yellow brain

Description:

Known as the yellow brain, the golden jelly fungus, the yellow trembler, and witches' butter. It is a common jelly fungus. The fruit body has an irregular shape, and usually breaks through the bark of dead branches. It is up to 7.5 cm broad and 2.5 to 5.0 cm high, but the present one is about 3 cm wide. It is rounded to variously lobed or brain-like in appearance. The fruit body is gelatin-like but tough when wet, and hard when dry. The surface is usually smooth, the lobes translucent, deep yellow or bright yellow-orange, fading to pale yellow, rarely unpigmented and white or colorless. The fruit bodies dry to a dark reddish or orange. The spores, viewed in mass, are whitish or pale yellow.

Habitat:

It is a very common species in deciduous trees forest. Most frequently found on dead but attached and on recently fallen branches, especially of angiosperms, as a parasite of wood decay fungi in the genus Peniophora. Very abundant at the end of the automn and all the winter.

Notes:

It is easy to confuse it with tremella aurantia which parasitizes Stereum hirsutum. Camera Model: NIKON D300 Exposure Time: 1/40 sec., f/10 ISO 1 EV below 200 Focal Length: 90.0 mm Objective lens: Tamron SP 90 AF f/2.8 72E.