urbpan | Entries tagged with dog stinkhorn

Disney's Coronado Springs is a hotel and conference center complex composed of a dozen or so buildings surrounding an artificial lake. There are many plantings of palms and other exotic tropical plants, in well-maintained mulch bed. The week I was there the weather was hot and humid with almost daily downpours in the afternoon. I thought I might see some mushrooms. I was right.

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Current Music: The Sword - The Horned Goddess

My dad came up to visit, and we went to my coworker's house in Hull for a visit. They immediately hit it off over the subject of women's basketball.

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Current Music: Too Much Joy - Pirate

I never get over the loveliness of a carpet of sugar maple leaves.

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Current Music: Roderick on the Line

While doing my mushroom walk for the zoo staff, we came across a group of dog stinkhorns.

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Current Music: The Monkees - A Little Bit Me, A Little Bit You

A coworker came to me complaining that her yard was infested with penises. She further added that it was inappropriate for these penises to infest the property of a lesbian couple, and what should she do about it? I told her to dig up the penises, their eggs, and the mulch that they came from, and discard it. Then after a moment I changed my mind--no, give the mulch to me!

Her girlfriend dug out the offending mycelium and bagged it up, and the next day my coworker gave me the bag. I saved a bunch of the stinkhorn eggs and put them in my little mulch bed--this one, where I grew the last stinkhorns--and put the rest of the material in my compost bin.

Well, they never grew in my mulch bed, but they sprouted like gangbusters in my compost bin!
photo IMG_2130_zps9b1e2332.jpg

These are Mutinus caninus the dog stinkhorn.

Current Music: The Sweet - Little Willy

Some day I'll present the mushrooms that occur in urban (man-made or strongly human-influenced) environments. Winecaps, oysters, turkey tail, earthballs, mica caps, stuff like that. What format should I use? Should I have a website, a zine, something else? Why does my internal voice sound like Marc Maron? I think between his podcast and the new CD I've been overdoing it--maybe it's the coffee: POW!

Anyway, this is Mutinus caninus, the dog stinkhorn, famous for really really really looking like a dog's penis. We had fun with it when it was 365 urban species #175. Like other stinkhorns, it produces a bad-smelling mass of spores called a "gleba" which attracts coprophagic insects to spread its spores around. At a recent mushroom lecture I attended, the presenter verified my suspicion that stinkhorns are relatively recently evolved (making them "more highly evolved" fungi than others, if you look at it that way, which I guess you shouldn't) since they depend on animals to reproduce (as do flowering plants, another relatively recently evolved group, by way of comparison). I don't know if that's why the ants are busying themselves about this mushroom or not. The fungus is commonly found in the wood chips and mulch of urban landscaping, as it is here at Franklin Park Zoo.

I identified another stinkhorn for someone via twitter recently, thus: "Phallus stinkhorns, complete with santorum-mimicking spore mass (gleba)." Yes I'm so proud of that, that I had to share it again. (Whoops, wrong podcast.)

Photos by cottonmanifesto. Location: the Riverway, near Longwood ave, Brookline. The rain has washed the spores off this specimen, and caused it to sag.

Urban species #175: Dog stinkhorn Mutinus caninus

Nature produces an infinite variety of wondrous forms, elegant and grotesque. Some are even difficult to describe with polite language. The dog stinkhorn is one of these. Named for its remarkable resemblance to a canine penis, and possessing a truly rank odor, it seems engineered to offend the senses. There are other phallic stinkhorns, somewhat more human-like in appearance, that so offended the sensibility of people in the Victorian era, that they were deliberately persecuted.

Of course, Nature isn't interested in offending us. Just as She did not mean for us to share the bee's delight in the scent of a rose, She does not intend to revolt us with the reek of the stinkhorn. Rather, the smell evolved because it is a successful attractant to the flies that spread the spores of this fungus. The phallus is a shape that elevates the gooey spore mass above the well-decomposed woodchips or leaf litter in which the fungus usually grows. The lurid red color...well, that I can't explain, but it sure makes it look like a dog's penis.

Masses of spores appear as a greenish substance coating the stinkhorns.

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The Urban Pantheist

Loving Nature While Living in the City

Entries tagged with dog stinkhorn

3:00 snapshot #1745: Tuesday, PLUS: Mushrooms of Coronado Springs

To Hull and back

Autumn at the zoo

3:00 snapshot #1418: dog phalluses, stunted by dryness

Phallus transplant, part 2

Urban mushoom!

365 Urban Species. #175: Dog Stinkhorn

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