mushrooms with a puffball morphology
This mushroom certainly lives up to its name! The largest Calvatia gigantea fruiting body on record was 8ft 8in in diameter and weighed 48 pounds! Normally, the “Giant Puffball” forms mushrooms much smaller than that. However, the mushrooms routinely reach sizes of a foot across or larger. Many could easily be mistaken for abandoned soccer balls from far away.
This is without a doubt the strangest-looking puffball-like mushroom in North America. It starts out looking like the inside of an oddly-colored egg and ends up resembling a little, red balloon glued to the top of a tiny termite mound. This description really doesn’t do the mushroom justice, so please do an image search for “Calostoma cinnabarinum” to see what the mushroom actually looks like.
The puffball is probably the second most familiar mushroom morphology. Many people can remember finding one of these as a child and giving in to the uncontrollable desire to kick the ball-shaped mushroom. Anyone who has tried this knows that your efforts are rewarded with a fabulous puff of spores. This puff is not just for the amusement of small children but is actually a rather ingenious spore dispersal mechanism. Puffballs are gasteroid fungi, meaning that spores develop inside the mushroom. All gasteroid fungi have lost the ability to forcibly discharge their spores, so they have to come up with other ways to release their spores. Puffballs achieve this by puffing their spores out of small openings. When the spores are mature a small opening (or a few small openings) called an ostiole develops on the surface of the mushroom. When a raindrop (or an animal’s/ someone’s foot) lands on...
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