Winter "Wildflowers": Mushroom Blooms

I see a stand of live oak. Their long limbs curve over the leaf litter, wet bark arcing black like calligraphy. I park the car and walk under their canopy. My feet crunch through the wet leaves. There! Bright red peeks out at me, circles of brilliant color among the winter browns of fallen leaves.

In winter, mushrooms pop up through our forests and fields in northern California. There are redhead russulas— the ones I spotted under the oaks— dark purple amethyst laccaria, lilac blewits, yellow and red witch's hats, rusty orange jack o'lantern mushrooms, silvery blue-black midnight entolomas, glistening green parrot mushrooms, and hundreds and hundreds of other species (not all so colorful).

Besides the fact that many are colorful, mushrooms are like wildflowers in another way: they are the reproductive parts of a larger organism. Most of an individual fungus is made up of mycelia, a web of underground tendrils. When conditions are right (generally meaning the right amount of moisture, though some mushrooms are temperature dependent instead) the underground fungus send up a fruiting body: a mushroom. The mushroom releases spores that act like seeds, spreading to possibly become new individual organisms.

A colorful wildflower is colorful in order to attract a pollinator-- a bee, a butterfly, a hummingbird. Most wildflowers bloom in the spring when temperatures are warm enough for these pollinators to be active but there is still plenty of moisture. Fungi don't depend on pollinators. When they produce mushrooms and spores, they have already engaged in sexual gene swapping underground, or their reproduction may be asexual without combining genes from different individuals. Since they don't need warm temperatures for pollinators, many mushrooms bloom at the height of our wet season when spores are most likely to land in welcoming wet soil.

But why are mushrooms colorful, if they don't need to attract a pollinator? Some mushrooms may benefit from using bright color to attract animals to eat them: if an animal lifts a mushroom or breaks it apart, that gives the spores a better chance of spreading far to a new suitable location. Some mushrooms are eaten by flies which disperse the spores when they poop them out later. On the other hand, some mushrooms have powerful toxins that can harm or even kill any animal (or mushroom hunting human) that eats them. This may be to keep animals from eating the mushrooms before the spores have fully developed, but no one really knows.

Mushroom blooms are a beautiful and mysterious part of our winters. Fungus are some of the least-well-understood organisms in our ecosystems. Their evolution and their relationships with other species in our ecosystems are full of unsolved mysteries. Even the identifying of species is an ongoing puzzle. A few weeks ago, I came across mushrooms that I think were Cortinarius ohlone-- a species only described about 10 years ago. And there are new species of fungi discovered in California every year.

MykoWeb: California fungi website

Mushrooms of the Redwood Coast: the best field guide for our area

Tilden Regional Park: lots of mushroom habitat

Redwood Regional Park: more mushroom habitat