A Checklist of Kansas Mushrooms compiled by Richard Kay

Wild Mushrooms Worth Knowing by Ansel Hartley Stubbs

Mushrooms in Kansas (NAMA Slide Program # 23) by Ron Meyers

Kansas reports 1000 species!

by Richard Kay

With a month of drought it didn't look as if this year we would make our goal of adding number 1000 to the species reported from Kansas. But Sherry's sharp eye for odd little guys paid off, combined with her persistence in the lab and library. Here are the most recent additions to the checklist of species reported from Kansas.

Tremella frondosa Fries (no. 994). Collected August 11 on the Adams foray, this jelly fungus appeared in large, leafy clusters that were yellow; some were darker, orangish at the base. See Arora, p. 674.

Collybia semihirtipes (no. 995). Terry Shister collected this on the Adams foray, growing on acorns and leaf litter. It looks like a Marasmius, so much so that Peck named it Marasmius semihirtipes. The specific epithet semihiripes implies that it is "half hairy," but this is a misnomer, because the stalk of our specimen was almost completely covered with matted cinnamon hairs, which fits Kauffman's description (1918, 1:67-68). He distinguishes it from M. spongiosus, which is hairy only at the base (1:65-66). Subsequently, spongiosus was moved from Marasmius to the genus Collybia, and according to Miller/Farr 1975, also synonymized with semihirtipes (p. 50). We think, however, that the hair stalks are distributed so differently that two species are still to be distinguished, though some might prefer to distinguish them as only two varieties. Collybia spongiosa has been reported once from Kansas, by Bartholomew in 1927.

Phellinus punctatus (no. 996). Sherry found this brown resupinate mass as a circular patch with rusty brown pores and context. It matched the description in Breitenbach (2:262), but Sherry was not sure until she saw a specimen at the NAMA foray in West Virginia.

Ciboria peckiana (no. 997). Collected on the Adams foray, these teeny-tiny gray cups stumped Sherry until they were identified at the NAMA foray by John Plischke III.

Panellus serotinus (no. 998). Very like oyster mushrooms, these were kidney- to fan-shaped, attached to wood without a stalk, with caps (3-7 cm) colored grayish with a tinge of violet. Collected September 7 on the Dingus foray. Reference: Phillips 1991, p. 211.

Callistosporium luteo-olivaceus (no. 999). Also found at Dingus, this looks like just another Marasmius, but the cap and gills are a shiny, solid yellow; as they dry out, they turn reddish, darker at the center. The stipe is scrufy. See Arora, p. 211.

Gerronema strombodes (no. 1000). A deep dimple, or umbilicate depression, at the cap center suggested the specific epithet strombodes, "trumpet shaped," which feature makes Gerronema a close relative to the more familiar genus Omphalina. Our single specimen was found on wood, at Dingus. The cap (2 cm) was a pale greenish gray, drying to a dark yellow; the stalk was whitish. See Phillips 1991, p. 77.