Fungi of Devil's Lake, Wisconsin

The Fall Mushroom Foray of 2003 organized by the Wisconsin Mycological Society was held at Devil's Lake in Wisconsin.   Since Devil's Lake is a very attractive spot in its own right, I decided to make the three and a half or four hour drive up from Chicago to photograph some mushrooms, and stay on to photograph the scenery and whatever wildlife was around.

Expert assistance at the Foray was also provided by the owner of this license plate -Tom Volk, a professor at the University of Wisconsin at La Crosse who has a very worthwhile mushroom website, and a knack for popularising the subject.

You can find puffballs looking like these all around the world.   Some members of this family, including the giant puffball, are edible.

I saw a few ladybird beetles crawling over mushrooms during the foray.   I assume they were deliberately hunting other insects eating the mushrooms.   It would be possible to have quite a complex little web of life in one small space, since theoretically you could have a ladybird beetle infected by a fungus eating insects which were eating a fungus which is parasitizing another fungus which is itself parasitizing a living tree!   It fair makes your head spin, doesn't it?

This unusual "orange peel" fungus was growing right beside a busy hiking trail, unobserved by almost every person passing by!   Fungi are just not things which most people think about.

Many fungi are at least as interesting from below as they are from above.   These rate as pretty average looking mushrooms, though the color of the gills is nice, but others like the boletes and the tooth fungi have undersides which most people wouldn't associate with mushrooms at all.

Here are some nice looking mushrooms, whose name I haven't figured out.   If you look very carefully on the right-hand side of the photo, you can see some little yellow dots which are also fungi.

And here are those little dots, blown up more than a few times!   The common name is "orange wood cup" or "lemon disco", their current Latin name is Bisporella citrina, but they've previously been called Calycella citrina and Helotium citrinum.

These little beauties are eyelash fungi, named after the hairs around their edges.   There are various species which look similar, my guess is that these are Scutellinia erinacea, but they could as easily be Scutellinia scutellata, Scutellinia setosa, or something else entirely!

As well as the other leaders, we had Marie Trest and Matthew Nelsen along as our lichen specialists.   Lichens are a pretty amazing combination of fungus and algae, with the fungus providing structure and the algae photosynthesizing food for both of them.

Well, sorry guys, but somehow lichens just don't grab me aesthetically as much as fungi proper!   Nevertheless, there are some appealing lichens, such as this "British soldier" lichen, so named for the bright red coloring on the fruiting bodies, which must have reminded someone of the bright red colors of the British soldiers' uniforms during the American colonial period.

These objects are, at best, only honorary fungi.   In fact, they're not fungi at all, nor are they an animal or a vegetable!   Instead, these slime molds constitute a "kingdom" of life all of their own.   Some of them form giant single cell organisms with thousands of cell nuclei, others exist as single cell organisms which come together under certain conditions and form a single creature.   Most of them move through or over rotting wood at about a millimeter an hour, consuming bacteria, and eventually move to the surface and produce fruiting bodies rather like fungi, complete with spores.

If I'm right, then these particular ones are called "wolf's milk slime mold" (Lycogala epidendrum), however at this stage they're meant to be exuding a pink paste, which I didn't observe.   The pink color lasts for less than a day, after that they turn brown.