With a lot of recent rain, fungi has been popping up in many places. I often go to the Cooks River for recreational cycling and also bird observing, but this time I thought I would go for a walk along part of the river and look for fungi.
Near Ewan Park – I have often seen a lot of stinkhorns emerging just after rain, so that was where I started. There were dozens of these stinkhorns – Phallus rubundicus. A lot of them had been washed out a bit by the rain, but others were quite fresh. One was being grazed on by a slug.
Nearby, a lot smaller were quite a few tiny red fungi growing on sticks or leaves – Cruentomycena viscidocruenta.
There were also a variety of other fungi out – the usual white and brown mushrooms, and some puffballs in abundance.
On the way home, I noticed some small stinkhorn “eggs” about to hatch. Stinkhorn fungi emerge from an egg type structure.
I collected two of these eggs and set them up to record a time lapse of their hatching. This did not work out too well. I had set up the camera to record a series of photos overnight, but my interval was too short (40 seconds between photos). It looks like these stinkhorns (Colus hirudinosus) take a fair while ( 8 – 12 hours?) to fully emerge.
More photos of the fungi are online on my website here.