Story and photos by Anita Westervelt, Texas Master Naturalist
Heavy summer rain in the Deep South of Texas makes for hot, dripping-humid days and sultry, mosquito-infested hours at dawn and dusk. Only the brave and curious venture out to find the odd surprises that nature bestows on the land.
Those hot, humid conditions, so annoying for humans, are perfect for fungi, a group of living organisms that are classified in their own kingdom. Fungi are not plants, animals or bacteria. They are different from plants in that fungi cell walls are composed of chitin rather than cellulose, and fungi do not go through photosynthesis. The word fungus is Latin for mushroom.
Mushrooms seem to pop up in the midst of a perfect lawn, sometimes looking like a tiny elf cottage, or a mass of wee brown tops resembling a miniature village that’s sprung up around a long-forgotten tree stump.
Other, more imaginative-looking objects arrive silently like alien craft and then vanish leaving no visible trace that they even existed. One such oddity looks like a small bright vermillion-red soccer ball. It’s a fungi in the family known as stinkhorn; its scientific name is Clathrus crispus. It has been described as resembling a popular 1960s game, if you’re of an age to remember the Whiffle ball.
Stinkhorn mushrooms have a worldwide distribution, especially in tropical regions; they inhabit the temperate Gulf coastal states from Florida to Texas, and along the coast of Mexico, South America and the Caribbean. Also known as latticed stinkhorn, basket stinkhorn, or red cage, they are found growing in leaf litter, on garden soil, grassy places, or in mulches. They are known for their foul-smelling, sticky spore masses.
Considered a friendly fungus, they don’t harm plants or cause disease. They are saprobic, which means they feed on already dead organic matter, not things still living. In fact, plants benefit from the presence of stinkhorn mushrooms because they break down rotting material into a form plants can use for nourishment.
Although hugely interesting to discover, their big draw-back is their smell which has been likened to that of carrion and dung — and there’s a reason for that. Their foul odor attracts flies.
Clathrus crispus first appears as an egg-like structure covered in what seems like a white film. As it grows, the white disintegrates, leaving the brilliant red fruiting body. The fruiting body soon breaks down, decomposing first at the dark grooves between the lattices, the gleba, the fleshy, odiferous spore-bearing part. Flies, attracted to the foul odor, eat the spores and then distribute them to new habitats.
Most lawn mushrooms are a good sign that the soil is healthy below the soil surface. Fungi feed on decomposing plant material gradually breaking it down and converting it into humus.
Fungi, globally, come in many different colors, sizes, unique designs and artful shapes. A familiar local fungus is the fan shaped shelf fungus, a polypore called hairy hexagonia. More unusual is the weird, bright yellow, spongy-looking fungus called dog vomit slime mold, so named for how it looks.
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These resources were helpful in writing this article: Mushroomexpert.com, Britannica.com, tropicaldesigns.com, and writer, photographer KennethSetzer.com