Good evening, friends,
We wrapped up another successful Friends of Fungi weekend in the Catskills and have a new mushroom to show for it. The Dingy Twiglet (Simocybe centunculus), not to be confused with the Scurfy Twiglet (Tubaria furfuracea), is a small, nondescript fall mushroom that grows on dead wood. Usually I might appreciate this mushroom, take a picture, and keep it moving, but the olive green cap and mottled coloring made me think an identification might be possible. I snapped a couple pics and brought a couple back for further examination.
Back at the ID table I was looking at the other mushrooms people found when I happened into Tim Baroni’s Mushrooms of the Northeastern United States and Eastern Canada flipped open to Gymnopilus junonious (the big laughing gyms I wrote about a couple weeks ago). On the opposite page - page 283 for everyone reading along at home - was Simocybe centunculus and I said, hey that looks pretty familiar. Sometimes the mushrooms identify themselves.
Fun Facts
This mushroom is considered an LBM (little brown mushroom) and looks like a lot of other small, brownish mushrooms. Not the easiest to identify, there is subsequently a lack of available information on not just the species, but the whole genus. In fact I had not even heard of the genus until I found this species in the book. Interestingly, the fungus is in the family Crepidotaceae and is closely related to the common, brown-spored Crepidotus mushrooms.
One of the few studies on Simocybe found that they were one of the predominant fungi in the soil during the development of the orchid Gastrodia elata. Orchids are partially to fully dependent on fungi and will have different fungal partners during different stages of their development. It looks like Simocybe are helpful partners in the soil for this Asian orchid listed as “vulnerable” by the IUCN Redlist.
The etymology was a little tricky to decipher. The species epithet centunculus means “patchwork” in Latin and I imagine that refers to the mottling of the cap. Simo- could mean “flat-nosed” (there are also other, less relevant definitions) while -cybe means “head” or “cap” — perhaps referring to the mushroom’s flat, smooth cap.
Ecology
The fungus is thought to be saprobic on well-decayed hardwoods as that’s where the mushrooms grow. This doesn’t necessarily contradict with the fungus living in the soil in Asia as some fungi can get nutrition from different sources (saprobic, mycorrhizal, pathogenic, etc.) at different points in life. Some days you just don’t have the energy to secret enzymes into the surrounding environment and slurp up the decomposed matter, I get it.
Per iNaturalist, the mushrooms can be found summer through fall (primarily fall) in temperate forests across the northern hemisphere. I kept fiddling with the mushroom and parts of the cap kept breaking, but if I had my wits about me I would’ve grabbed a spore print to confirm the identification. This mushroom would have brown spores, like other mushrooms in Crepidotaceae.
Hope you had a nice equinox. It looks like we’re finally going to get some rain which should usher in a whole slew of fall mushrooms.
Excited to see who pops up,
Aubrey
References:
Kuo, M. (2007, February). Simocybe centunculus. Retrieved from the MushroomExpert.Com Web site: http://www.mushroomexpert.com/simocybe_centunculus.html
Chen L, Wang YC, Qin LY, He HY, Yu XL, Yang MZ, Zhang HB. Dynamics of fungal communities during Gastrodia elata growth. BMC Microbiol. 2019 Jul 10;19(1):158. doi: 10.1186/s12866-019-1501-z. PMID: 31291888; PMCID: PMC6617676.
https://www.inaturalist.org/taxa/343174-Simocybe-centunculus