Again, sandwich boxes are ideal because you can line the bottom with wet paper towels. A smaller bowl or cover may keep the moisture from evaporating but with very small mushrooms it may be necessary to carry out the whole process in a chamber containing a source of humidity. If you put a small mushroom on a piece of paper and cover it with a large bowl you may end up with a shrivelled cap and no spore print. Dry mushrooms won't give a good spore print, but wet ones can make a sloppy mess. Maintaining the ideal humidity is perhaps the trickiest part of making spore prints. Don't let the mushroom get too dry or too wet These boxes have a hinged cover that will effectively block aircurrents.ģ. We use the plastic boxes used by stores to sell sandwiches and salads. Smaller mushrooms or pieces of larger ones are usually best printed inside a covered contained. If printing an undivided mushroom on paper you will simply need to cover it with some kind of bowl. Unless you are trying for an artistic effect, you will not want to have air moving between the pileus and the printing surface. Try to avoid air currents that may distort the print Mushrooms that seem to be dried out will often give poor prints.Ģ. Just look at the picture of a Boletus spore print below to see the kind of mess you can get! Species of Coprinus and similar genera with self-digesting gills can also give unattractive results.
We have had especially bad experiences with boletes in this regard.
Making mushroom spore prints full#
Once mushrooms reach full maturity they may decompose rapidly into a pool of sludge. At the same time, avoid ones that are overmature. Choose ones that are expanded enough that they seem to be discharging their contents. Very young mushroom caps may not yet have produced mature spores. In recording spore print colour for your notes you can use any colour system, such HSV as described on our colour page. It is also often difficult to remove spores from paper for microscopic examination, while removal from glass is usually successful. We prefer to do ours on glass because even very weak prints that might not be visible on paper can usually be seen. Freshly discharged spores are essential for these purposes.Īlthough spore prints on paper are the most common it is possible to obtain a print on other materials such as glass or clear plastic. Mycologists may also be interested in cultivating a mushroom, either in a Petri dish for microscopic examination or for genetic studies, or for obtaining fruiting bodies on a larger or even industrial scale. Because the size and shape of basidiospores is important in the identification of mushrooms, and to their ecology, it is best to work with completely mature ones as are found in the spore print. A piece of lamella examined with a microscope will usually bear large numbers of spores, but these may range from small, really immature ones to others that are quite mature and ready to be shot away. Had it been some colour other than brown we would not have classified it in CortinariusĪ second reason for obtaining a spore print is to be assured of a collection of mature spores for microscopic examination. armillatus shown here is clearly a light brown colour. In common with other species of Cortinarius the spore print of C. The page on mushroom classification briefly discusses how that works. First, and perhaps most important of all, is that for more than two centuries mushrooms have been classified according to the colour of their spores. There are several reasons why you might want to make a spore print. Usually white paper is used for spore prints, but white spore prints may be difficult to see and some people have chosen to make spore prints of a mushroom on both black and white paper. It is a photograph-like impression of the pileus and lamellae. The spores produced on the lamellae had been discharged during the night and had formed a thick deposit on the paper, a result called a spore print. The same pileus that had been removed from its stipe was place lamella-side down on a sheet of white paper, covered with a bowl and left overnight. At far left is a scan of the same pileus inverted to show the lamellae. The leftmost mushroom in the picture had its stipe removed and placed beside the pileus. These were "photographed" on a flatbed scanner not long after they were collected. The picture above is of four fruiting bodies of Cortinarius armillatus, a mushroom commonly collected under birch.
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