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ID on edible fungus
The fungus illustrated at
http://www.box.net/public/static/x3cz7z1cji.jpg is sold at a local Sydney vegetable market. Can anybody put a name to the fungus please? The seller says the cap never gets much bigger than shown. |
#2
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ID on edible fungus
In article ,
Richard Wright wrote: The fungus illustrated at http://www.box.net/public/static/x3cz7z1cji.jpg is sold at a local Sydney vegetable market. Can anybody put a name to the fungus please? The seller says the cap never gets much bigger than shown. It's definitely a mushroom (Basidiomycete). How much does the seller know about the origin? What does he call it in English or other language? Is it collected from the wild or cultivated? I'm no expert on mushrooms, but the decurrent gills make me doubt that it's the commonly cultivated species Agaricus campestris, although the unusual small capped form makes it hard to tell. There are at least a dozen other species of mushroom in common cultivation, but to my limited knowledge, it doesn't look any more like the others. Pleurotus spp have decurrent gills, but they also have asymmetic caps with edges that turn up. As for the small cap form, this could either be a mutation in a cultivated species, or due to manipulation of the growing conditions (temperature, humidity, light exposure, etc.) Mushrooms are often identified by the gills and spores. If you could keep some of these under humid conditions and let them mature further, a photo of the mature gills and a spore print would help the more knowledgable identify it. To make a spore print, put a mature cap gill side down on a piece of white paper for several hours. The spores will fall onto the paper in a characteristic pattern, and both pattern and color are used in identification. (I wonder if it could be some kind of sterile mutant that doesn't form spores. IIRC, airborne spores are a problem in mushroom production facilities, causing repiratory troubles and allergies in the workers. So even though the cap is the more desirable part of the mushroom for consumers, there could be a commercial role for such a strain.) I'm cross posting this to bionet.mycology, where some more knowledgable people may see it. Fungi were kicked out of the plant kingdom a long time ago, and DNA studies have shown that they're somewhat more related to animals than to plants. |
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