I'm hoping someone can confirm this as Leucocoprinus birnbaumii it's indoors in a podocarpus plant pot, 4 cm tall and bright yellow.
Hi Evan, It certainly looks like Leucocoprinus birnbaumii, but to be precise, confirmation of any species is rarely possible from a photo. Don't get me wrong, this is a reasonably strong identification given appearance and habitat. ... But if you really wanted confirmation you could bring your specimen to a mycologist, eg. go to a SVIMS meeting (South Vancouver Island Mycological Society) and ask one of the experts there to examine it. If you decide to do this, please bring the whole mushroom including the base. cheers! frog
So how would someone preserve the mushroom from the date of finding, to the date of the meeting, perhaps 2-3 months or more later?
Hi Michael, Glad you asked! :-) For fungi in general it's a good idea to first record the condition of the fresh specimen; - height, width, smell, taste, habitat (eg. conifer woods, cowfield), bruising colour(if any), latex colour(if any), substrate (eg on wood, on soil, on corpse), habit (single, clustered), spore colour. Then dry the mushroom out. A food dryer, esp one with a fan is ideal, but other methods work too, such as using the oven with the lightbulb on and door cracked, or a rack over radiator on very low, or hanging in a dry place with maximum air circulation (mesh racks, mesh bags). Larger wetter fungi may need to be sliced to expose more area to drying. SVIMS and VMS mushroom clubs meet monthly for most of the year, but also they can be contacted by email outside of those meeting dates. If it is possible to bring a fresh specimen (eg stored for a couple of days in a paperbag in the bottom of the fridge, but not the freezer), that is best, but dried specimens (with the above sort of info) are welcome as well, also because they are ready to be deposited in the Herbarium, which is a great thing to do! I think the mushroom under discussion is not the best example for this though. Although mushrooms that look like this are consistently ID'd as L. birnbaumii (by sight not using eg. key references or microscopy), this is not a native fungus, so there are unlikely to be many folks who are particularly, intimately familiar with it. I wonder if there might not be relatives of similar appearance that could also hitchhike with plants to Canada. But don't let that stop you from bringing it to the SVIMS folks: Who knows what may result! :-) frog
I didn't realize how difficult mushroom identification could be! I'm not sure I will hunt down an ID any further, the mushroom is long gone. I am glad I won't be calling it something isn't though. Thanks for the responses, Evan
Yah it can be difficult sometimes, but I do hope I've not put you off <grin>. And dollars to donuts another fruiting body will pop up in the plant pot. Leucocoprinus birnbaumii really is a reasonable ID for your visitor ... but I see the need to hair-split sometimes to remind folks generally of the limited accuracy of ID's for mushrooms from photos only. cheers! frog
