Good afternoon team. The mushroom of the week, the first week of March, is Camillea punctulata. This mushroom is growing on the same downed oak limb north of the boathouse that has been featured previously. That limb, in my opinion, is the best display of fungal diversity in the ramble with ~5 species growing within a few feet of each other. In the second picture you can see the previously featured Biscogniauxia atropunctata (the light, salt & pepper looking growth just above the black C. punctulata). It's neat to see them all competing for the same nutrients (cellulose and lignin) in the wood, and I expect to see different mushrooms appear as the dead limb continues to age.
There isn't too much available information on C. punctulata. It has forty-four recordings on iNaturalist, only two of which are outside of the New York region. It has also been found in Puerto Rico and believed to be native there.(1) From what I can tell it grows and releases spores year-round. If you zoom in on the first picture you can see the ostioles (where the spores are released) are pits rather than pimples and that helps distinguish it from B. atropunctata.
There is another Camillea species (C. tinctor) that is rarer in New York, but you can distinguish between the two species by scratching the mushroom and looking at the wood underneath. C. tinctor stains the wood orange while, as you can see in the attached picture, C. punctulata does not stain the wood.
Lastly, two members of the New York Mycological Society - Sigrid Jakob and Potter Palmer - conducted a fungal phenology survey of Green-Wood cemetery in Brooklyn using ArcGIS and iNaturalist. You can check it out here, it's incredibly informative for amateurs like us: https://gardens.green-wood.com/portal/apps/MapSeries/index.html?appid=0559180c344148609860a4973812bc05. Would be neat to do something like this in our woodlands.
Have a stellar week,
Aubrey
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