More Fungi from Sassafras Gully – 11 June 2015

After a recent trip down Sassafras Gully, I was keen to return to see how the fungi was going. I had found some strange fungi on the last trip and I was interested to see if any more was out.

I set off down the track from Sassafras Gully Road and soon arrived in the rainforest section of the creek. A lot of the fungi I had seen on the last trip had deteriorated – it had dried out and was falling to bits. I still found a few interesting ones but not as good as previously. So I continued on past the junction with Glenbrook Creek and went out via Magdala Creek.

It had been a while since I had visited Magdala Creek, and I was pleasantly surprised to find more fungi out there then I expected. At one place – I had stopped to photograph nice red hygrocybes on the side of the track, and then looked down a mossy bank and spotted some green hygrocybes a fair way below. I climbed down and set up my camera and tripod to take some photograph and then spotted some very interesting fungi nearby. There were several large clusters of orange capped hygrocybes with upturned gills. They looked a bit like Hygrocybe anomala but did not seem to be either of the well known variants (Hygrocybe anomala var anomola or Hygrocybe anomala var ianthinmarginata). Very interesting!

Here is a selection of photos that I took on the trip –

Another interesting observation, I was finding a lot of a brown substance covered in a blue mould (penicillin?). The brown substance was possibly some type of animal poo – but in certain places it was certainly very prolific – with blobs of it all over the place. And a lot of it was covered with the blue mould. Just after I noticed this, I also noticed that some of the blue mould seemed to change into a different type of fungi – into a pin mould. Now I wonder if the blue mould develops into the pin mould or if the pin mould is a later separate infection? And also – what is the brown substrate? Is it a type of poo – perhaps from a rat? or is it something else?

More photos from the day together with my identification attempts can be found on my website here.