Elf cups and other unmushroomy fungi

Emma and I took a walk in the local woods this week, to check out which plants are braving February (there's a class on Monday that will be doing some surveying of them and I wanted to make a guide). There were quite a few species, but none were venturing any flowers yet.

However, a very bright object did catch our eyes - and it wasn't a bit of litter, either. It was the amazing and strange Scarlet elf cup (Sarcoscypha coccinea).

Above is the lone specimen we found, but if you're lucky you'll see lots together. They grow on dead wood. I think something so peculiar-looking should definitely be associated with otherworldly creatures like elves. Their scientific name also alludes to their weirdness: 'sarco' is 'flesh' and 'scypha' means 'cup'. (Coccinea will remind you of the squashed beetle colouring cochineal, and it means 'scarlet'.)

CC image by Ceridwen

You'll notice there isn't a mushroomy gill in sight - so where do their spores come from? Mushroomy-mushrooms use little sticking out structures on their gills called basidia. But most fungi are actually like the lovely Elf cups - they're called 'Ascomycetes' and they produce spores in flask-shape cells called asci. There's a nice understandable page about all this on the Australian National Botanic Gardens website.

The beautifully red upper layer of Elf cups is packed with these vertically arranged asci*, and when the spores are ready they are fired off into the air. I even read that this makes a noise, which sounds a bit mad. (Although, if an elf cup releases spores into a wood and no-one's there, does it make a sound? Etc.) Apparently if you pick the right moment you can blow on their surface and see a puff of spores float away.

So if you've chosen fungi, this is a reminder that you want to include both Ascomycetes and Basidiomycetes in your collection.  And that although mushroomy basidiomycetes might be laying relatively low at this time of year, you might still find some ascomycetes. King Alfred's cakes (Daldinia concentrica) are another easily found example.

(*You can also see asci in lichens - because lichens, of course, are part fungus. It's possible to cut a very thin slice and examine them under the microscope. Counting the number of spores per ascus can help sometimes with identification.)