katemacquarrie22

It’s Mushroom Monday, and this week you get two fungi for the price of one! This smoky-looking individual is a White Coral Fungus (Clavulina coralloides) being infected by the parasitic Helminthosphaeria clavariarum fungus. Unlike typical cap-and-stem mushrooms, Coral Fungi are club-shaped or branched, and many resemble their namesake marine invertebrates. Coral Fungi can be white, black, or brightly coloured (such as the Violet Coral I showed you earlier this fall), but none have the...

Within PEI’s landscape are inconspicuous, often-overlooked plants that are the only living relatives of species that grew here long before dinosaurs walked the Earth: meet Horsetails (Equisetum spp, with Equisetum sylvaticum shown). About 290 million years ago, the sediments that would eventually become PEI’s sandstone bedrock were being deposited in the centre of the supercontinent Pangea, near the equator. Growing among these sediments were dense forests, including trees called Calamites...

It’s Mushroom Monday, and this week we have one mushroom that comes in two, very different forms. Meet Shrimp of the Woods (Entoloma abortivum)! On the right side of the photo is the ‘normal’ form of this fungus – a typical cap-and-stem mushroom with a grey top and close-set gills that start out grey but become pinkish as they age (another name for the Entoloma Family is Pinkgills, and I posted about them back in May). But when this Entoloma grows alongside Honey Mushrooms (Armillaria...