Inky Cap Art

Coprinus comatus (aka. Inky caps). Pic by nejmlez (Wikimedia)

After a tasty Thanksgiving dinner with the extended family at my mother's house, Kai and I came across a pair of sorry-looking Inky Cap mushrooms growing from the soil at the edge of the driveway. Inky Caps are amazing mushrooms. They are large (the particular ones we found were about 7 inches long), distinctive (they look like British lawyer's wigs - which is also one of the common names for them), and have the strange habit of turning from firm, white flesh to thick, black liquid overnight. When young, they are edible. When old, like the ones that Kai and I had found, they can be used as a natural ink.

Just a few hours earlier, my wife, Mary, and mother, Bonnie, had suggested I begin writing a blog. It seemed as if I'd have a lot of time on my hands since I'd been given the news a week earlier that the Cranberry Lake Preserve nature center where I work was scheduled for permanent closure at the end of the year. So the find of these particular mushrooms and the fun that Kai and I had with them became the final push for beginning this project, as well as the inspiration for the name of the blog and its first entry.

Kai fingerpainting with liquified Inky Caps

Since these Inky Caps were clearly not suitable for the cooking pot, we did the next best thing. I plucked the caps with their gills well on the way to turning into black liquid, flipped them over to make ink pots, and grabbed some paper from the car. If mom had some Paper Birch growing in the yard we could have made it an all-gathered activity. With a little encouragement, Kai poked his little fingers into the cold, wet glop and began to draw a black sun.

Kai learned the name of the mushroom, how to recognize it, and had a good time. I learned too, but it wasn't so immediate. "Why does the mushroom turn to liquid?" is what I had wondered for a long time. It had to do something with spore dispersal, but there was no obvious answer. If the spores were part of the inky fluid, they had no place to go but back to the soil below which was already inhabited by the Inky's mycelium ('fungal roots' - not a very accurate description, but that's a lesson and blog post for when Kai is older). That would be as senseless as for all of a tree's seeds to land and remain on the ground below, where they would germinate but be quickly outcompeted for light and nutrients by their mother. Apparently, there is something else going on: the spores mature from bottom up and, to facilitate escape, the portion of the gill just below the mature spores liquifies and falls away. The spores are discharged into the air and not as part of the liquid. For more on this check out the description on http://www.anbg.gov.au/fungi/spore-discharge-mushrooms.html.