Rhodocybe 'lateritia group'

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Photo 1 shows a view of the underside, with an abnormal growth – seemingly a mini-cap surface growing on the gills! Things do occasionally go awry in mushroom development (but that is the case with any type of organism). In Photo 3 you see another ‘droplet-stained’ cap and also part of a spore print. To the left and right of the spore print you see photographs of spores. A mass of spores is pinkish brown, but the colour is weak in an individual spore and under the microscope, spores mounted in water or potassium hydroxide solution are colourless. The spores are not smooth but have small, low bumps scattered over the spore surfaces. Unfortunately the spores wobbled slightly in the mounting fluid so the bumps don’t show clearly. Mostly you see the spores side-on here, but to the right of the spore print the arrow points to two spores seen end on (or in polar view), and here you see that the spore outline is faintly angular, rather than a smooth curve. The bumps create the angular effect. Today when I was working with the dried material (preparing it for the microscope and then measuring and photographing the spores), a diffuse curry aroma hung over my work bench. However, if I held my nose to one of the dried mushrooms (or poked it into the bag holding the entire collection), the odour was more unpleasant. In the notes I made when I collected a number of mushrooms from a ring of them, I recorded “smell-none”.