-cutor".  This consisted of a UV light which attracted flying insects which were then zapped by a high voltage grid and fell into a collection tray below.  Prototypes were installed into food factories, where they could kill insects without the use of chemicals.  I remember a visit to the Paxo Stuffing factory to collect the contents of the tray.  My unenviable job was to identify and count the different insects from their frazzled remains.  The smell was very distinctive! 

The document I was looking for was a press release showing me in my white coat doing that very job....alas, I have been through a lot of folders but haven't yet found it.  Watch this space!