Great, now I’m gonna be looking even more like a crazy person when walking in the woods, as I crawl around sticking my face up to every Turkey Tail (Trametes Versicolor) that I pass looking for these. Jk, thanks for sharing!
You'll have more luck checking Trichaptum - I've never found them on Trametes yet.
There's also a similar looking species, Gliocladium polyporicola, which grows on Stereum hirsutum, so may as well check all the small shelf fungi!
Theres a lot of other factors, but to be very reductionist: in theory yes.
It depends on how accurately the environment was simulated, which includes things such as gravity, protection from cosmic rays(or lack thereof), potentially magnetic fields, light spectrum, etc. It's very difficult to replicate all environmental factors in a lab.
But the biggest concern is that I doubt they have access to a food/energy supply, unless they are photosynthetic, and even that requires things such as oxygen and water which you would be hard pressed to find in a usable form of Mars.
Also, the soil contains perchlorates which are very bad for life as we know it.
Perchlorates in martian soil ?? potential source of energy and oxygen! Rule of thumb - if a reaction is thermodynamically favourable, but there's some kinetic barrier, some microbes could evolve to exploit it. Life doesn't have to be as we know it.
You can eat any of them, though some may kill you if you do :)
The first one is a morel, and the black one (also edible) is a black trumpet. Others may be edible, I'm not sure. The frog mushroom (Amanita muscaria) is supposed to be very poisonous, but there is an episode of Hamilton's Pharmacopoeia where he finds a man who eats them regularly. (This is not me suggesting you eat them yourself, just an interesting tid bit, mushrooms are weird)
You can eat fly agaric, but you have to boil it, change the water, and repeat a couple of times. The egg could be meant to represent a puffball, young stinkhorn (either of which people do eat) or an amanita still in the volva (v dangerous!). Tree nose looks like birch polypore. Purple could be based on amethyst deceiver. NSFW is stinkhorn. Deeply disconcerting is likely mealy tooth, though iirc there may be another one that looks similar. Citadel is possibly one of the yellow coral fungi (there's a lot).
Death Cap grows on tree roots, not sure if that counts.
There aren’t a ton of mushrooms that grow on healthy living trees I think, so it’s kinda hard to find a poisonous example but maybe Jack O’ Lanterns count. They can grow at the base of living hardwood trees. They won’t kill you but you will have a very bad time. I think there’s another closely related species that grows on both conifers and hardwoods.
Thank you for posting this! I saw several examples of this during the recent freezing weather in the UK, and was confused as to what it was. I don’t recall having seen it before, but then I haven’t lived in a wooded valley during prolonged double-digit negative temperatures before either.
Mycology
Active