Little Red Mushrooms

While I was eating lunch Patty came in from the yard, where she'd been weeding the gardens (I'd been mowing the lawn) to tell me that there are some very cool little red mushrooms out by the compost pile. Look in the moss she said.

So I did. And I brought along a camera, macro lens attached.

I needed it, as they were very small (that's a US 25¢ coin for scale).

And very picturesque.

I think they are Vermilion Waxcap mushrooms, Hygrocybe miniata.

But mushroom ID is non-trivial. And these didn't match the images in either of my field guides. Nor did the description quite line up. But they also said this mushroom is found all around the Earth and varies in color from scarlet to orange. And internet references did not agree on sizes.

When I was in school there were two kingdoms of life, plants and animals. And Mushrooms were in the plants, mainly it seems because they didn't move about. In 1969 they were assigned to their own kingdom the fungi. It took awhile for the biology textbooks to catch up. In 2015 scientists published a paper arguing for seven kingdoms. I wonder what today's textbooks say.

Mushrooms are the fruiting bodies of the fungi, the reproductive structures, somewhat analogous to flowers.

Mushrooms are also like leaves on a tree, an important part for sure, but pick a leaf and the tree survives. Likewise for the fungi, the bulk of which lives, at least for these mushrooms, underground. So picking any individual mushroom is largely insignificant.

And there were plenty of 'leaves' on this fungi. I count sixteen in the image above. And this was just a small [pun!] sample of what's there.

Keep looking down.