A Mycological Mystery

By Charles Paxton & Danny Newman
On a cold December's day in Bawcomville, West Monroe, Louisiana. My wife, Kimmie Paxton, was having a stroll around the backyard to see what she might find going on in nature. In so doing she examined the charred remains of a deciduous stump in the makeshift fire pit that her family had created while clearing out some of her grandfather's outbuildings. Tiny white dots on lemon yellow stalks stood out like pale matchsticks along the top of the perimeter of the blackened stump. On further inspection, these little matchsticks white dots were also on the ground in a patch around the stump throughout the southwestern edge of the burn pile. A bit of macrophotography confirmed her suspicion that it was very likely fungal. She added her observation to iNaturalist listed as 'Fungi'.

Upon sharing photos of this strange white fungus to her mom, instead of the expected exclamation of joy, she received a deep-felt, outraged 'eughhh!!!' Perhaps not very surprising, on reflection, as some of these tiny structures resembled leprous toes thrusting up from the charcoal substrate, see http://www.inaturalist.org/observations/193242907.

A few days later, on December 9, Kimmie called me outside to photograph these little fungi that she'd found with my DSLR and macro lens, and while there I lifted a board to the left of the fungi and was amazed to see some strange, fiery orange,yellow claw-looking structures emerging from under the board. I lifted a second board and we could see them fully revealed, they were orangeish yellowish fungi covered with little black dots on the side and they looked very weird; we'd seen nothing like them before.  As they looked unrelated to the tinier, paler, matchstick palid fungi that she'd found, I posted them as a separate observation ( https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/213846964).

The Gulf South Mycological Society ascomycete expert, Danny Newman, was watching as we posted our observations on Inaturalist. He was exactly the right kind of person to be investigating this unusual case. He saw the specimens from both observations and understood what both the matchsticks and the strange, fiery orange claws might be.

It turns out that a similar, dung-dwelling fungus had been described from Sri Lanka in the late 1970s, depicted with both forms/stages as what was occurring in our burn pile.  The Sri Lankan authors created a new genus called Lindquistia to accommodate the pale matchsticks (the anamorph), which they believed was but an alternate guise of some sturdier, club-like forms in the genus Podosordaria (the teleomorph). 

After Danny examined specimens that we then sent him, he sent an exciting reply:

  "Even just judging by the macroscopic description of the Podosordaria (=Poronia) teleomorph in the [Sri Lankan] paper, it was clear that what you had found was distinct. Theirs is on dung, and is "capitate" (having a sterile stipe that is clearly differentiated from a fertile, round "head'). Yours is on burned wood, and is fertile along most of its length. The color is markedly different too, though color is often a weakly diagnostic character, especially when considered in isolation. The microscopic differences between your teleomorph and theirs significantly strengthen the case for these being distinct spp. There are [also] multiple micromorphological features that diverge between the two taxa, including spore shape and size, germ slit prominence, and the apical apparatus."

In brief, what we had found in Louisiana was similar to, but distinct from, what had been found and published about in Sri Lanka some 47 years before.

Thanks to the help of a Taiwanese alphataxonomist named Dr. Yu-Ming Ju, we recently learned from Danny’s presentation to the Gulf South Mycological Society Summer Foray that our two-stage fungus belongs to a species known as Xylaria phosphorea. Described in 1872 in Victoria, Australia, X. phosphorea was only ever known from its teleomorphic ”claw-” or “club-like” state.  No one in over 150 years ever knew it to possess this matchstick (Lindquistia) anamorph, because the two forms had never been observed occurring together.  Ours was the first!  Moreover, the number of worldwide collections of X. phosphorea is very low, making this an exceedingly rare find, even without the bonus of solving the mycological mystery of its anamorph-teleomorph connection.

The matchstick, now with its "flame", ironically found in a burn pit, currently bears the name, Xylaria phosphorea, but Danny and Dr. Ju will soon recombine it in the genus, Poronia, where it rightly belongs.