#earthball

[cairina-photography]

Fungi

Species: Ghost Fungus, Hairy Trumpet and Onion Earthball (Taken over a month or so)

Perth, Western Australia (2024)

[wild-e-eep]

Aaah… a nice cup of (somewhat poisonous) earthball spores ^_^

[lost-harts]

September 2025

[grrlmusic]

The Wire

[mostlythemarsh]

Earthball

[fungitopia]

trick or treat!

This message was too late last year! So here you go! Happy Samhain!

[mushroomgay]

London, UK, October 2022

Common earthball (Scleroderma citrinum)

A beautiful common earthball just on the brink of maturity, splitting to open to release the dark spores inside.

[vandaliatraveler]

North American mushroom hunters circle August on their calendars, when the sheer proliferation of fungi reaches its peak in the mid to late summer woods. In a healthy Appalachian forest, fungi emerge in a mind-boggling procession of forms and colors from every square inch of dead and living matter: patches of leaf litter, the mossy crooks and crannies of boulders, dead tree stumps, and nearly everything else fixed in place. And underlying all these magical fruiting bodies is an extraordinary network of filaments (”hyphae”) that binds all life in the forest, metabolizing proteins into soluble nitrates essential to plant life and even sending signals to divert resources to plants in distress: the Mycelium Network . Indeed, a forest cannot exist without fungi.

Above is just a small sampling of those extraordinary beings - not quite plant and not quite animal - that give life to our forests, photographed during a hike yesterday at Coopers Rock State Forest. Earthballs, chanterelles, corals, amanitas, boletes, and so on. Collectively, nature’s version of the world-wide web.