The Urban Pantheist

This lone elbiem (little brown mushroom) went unidentified during our most recent Urban Nature Walk in Waltham. I suspect it's related to either Xeromphalina or Marasmius mushrooms.

I found these little guys in the same mulch bed with the mysterious phallic mushrooms from the last post. This was in a drug store parking lot in the city of St. Louis Missouri. I was not surprised to find these tiny bird's nests--wood chips are a predictable habitat for them--and I was confident I could identify them when I got a close look at the picture.

Flash forward to this week, when I spend some time looking at them closely, checking the key, and coming to no conclusion. Well, I came to the conclusion that these are not either of the two species that are very common in the urban northeast, they are one of the other 39 species that occur in North America. The little "eggs" inside are black rather than white, as they are in the members of Nidulariaceae* that I am familiar with.

In any case, the natural history of this mystery species is likely to be very similar: The cups emerge from the substrate with little covers on, which either peel back or dissolve away, leaving the eggs exposed. Then the rain comes, and if a drop hits the cup in the right place it will splash the egg some distance away. In some species a cord is attached to the egg, and will entangle it on objects in its path. Then the covering on the egg wears away, exposing the spores; some species may depend on being accidentally eaten by herbivorous animals to spread the spores.

*Small nest family

This beautiful youngster is a stinkbug in the family Asopinae.* This family differs from all the others in that it is a predator. Most Asopines attack small soft-bodied creatures like aphids or caterpillars. Others attack their cousins, the plant-sucking stink bugs. Predatory stink bugs have been used for biocontrol in gardens and crops for this reason. This nymph has yet to grow wings, and my photo was sent to the bugguide file "Not Yet Identified Nymphs."


* from the Genus Asopus, from a Greek river god of the same name.

I picked a wine cap mushroom, a nice fresh one that looked like it would make a good spore print. I looked at the gills, they were purple and intact, but I could see something wedged in them. It was some kind of insect larva. There are many kinds of beetles and flies that lay eggs in mushrooms, allowing their young to develop enveloped in the nourishing safety of fungus flesh.


I carefully worked it out of its refuge with my knife, and was surprised to see what appeared to me to be a caterpillar. I posted these photos on a caterpillar identification group on facebook, and someone quickly pointed out that I was barking up the wrong tree. This larva has no distinct head, meaning it is not a lepidopteran, but a dipteran. This baby fly is in the Syrphidae* family--hover flies and flower flies. Syrphid larvae are predators--aphid killers come to mind. What was this one doing in the lamellae of a mushroom? Dunno, but possibly it was hunting fungus gnat maggots or other tiny prey. Have any entomologists out there heard of mushroom-dwelling syrphids?



* From Ancient Greek σύρφος (súrphos, “gnat, winged ant”)

These mushrooms are growing from a log in front of the (indoor) tapir exhibit. They probably were there when the log was brought indoors. Most likely this is Poronidulus conchifer, a species that has strikingly banded cuplike mushrooms when fresh but quickly fades to whitish.

I found these mushrooms about a week ago in my brush pile. A couple days later( Read more... )

Growing inconspicuously inside a huge hollow stump (probably an oak, based on the size and location), I nearly missed these mushrooms. It was December 24th 2014 and the cluster of caps glistening there looked like--if you'll pardon some zookeeper earthiness--a pile of deer scat. But it was levitating near the rim of the hollow stump, so I stopped and angled my camera down to look at them from below. I will guess that these are Mycena mushrooms, pending confirmation from the experts.

This moth by my porch light is one of two species: either a winter moth, Operophtera brumata, or a Bruce spanworm O. bruceata. Bruce spanworm moths are more likely to be flying in autumn, but there's a chance that this is a winter moth flying early. The field marking that distinguishes them is a small spot on the underside of their hind wings.

This is a male moth, by the way, females of both above species are flightless.

Like most of the things in this post, these mushrooms are unidentified. They are polypores--which is a bit like saying an animal is an arthropod.

( Read more... )

Every year there's a sudden drop off of visible biodiversity in the North, as cold weather arrives and many of the insects disappear. This year was especially hard on me, as I spent one of the last weeks of the summer in Florida, where insects and spiders and large wading birds and giant reptiles are loose everywhere, all the time as far as I know. Then I came back to Boston on a change of weather day--everyone in Boston thought it was pretty cold compared to the day before, but it was like a 30 degree drop for me. I looked around my yard and it looked like I'd been away for months: the grass was brown, all the sunflowers had come and gone, the perennials and wildflowers had all gone to seed.

I just posted this on tumblr, with a mopey caption:

It's terribly blurry, but the wing veins are nice and visible, in case any entomologists want to identify it. I know it's a carrion fly but beyond that who knows?