Chrome-footed Bolete (Harrya chromipes)
- Aubrey
- Jul 20
- 4 min read
Updated: Jul 24
Good evening, friends,
This week’s mushroom comes to us from the Cape Cod Mycological Society walk that took place this past Saturday in Dennis, MA.
Before the walk, I picked up another club member, Anais (her 2008 Subaru Outback is two years more broken than my 2010 Subaru Outback), before I promptly input the wrong area into the GPS. The ol’ Flax Pond Recreation Area instead of the Flax Pond Conservation Lands switcharoo.
We turned an early arrival into a late one, and even more frustratingly, there wasn’t anyone in the parking lot but dog walkers when we showed up. “Maybe we should make posters for these walks” as we shrugged and got out in the woods.
We were poking around for a good 20 minutes before I got a call from another member, Hannah, that she and a group of folks were waiting in the parking lot. We had conquered the GPS gaffe, but we did not account for the double parking lot predicament. For what it’s worth, we drove by that parking lot and I thought to myself, “that’s going to be confusing for people”, but I didn’t bother pulling in to see if anyone was actually in there. We learn from our mistakes.
We ended up having ten people (rounding up from nine) join us for the walk, and while there weren’t a tremendous amount of mushrooms, we ended the day with nice diversity. Today, we’ll look at one of the last mushrooms we saw on the walk, and one I also saw the week before in the Adirondacks: the chrome-footed bolete (Harrya chromipes).
Fun Facts
This is one of a handful of boletes that you can reliably identify in the field. The pink cap, white tubes (that eventually discolor to a pinkish brown), and golden foot are all reliable characteristics that point toward Harrya chromipes. The mushroom does not bruise at all when you handle it.
The mushroom is edible. However, a study out of Poland showed that these mushrooms hyper-accumulate Mercury in their cap. The researchers determined that eating a regular amount of these mushrooms (300 dry grams per week) would not result in dangerous levels of Mercury for the average person — as long as the consumer wasn’t ingesting Mercury from other sources as well.
Etymology
The genus epithet Harrya is named after the American mycologist Harry D. Thiers. Thiers was a professor at San Francisco State University and specialized in bolete taxonomy. Before it was named after him, he actually moved this mushroom into the genus Tylopilus because of the pinkish brown spores the mushroom produces. He didn’t name the mushroom after himself; he passed in 2000 and the genus Harrya was created in 2012.
The species epithet chromipes comes from the Greek root chroma which means "color", and ipes which means "footed". The name references the mushroom’s characteristic yellow foot.
Ecology
The fungus is mycorrhizal and grows in association with a variety of different hardwoods and conifers which is probably why I found it both in the middle of the Adirondacks and further out on the Cape. The mushrooms pop up summer through fall in Asia, North America, and Central America.
The fungus has bounced around a bunch taxonomically (ten name changes to be precise), and has moved from Boletus to Leccinum to Tylopilus before landing in Harrya. Even more recently, in 2022, the species epithet changed from chromapes to chromipes. They just couldn’t leave this mushroom alone. But that’s mycology, where the mushroom’s name is just as inconsistent as their shifting appearances.
Errors and Omissions
A few weeks ago I wrote about Pleurotus dryinus, and in the article I mentioned the mushroom was either Pleurotus dryinus or Pleurotus levis. I went with the former identification for a few reasons (geographic location, color, etc.). I was wrong, and fortunately Alex Gordon corrected my ID on iNaturalist. He provided a whole slew of helpful identification information you can read there, but the easiest ID tip is that if there is any yellow in the cap/flesh of the mushroom (seen best by bisecting the specimen), then you have Pleurotus levis.
I don’t know how it’s been where you are, but we could use some rain out here. The woods are drying up :/. New moon on Thursday,
Aubrey
References:
Kuo, M. (2013, December). Harrya chromapes. Retrieved from the MushroomExpert.Com Web site: http://www.mushroomexpert.com/harrya_chromapes.html
Falandysz J, Zhang J, Wang Y, Krasińska G, Kojta A, Saba M, Shen T, Li T, Liu H. Evaluation of the mercury contamination in mushrooms of genus Leccinum from two different regions of the world: Accumulation, distribution and probable dietary intake. Sci Total Environ. 2015 Dec 15;537:470-8. doi: 10.1016/j.scitotenv.2015.07.159. Epub 2015 Aug 29. PMID: 26322595.