Cyathus sp.

A Bird's Nest Fungus at Dunlop, ACT

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Identification history

	Cyathus sp.	7 Feb 2019	Heino1
	Unidentified	6 Feb 2019	purple66

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User's notes

A bird's nest fungus appearing after recent rain

3 comments

Pam wrote:

7 Feb 2019

A 'Bird's Nest Fungus'. With the smooth, pale interior surface of the 'nest', with its widely fluted margins and pale brown hairy external surface it's possibly Cyathus olla! What do you think Heino? You know the species down your way better than me.

Heino1 wrote:

7 Feb 2019

I’d think Cyathus stercoreus is a possibility. It has a shaggy outer surface (though in aged specimens this shagginess may disappear to some degree) whereas Cyathus olla has a smooth to slightly hairy surface and I think of it as usually with a more widely flared mouth. Stercoreus is probably the commonest Cyathus in Canberra (often in large colonies) and I have (for sure) collected olla twice in the ACT (in the CSIRO grounds and at the ANU – probably within a kilometre or so of each other) but I do have some unidentified collections to work through. For the moment I’ll put this in Cyathus. I’ll have to check if there are any macroscopic stercoreus look-alikes (microscopically the large spores give it away immediately) and then I’ll see about putting a description and notes about stercoreus (or perhaps ‘stercoreus group’) up on Canberra Nature Map.

Pam wrote:

8 Feb 2019

Thanks for all of that Heino.

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