A HUGE Fungus Among Us!
As I’ve mentioned before, it’s been a VERY wet and VERY humid Spring around here. And I must mention that fungi LOVE that type of weather. Which has to explain my older daughter’s recent finding by the creek.
This may not look like a huge mushroom to you, but to us it’s massive! And you’ll notice a smaller mushroom below the large one in it’s shelter. Below is the size of a normal mushroom in these parts.
We got out our ruler and took this opportunity to do some mushroom measuring. The small mushroom above is about 1-1/2″ wide across the cap. This huge mushroom we found, measured 11 inches across it’s massive cap! Yep, that’s almost a foot!
And the stalk was 3″ thick! As I looked at the following picture I noticed the gills (underside of the cap where spores are dropped out). I thought how cool it would be to make a spore print out of this thing!! I also thought about how large the mycelium (root system) must be below it. The mushroom is simply the “fruiting body” of a very large web-like root system below the ground. Once this big mushroom serves it’s purpose of dropping spores to reproduce, it will quickly wither away.
We went exploring around the area and found several more mushrooms of varying sizes, all of them much smaller than our mammoth one. This one below measured about 2″ across the cap.
We also found a few waterlogged logs full of funky looking fungi such as below.
If you are experiencing wet and humid weather don’t miss this opportunity to get outside on a fungi hunt! All of the activities and information I mention above are included in our A Fungus Among Us study, including lot of notebooking pages to use, one of which is a place to write all those measurements down that we took!
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