It seems that the Teeming Millions can manage to identify just about anything. I’ve been scanning some old slides and came across a decades-old unsolved mystery, and thought I’d see if it could be answered.
The scene is a camp in a redwood forest in the Santa Cruz mountains of California. A fallen douglas-fir across a trail sprouted the oddest fungus one winter. This blob-shaped fungus had a decidedly silvery-colored skin, odd enough that we called it the “UFO fungus”. The irregular shape is suggestive of a slime mold, but the texture is much more firm along the lines of a bracket fungus, but it’s not bracket shaped.
Sadly, the camp maintenance staff cleared the log off the trail that spring, and neither this fungus, nor any other like it, was ever seen again.
Best picture I have is a digital scan of a slide which has been sitting in a box for 30 years …
Probably not Ganoderma. Ganoderma tend to be shelflike growths and the UFO specimen appears to be laying on top of the log. At first glance, it does appear to me to be a slime mold. If the texture was tough, it might just mean that the slime mold was dried out. Difficult to make any identification from any picture let alone this one. My reference books are mostly focused on Basidiomycetes and Ascomycetes. I don’t (yet) have a good slime mold reference. Mushrooms Demystified by David Arora is a great reference for anything found in Northern California. It also may be a case of one fungus attacking another which makes it nearly impossible to identify except under the microscope.
Highly variable in appearance (naturally, being a slime mold) but I did find a couple of photos of ones that were just as silvery as my UFO, with the same dark brown innards peeking through the broken crust.
Ironically, I actually worked with David Arora to set up a fungus fair a few years after I met the UFO, but I was too busy figuring out the 'shooms we had that day to think to ask about old memories.
Cool! My gf is a member of the Illinois Mycological Society and I’ve gotten into it as well. To be honest, I’m really just in it for the morels, chanterelles and porcinis
Oh yeah and the Hen of the Woods, Mmmm, love those sauteed with butter and thyme!
