Fungi Friday - More Finds

Here are some more finds in the end of summer rainy season for this #fungifriday

Look at these plops of whipped cream. These are dog vomit slime mold at their peak humidity. Eventually they will dry out to something gross looking aka its common name. This stuff is out everywhere when it is hot and humid.

Now for a strange green brittle gill mushroom. Too bad I found it in such bad shape.

The only other green brittle gill I've seen here was called the cracked brittlegill and this one is not cracked. My best guess is Russula aeruginea but it could by any number of other Russula species.

Now for a deadly toxic LBM.

I suspect this is Cortinarius rubellus aka the deadly webcap.

These are sometimes confused with edible cortinarius species. Thus it is always good to do spore prints. Most mushrooms with rusty spore prints are toxic or deadly. I recently had to spore print some purple and white deceivers to make sure they were not a deadly cortinarius species. In fact I found my edible purple and white deceivers next to these. Fortunately they don't even look very much like one another.

Here is another strange and large brittle gill. The worms like to burrow their way up the stem and hollow them out so they break easily.

My daughter liked mashing them. I have no idea if they are edible as there are so many version of brittle gills around. Most aren't edible thus I rarely ever forage any of them other than the green cracked brittle gill.

Now for some healthy looking polypores. They really puff up from the summer rain.

I checked to see if they had any teeth underneath but they didn't thus it could be any number of polypore species. Many polypores have medicinal qualities (and are not toxic) from compounds in them that kill cancer and tumors. The trick is going through the complex process of producing a tincture out of them. But if you don't even know what kind of polypore it is you could just be going through the tincture process for nothing.