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Species Information
Summary: Features include a bright orange to yellow orange cup that stains blue-green especially where handled, growth under conifers just after snow melt, and microscopic characters including round spores. An albino form with bluish stains was found in Idaho (Arora). Caloscypha fulgens is a parasite of conifer seeds (Trudell).
It is found in BC, WA, OR, ID, and also AB, CA, CO, MT, UT, and WY, (Larsen), MB, NB, ON, PQ, (Ginns), and Europe and temperate Asia (Trudell).
Upper surface: to 4cm wide, cup-shaped with mouth constricted, sometimes split like Otidea; bright orange-yellow with mottling of blue-green, especially where bruised; smooth, (Ginns), 2-4cm, spherical when young, then irregularly cup-shaped to saucer-shaped; bright yellow, more orange on drying; smooth to tuberculate [bumpy]; margin "even to sinuous, in part split and notched", (Breitenbach)
Flesh: to 0.1cm thick, very brittle; pale yellow, (Ginns)
Underside: "pale yellow or brownish with a distinct green tinge, finely pruinose, smooth", (Ginns), ocher-brownish, turning a greenish color when touched; farinose [mealy], (Breitenbach)
Stem: sometimes short-stemmed, (Breitenbach), essentially sessile (Ginns), "absent or present only as a short, narrowed whitish base", (Arora)
Odor: none (Miller)
Taste: mild (Miller)
Microscopic: spores (5.5)6-6.5(7) microns in diameter, round or nearly round, smooth, colorless, pale yellow in Melzer''s, wall slightly thickened (to 0.5 microns), at first 2-seriate but when mature 1-seriate; asci 8-spored, 110-135 x 8-9 microns, inamyloid; paraphyses cylindric to wavy, some tapering in the apical 20 microns, 2.5-3.5 microns wide, generally septate and branched 40-60 microns below tips, contents homogeneous, (yellow granules noted in paraphyses by Seaver), (Ginns), spores 5-6 microns in diameter, round, smooth, colorless, without droplets; asci 8-spored, 100 x 10 microns, inamyloid; paraphyses cylindric, septate, forked toward base, (Breitenbach for Switzerland)
Habitat / Range
"on soil among mosses or sometimes attached to buried rotten wood, apparently only under conifers", generally in May in Canada, but as early as mid-April in BC, (Ginns), fruiting shortly after snow melts (Arora), single to gregarious on mossy ground or needle and leaf litter, in hardwood and coniferous forests, March to May, may be mycorrhizal with Abies, (Breitenbach for Switzerland), in boggy places and in mountainous coniferous areas (Lincoff), single, scattered or in clusters, (Ammirati)
