Here’s a gooey, mysterious find from my trip to Mohonk Mountain House over Thanksgiving.
It took me a while to identify, but it’s a stalked puffball-in-aspic (Calostoma cinnabarinum), an ectomycorrhizal boletes that is associated with oak tree roots. It has a number of amusing common names such as hot lips and pretty lips. This one was growing around a pine tree, so perhaps they are flexible about their symbiotic partner. It’s also possible that roots from distant oaks extended to this location (there are some leaves in the frame). But I think the former is more likely, partly because I found a paper (Bautista-Nava and Moreno-Fuentes 2009) that says they grow in pine forests in Mexico. But that paper is in Spanish, which I cannot read, so I could have that wrong.
What we are finding in Australia is that some of the introduced fungi is crossing over to associations with our local species. One unfortunate example is Amanita muscaria which is now associated with Antarctic Beech, a genus which is not found in the northern hemisphere. Hopefully it won’t have a major effect on growth.