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Phallus rubicundus
This mushroom truly smells much worse than it looks. After all, it's called a "stinkhorn" for a reason. It has a spike-like orange fruiting body with small pockmarks and an olive-brown, gelatinous, stinky spore mass towards the apex, which is called the gleba. The fetid odor of the gleba attracts flies. The gleba sticks to the flies as they feed on it, and the flies then mechanically spread the fungus when they land in different places. In addition, the flies further aid in spore dispersal by frantically sucking up the gleba as they can consume as much as 80 percent of their body weight in stinkhorn gleba daily! This putrid gorging upsets the fly's digestive system, which then enables the spores to quickly make their exit from the fly's hindgut. In picture 2, you can see that the fly on the right has a very distended abdomen from sponging up copious amounts of gleba.
Spotted growing in mulch in a rural garden.
Phallus rubicundus is often confused with Mutinus elegans. The difference is that Mutinus elegans doesn't have a clearly separated cap as Phallus rubicundus has.
4 Comments
Haha, yes - you'll probably smell it before you see it! It's a great area for mushrooming if you can tolerate the barren winters...Although, it's been so dry lately that our fall mushroom hunts have been pretty pathetic. I would love to mushroom hunt with you! Maybe someday :)
Yet another wonderful fungus on my list! I don't look forward to the smell, but I will be excited when I find one! You are really making me miss New England (I lived there for 6-7 years)! If only I lived closer we could go on a mushroom hunt together!
Thanks Dan! This was new to me too, and I thought it was M. elegans until someone corrected my ID on mushroom observer. I had no idea there was a look-alike. 11 stinkhorns is impressive though- you must have a lot of gleba-loving flies spreading the spores around :P.
Cool! I didn't know there was a red stinkhorn. I've had 11 M. elegans come up in the mulch in my front garden this year.