Fungi Friday: 7th February 2020
Welcome to my weekly #FungiFriday post! Every Friday I aim to post my latest photos and learning from the Kingdom of Fungi (where I live). You can see my Fungi Friday archive here.
Last Sunday I was taking apart an old shed. Plenty of wildlife had made a home in the shed, including lots of large spiders, woodlice and springtails. Pulling the panels away, I was amazed to find this very small mushroom sitting there on a wooden panel.
This is a species that I’ve posted about on a previous Fungi Friday but instead when it appears in the fissures of tree bark. This shroom shows the ability for fungi to get into any appropriate micro-habitat if the spores can reach them. This shed was very damp and moulds were already building in places. I was simply speeding up a process that fungi and other recyclers had started.
If you look at the image above you can see the scale of the mushroom. It’s miniscule! To photograph it I used a macro lens and a macro adaptor to get even closer.
Meanwhile at the river Rother in West Sussex, my poplar branch patch was drying out due to lack of rain and some unseasonably warm sun. It gave the cyanobacteria and algae the chance they need to turn some of that light into sugar and feed the fungus that puts a roof over (under?) their heads.
The common yellow lichen Xanthoria parietina continued undimmed. Life goes on. There’s a storm coming…
Extreme Macro Photos Unveil the Hidden World of Fungi in the Forest
Daniel Greenwood 