Indoor ecology
Aug. 24th, 2014 09:00 am
My attention was called to the ceiling of a gift shop, where it was reported that a mushroom was growing.

Close up I could see that it was gilled--and beautiful in its way.

My guess is that it is Pleurotus species--the group of fungi that produce oyster mushrooms. These fungi are "weedy," meaning that they can colonize a variety of substrates, and do so aggressively, often before other organisms can. I posted these photos on mushroom identification facebook groups, and no one contradicted my identification (except one person who suggested a polypore--clearly false) but there was a lively discussion of what weird man-made objects people have found oyster mushrooms on.