Welcome back to Mushroom Monday, your weekly look at some of PEI’s easy-to-identify fungi. ‘Mushroom’ usually evokes the stereotypical cap-and-stem image that we are all familiar with, but mushrooms come in all sorts of shapes and sizes. One of the more unusual groups is the Jelly Fungi, which includes our common Orange Jelly Spot (Dacrymyces chrysospermus).
Names are important, and while this fungus is sometimes called Witches’ Butter, technically that’s a different mushroom (Tremella mesenterica). Orange Jelly Spot and Witches’ Butter are both orange and gelatinous, but the former grows on softwood, the latter on hardwood. If in doubt, check the base of the mushroom: Orange Jelly Spot is white where it attaches to the wood, Witches’ Butter is not.
Although grouped together in guidebooks because of their similar growth form, Jelly Fungi are not all closely related (biologist Terrence Delaney of the University of Vermont describes some Jelly Fungi as being less closely related to each other than we are to Hummingbirds!). They can be colourful or drab and have names ranging from the charming Cat’s-tongue (https://www.pei-untamed.com/post/cat-s-tongue) to the eerie Goblin Ear.
A common feature of this group is their pliable cell walls, allowing them to expand in wet conditions and contract when it’s dry. That’s a useful adaptation that means Jelly Fungi can quicky take advantage of wet weather to spread their spores. Unlike many other fungi, they don’t need to build an entire fruiting body from scratch when it rains – they can just plump up.
Most mushrooms make a living in one of three ways: forming relationships with other plants (mycorrhizal), stealing nutrients from other plants or fungi (parasitic), or feeding on decaying organic matter (saprotrophic). Orange Jelly Spot is saprotrophic, one of the brown-rot fungi that feeds on wood’s cellulose (a carbohydrate) and leaves behind decay-resistant lignin that lasts for centuries.
Residue from brown-rot fungi doesn’t play a major role in nutrient cycling but is very important to soil’s structure and moisture-holding ability, as well as to carbon storage. We often recognize the value of deadwood and the ecosystem services it provides, forgetting that it’s fungi that govern the rate at which deadwood decomposes, provides those services, and releases its carbon to the atmosphere.
Orange Jelly Spot’s bright colour makes it easy to spot, and it’s one of the few mushrooms (other than bracket fungi) that you can find year-round. It’s common on dead conifer trees across PEI, and I frequently find it growing out of cut stumps as shown here. Like many jelly fungi, Orange Jelly Spot is edible, though I wouldn’t call it palatable. It’s virtually flavourless and I find the texture off-putting.
That said, it certainly won’t overpower any dish you use it in and can make an interesting and colourful addition to soups and stir-frys. Other Jelly Fungi (including the aforementioned Cat’s-tongue) are often candied, and I expect you could do the same with Orange Jelly Spot. While this fungus is common, I’ve never seen huge amounts of it in any one location. Unless you are covering a lot of ground, foraging Orange Jelly Spot is by ounces rather than pounds.
While we do have other orange Jelly Fungi, none are known to be toxic and so this is a safe mushroom for beginners. Keep your eye open for this bright spot in Island woodlands this fall and winter as you explore PEI untamed!
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