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Species Information
Summary: Also listed in Clubs category. Asterophora lycoperdoides is recognized by its habitat on mushrooms, small whitish caps that become brown and powdery, and poorly formed gills.
It has been found at least in WA, OR, CA, (Castellano) and BC (Paul Kroeger, pers. comm., collections at the University of British Columbia). Breitenbach(3) give its distribution as North America, Europe, Asia, and North Africa.
Cap: 1-2cm across, hemispheric, margin inrolled for a long time; whitish and floury when young, "soon browning and covered with cinnamon-colored powder, eventually the entire surface breaking into brown chlamydospores", (Breitenbach), cap 1-2(3)cm across, spherical with inrolled margin, expanding when old to hemispheric or broadly convex; "at first white to buff and fibrillose to farinose, soon becoming areolate and the fibrillose covering remaining only in patches on the cap and remaining intact along the margin", but disappearing entirely when old, "revealing a cinnamon to dull brown powdery mass", (Castellano), cap 0.5-2cm across, nearly spherical; white becoming brown and powdery; dry, (Arora), 1-2cm across, nearly spherical; white, becoming covered with dense brown powder, (Lincoff)
Flesh: whitish-cream, (Breitenbach), thin (Arora)
Gills: distant, thickish, sometimes rudimentary or completely lacking; pale whitish, (Breitenbach), often poorly developed, absent in some fruitbodies, when present adnate, distant, narrow, thick, blunt-edged, seldom forked; white to pale gray, (Castellano), attached, sometimes forked, often malformed and barely present, well-spaced, thick; whitish, (Arora)
Stem: 1-3cm x 0.3-0.5cm, cylindric, bent, soon hollow; whitish, brownish when old; cottony, (Breitenbach), 1-3cm x 0.3-1cm, central, equal to club-shaped, often curved, stuffed to hollow; white; dull, appressed fibrillose to downy, (Castellano), 1-3cm x 0.3-0.8cm, more or less equal; white becoming brownish, (Arora), 2-3cm x 0.3-1cm, stuffed to hollow; white; silky to minutely hairy, (Lincoff)
Veil: absent (Arora)
Odor: farinaceous (Breitenbach)
Taste: farinaceous (Breitenbach)
Microscopic spores: spores 3.2-5.8 x 2.0-4.2 microns, elliptic, smooth, colorless, also chlamydospores 13-20 x 10-20 microns excluding spines, oval to nearly round, verrucose (warty) to bluntly spiny, light brownish; basidia 4-spored, 14-17 x 5-7 microns, cylindric-ventricose, with basal clamp; pleurocystidia and cheilocystidia not seen; cap cuticle not present, completely broken up into chlamydospores, (Breitenbach), spores 5-6 x 3.5-4 microns, elliptic, smooth; cap surface also produces chlamydospores 12-18 microns, round, bumpy or spiny, thick-walled, brownish, (Arora), basidiospores not formed in many fruitbodies; cap cuticle a cutis of loosely interwoven colorless hyphae 3-6 microns wide; clamps present, (Castellano)
Spore deposit: white when obtainable (Arora)
Habitat / Range
in gregarious clusters on rotting Russula (especially the R. dissimulans-R. nigricans complex) and Lactarius spp., in forests, (Castellano), usually grouped or clustered on dead mushrooms of Russula and Lactarius, (Breitenbach), in colonies on old mushrooms especially species in the Russula densifolia group, (Arora), on rotting mushrooms, especially Russula and Lactarius, (Lincoff), summer and fall (Miller), summer, fall, winter, (Buczacki)
Similar Species
Asterophora parasitica has a non-powdery, dirty white silky cap and smooth elliptic chlamydospores from well-formed gills.
