Fungi Madness

These pictures were sent to me by a friend who lives just up the road from our place when the McLennans were staying at our house for a few days. Mrs. McLennan agreed with me that it was totally weird and freaky! I'll let my friend tell the story though.

"Something really strange happened the other day. Mum was in the garden weeding and pruning when this thing started to appear out of the ground in the outline shape of a soccer ball. It was unfolding out of a ball. She got Daddy and me. It was most bizarre. We found out that it was a fungi. We found another one. A small ball made out of the same stuff as mushrooms. Daddy split it open. And there was one of these folded balls but this one didn't unfold. It was really strange. Like something, not from this world."

Amy researched, and found that it was called Ileodictyon gracile. I did a google search on that term and came up with some pretty amazing facts:

• Fruit body--a lattice-shaped receptacle, initially within an egg.


• Egg--Subglobose to ovoid, smooth, whitish, with white mycelial strands extending into substrate. In the juvenile stage the receptacle is tightly packed within the egg in a jelly-like layer.


• Receptacle--Emerges from the egg (sometimes explosively) to form a hollow, spherical, lattice-like network, with 10-30 meshes. Arms white or cream. The receptacle eventually becomes free, and then has no obvious top or bottom, and can roll free along the ground.


• Smell--Foetid, like sour milk or Camembert cheese.


• Spores--Forming an olive brown, slimy mass on the inside of the arms of the cage.


• Habitat--On the ground, or amongst mulch or wood chips. Common in gardens, and on the edge of tracks, also in native forest.

Have a look at the website. It has a map of where the fungi is most often to be found in Australia (South-East, so basically right in our vicinity!), and some other facts that I haven't put up here.