Posts Tagged ‘Mushrooms’
Weird giant mushrooms
Thursday
– photo by Mitch Waxman
This post is a bit of an aside, and describes a situation which popped up in the back yard of HQ, here in Pittsburgh’s Dormont. Weird giant mushrooms, which arise shortly after heavy rain events, and display an incredible amount of growth in quite a short interval.
The thingie pictured above transformed into the flopped over monster seen below, and all within 24 hours.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
I put a soda can alongside of the fungal protuberance for scale.
Big, I tell you, it was big.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
At night, the thing began to balloon out and open. By the time that this process played out, the crown of the mushroom had flattened out and got to the size of a dinner plate with about a one inch hard vertical edge.
It’s odd.
Incidentally, these mushrooms weren’t glowing red, instead I had set my pocket led flashlight to red earlier, and couldn’t remember how to actuate the combination of clicks required to get it back to displaying white light.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
When it fully opens, the mushroom displays its gills and flops over. The spores will fall out of the gills, onto soil or to get picked up on the wind.
A quick google search revealed these mushrooms as likely being ‘Green-Gill Parasols,’ a poisonous specie colloquially known as ‘The Vomiter.’
– photo by Mitch Waxman
One wasn’t satisfied with that first shot of the flopped over mushroom, and had to rearrange my flashlight’s luminance because that sort of thing matters to me.
What piqued my interest about these things was the fact that my back yard here in Dormont is an herbivore superhighway9. Deer, woodchucks, groundhogs, two different kinds of squirrel, a population of rabbits so extensive that we’ve started giving them names. All these critters drive Moe the Dog absolutely crazy.
All of those herbivores, and not one single nibble into those giant, weird mushrooms. The Vomiter, indeed.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Thereby- I present the Vomiter to you, lords and ladies, lit up in scarlet.
Somehow it feels like the last seventeen years of my life have all been leading up to offering that last sentence.
Back tomorrow with something different.
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