Sunday, October 7, 2012

Stamp of the day: Finding Funky Fungi

It is the season of the fungi, these strange creatures that are actually more animal than plant.... evolutionarily speaking.  I have seen a lot of interesting fungi lately in our wet fall in eastern USA.

possibly Astraeus hygrometricus, an earth star (fungi)


(above) Earth stars in the Pine Barrens...  I haven't seen an earth star in many years, so this was fun!

Cobolt crust fungus in our garden, found on an old stick (sorry, no photo, check out the link to see the amazing color)...

Tiny little black specks on a rotten branch was Diatrype, an ascomycete (related to morels)...

and then jelly fungi of course, these jellyfish-looking things that come out of branches as gelatinous exudates...

The stamp of the day is from Taiwan and was one of the few mushroom stamps I could find that had an earth star among it.

Enjoy!

1 comment:

EH said...

Love the earth stars, saw one this spring at KTH, in a flower bed! Unlikely place but there it was.