False Chanterelle

Welcome back to Mushroom Monday, your weekly look at some of PEI’s fascinating fungi. Today’s species is one I’ve known about for decades but hadn’t found until this year: False Chanterelle (Hygrophoropsis aurantiaca).

Even if you’re not a forager, you likely know of Chanterelle mushrooms as popular, edible species. (I’ve written about Chanterelles before: https://www.pei-untamed.com/post/chanterelles). False Chanterelles are often cited as one of the lookalikes to be wary of if you’re picking Chanterelles, but meeting these mushrooms in person shows me they are actually very different.

Young False Chanterelles are button-shaped, but they tend to get wavy around the edges and much less Chanterelle-like as they age (inset photo). Regardless of age, the cap colours are striking and distinctive: dark orange in the middle, fading to yellow and cream towards the edge.

Under the cap, False Chanterelles have gills that are the same colour as or darker than the cap, with branching that makes them look a bit like tuning forks (main photo). The gills run down the top of the stem, which is orange like the centre of the cap and mostly hollow. Despite having gills, False Chanterelles are more closely related to the Boletes than to most other gilled mushrooms.

False Chanterelles are among the brown rot fungi – digesting cellulose in wood and leaving behind lignin – and are most commonly associated with conifer trees. If you find one that looks like it’s growing directly from the ground, dig down a bit and you’ll likely see that it’s attached to buried wood. If you’ve been following this series, you’ll recall that the lignin left behind by brown rot fungi plays important roles in the structure, moisture-holding ability, and carbon-storage capacity of forest soils.

In addition to their valuable roles as decomposers, False Chanterelles also increase the availability of phosphorous in the surrounding soil. Sandy, acidic podzols (the type of soils we have here on PEI) have limited availability of several essential plant nutrients, including phosphorous. False Chanterelles can help with this by interacting with the chemistry of phosphorous and changing it to a form more readily used by plants.

Just like False Morels don’t really look like Morels and there’s a move to replace that name with their genus, Gyromitra, I’d be in favour of calling False Chanterelles something else. ‘Hygrophoropsis’ is a bit of a mouthful, but maybe Orange Soil-builder would work for this beautiful part of PEI Untamed.