Scarlet
Berry Truffle (Paurocotylis pila)
It is always nice to find something new even if at the time of finding it you didn't realise
it was going to turn out to be a new county record; which is exactly what
happened recently whilst hunting for Sussex fungi with good friend Colin Knight.
In
its native range of New Zealand, the brain-like P. pila
grows under Podocarpus and has
evolved to imitate the plant's fruit. Its spores are dispersed by large birds,
which eat the fallen fruits and are cunningly fooled into also eating the
fungus. Taxus baccata, the tree species under
which the fungus was discovered, and Podocarpus
fruits are rather similar in appearance and are both bird-dispersed. It is therefore quite possible that P. pila has found a
parallel ecological niche halfway around the world. Apparently there are many
Antipodean fungi that have co-evolved with large birds to be truffle-like and
imitate fruits but there is already evidence that these same species are
evolving 'back' to be non-truffle-like following the extinction of many of
these species, such as Dinornis the
Giant Moa.
P. pila is a scarce find in Britain with currently only 35 records listed on
the British Mycological Society’s Fungal Records Database of Britain and
Ireland (FRDBI), with most of these coming from northern England and
Scotland. The above images show a selection of the specimens we located emerging
from the bare soil. In addition, Nick Aplin of the Sussex Fungus Group has kindly
supplied a photomicrograph of the large spherical spores.
My
thanks to Colin for finding it in the first place and to Nick for much of the
information above and for providing the definitive identification.
References:
Great find! Loving the spherical spores.
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