Mushrooms, fungi and other stuff

 July seems to be mushroom month in the Georgia Piedmont. I’ve seen several that I think are in genus Amanita.

The genus has 600 species — some edible, some psychedelic, some deadly.

One specimen looked like Coker’s amanita, Amanita cokeri, to me. It was beautiful, with a white cap with white warts. But experts say identification is difficult. It’s beyond me.

I’ve also seen a couple of specimens that are in the broader class of Agaricomycetes.

One looked like silver dollars that were white to almost clear. Others looked like orange ears, probably in order Auriculariales. Again, I’m lost.

Agaricomycetes make up a class of fungus in Basidiomycota. Some of these fungi form mushrooms. The class also includes gasteroid fungi, which I first knew as puffballs.

At Arabia Mountain, I saw what looked like red jelly beans stuck on the side of a rotting log. It was wolf’s milk, Lycogala epidendrum, sometimes called toothpaste slime. It’s a slime mold, rather than a fungus. Amoeba-like organisms called plasmodia congregate to form these fruiting bodies. They use chemical signals to congregate.