Chicken Lips

It’s Mushroom Monday, and this week we have one of PEI’s most distinctive (and oddly named) fungi: meet Chicken Lips (Leotia viscosa)!

Leotia species are also known as Jelly Babies, because of their squishy texture and superficial resemblance to the British candy of the same name. Despite sharing a name with that sweet treat, Jelly Babies are tasteless, slimy, and not considered edible. Within this group, Chicken Lips are easily identified by their yellow stems and wrinkly green tops – for now, at least. Future genetic work may lump all the Jelly Babies together as a single species or (more likely) split them into new ones.

At first glance, Chicken Lips looks much like a cap-and-stem mushroom, but it’s not: there are no spore-bearing gills, pores, or teeth under the cap. Instead, the outer surface of those green tops is covered in asci – specialized spore-bearing cells – that shoot spores into the air. This places Chicken Lips among the Ascomycota, a group that includes the Orange Peel Fungus, Scarlet Elf Cup, Earth Tongues, and Morels that I’ve profiled previously.

Chicken Lips are small mushrooms, usually just a couple of inches (about five centimetres tall). They’re among our decomposers and can be found in both hardwood and softwood forests, sometimes growing from deadwood but more often sprouting directly from the soil in groups as seen here. These Chicken Lips were well camouflaged under leaf litter, until sunlight hit one of those tiny green caps and it caught my eye. When I brushed aside the fallen leaves, I found tons of these little guys scattered around the forest floor.

Fungi sometimes have common names that describe their appearance, colour, or habitat: think of Puffball, Violet Coral, or Birch Polypore, for example. But what about Chicken Lips? My best guess is that someone thought the yellow stem resembled a bird’s beak, with the lumpy green cap being puckered lips, if chickens had them. The common name was used as early as the 1970s, and so pre-dates both the Bruce Springsteen song and the fried food of the same name.

While they may not be on your Thanksgiving menu, Chicken Lips are interesting and unmistakeable parts of PEI Untamed!