Stinky Squid

September on PEI doesn’t just mean shorter days, cooler weather, and back to school. It also means the return of Mushroom Mondays! Let’s kick the season off with a species that reminds us just how strange fungi can be: meet the Stinky Squid (Pseudocolus fusiformis).

You could be forgiven for thinking this looks more like an alien than a mushroom. Stinky Squids start out as greyish eggs in the soil (inset photo) and, as they mature, develop three to four orange arms each covered in a dark-brown slime (main photo). They’re small – only about five centimetres (two inches) tall – but not subtle: if the bright colour doesn’t catch your eye, their foul smell may catch your nose!

This is one of the Stinkhorn mushrooms, so named because they use odours to attract insects; what’s stinky to us is ambrosia to flies, beetles, and even some types of bees and wasps. The dark-brown slime on the arms of Stinky Squid smells like rotting garbage but contains both sugars and spores (reproductive cells). Insects are attracted to the smell, land on it for a sweet meal, and fly off with the mushroom’s spores stuck to them. I could detect the smell of these Stinky Squids from about a metre or so (more than three feet) away, and it was very strong when I got close enough to get some photos!

Stinky Squid is a decomposer, breaking down dead organic matter into forms that can be used by other fungi, plants, and animals. Decomposers provide important ecological services: in addition to helping with nutrient cycling, they keep us from being buried under piles of undecomposed dead things.

Mycologists suspect Stinky Squid isn’t native to North America but was unintentionally introduced from Asia. It’s fairly well distributed along the eastern seaboard of the US but known from only a few locations in the Maritimes, including just one here on PEI. It’s worth keeping an eye out for it along public trails and in garden mulch.

For those brave – or hungry – enough, Stinkhorn eggs are edible. (It’s important to be able to differentiate them from toxic Amanita eggs, and I’ll have more on those next week). I didn’t taste-test these but note that Forager Chef Alan Bergo has described Stinkhorn eggs as tasting “like old dust”.

If you’re new to this series, or want to revisit some of your past favorites, you can find the 60 mushroom species and groups covered to date in the Fungus Profiles section of the blog on this website.