Welcome back to Mushroom Monday, your weekly look at some of PEI’s easy-to-identify fungi. Today it’s one of our common polypores, Artist’s Conk (Ganoderma applanatum).
Polypores are sometimes called bracket fungi, shelf fungi, or conks, and you’ll find them growing on the sides of living or dead trees. Under their caps are many pores (hence the name ‘polypore’) which are the ends of narrow tubes that produce spores. Boletes are another group of fungi that have their spores in tubes, but they are traditional cap and stem mushrooms rather than brackets.
Artist’s Conk forms a hard, fan-shaped bracket with dull (not shiny) bands of tan or brown on top, and often a band of white at the leading edge. This is a perennial fungus, and size depends on age. Each year, Artist’s Conk produces a new pore layer below the one from the previous year; if you bisect it, you can count these layers to see how old it is. I didn’t cut these open, but the smaller conk on the left in the photo is younger than the larger one on the right.
The fresh, whitish pore surface of Artist’s Conk has an unusual feature: it bruises dark when pressed by fingers, sticks, or drawing tools, and stays that way. For this reason, it can be used as a canvas for drawing anything from a crude stick figure or happy face to elaborate works of art. (Carefully prying the polypore from the tree without touching the underside will avoid the fingerprints that mar my masterpiece!).
Like most polypores, Artist’s Conk is too hard and woody to eat but it – and its relatives, including the popular Reishi (Ganoderma lucidum) – have long been used in traditional east Asian medicine. Modern research into these fungi is ongoing, but there is evidence of anti-bacterial, anti-viral, anti-tumor, liver-protective, and other effects from the mushroom’s bioactive compounds, including ganoderic acid. Although you may hear people saying they’ve found Reishi on PEI, Ganoderma lucidum hasn’t been recorded further north than Maine. Our species is the similar-looking Hemlock Varnish Shelf (Ganoderma tsugae).
Artist’s Conk can be parasitic on living trees (where it causes white mottled rot) but is more often a decomposer of dead wood, especially hardwoods. In this way, it plays an essential role in nutrient cycling within our forests by breaking up stored carbon, oxygen, hydrogen, nitrogen, and minerals into bits that other plants, animals, and fungi can use. This is also an important waste-disposal service: if it weren’t for decomposers, we’d be buried under tons of dead things!
We have many species of polypores on the Island, but none closely resemble a mature Artist’s Conk. Keep your eye out for this artistically, medicinally, and ecologically useful part of PEI untamed!
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