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Species Information
Summary: Identifying features include 1) a small cap with coarse, matted, radiating, dextrinoid hairs on the cap, often with a ciliate cap margin, and 2) a thin, tough, dark stem that inserts into individual spruce needles with a basal disc. Other features include a dry cap that is whitish to buff or tinged tawny with a darker center, thin white flesh, adnexed to free, close, white gills, a white spore deposit, and cylindric, smooth, inamyloid spores. A tropical species of this genus called Crinipellis perniciosa causes severe damage to cacao trees, (Laessoe(1)).
Crinipellis piceae has been found in AK, BC, WA, OR, CA, along the Pacific coast in the fog belt, and also in NB, NS, ON, and the USSR, (Redhead(6), Redhead(54)).
Cap: 0.3-0.6cm across, convex to bell-shaped, becoming flat, or disc depressed slightly; buff, disc chestnut or darker; dry opaque, with appressed, radiating, matted, brown fibrils and scales, margins usually dentate [toothed] from radiating fibrils, (Redhead(54)), 0.3-0.7(1)cm across, convex to broadly convex or nearly flat, "center sometimes slightly depressed"; "whitish to buff or tinged tawny except for the dark (tawny-brown to brown or blackish) center, which is often surrounded by a dark circle; covered with coarse tawny to brownish hairs and sometimes minute scales, not viscid", margin often fringed with projecting hairs, (Arora)
Flesh: thin, membranous; buff, (Redhead(54)), very thin; white, (Arora)
Gills: narrowly adnate, moderately spaced, "narrow or moderately broad, occasionally subventricose"; white, (Redhead(54)), adnexed or free, close; white, (Arora)
Stem: 1.8-3.2cm x 0.01-0.05cm, usually straight, corneous [horny] to pliant, individually insititious on conifer needles, forming a slight basal disc; "bay to dark brick basally, paler above (sienna to buff) and covered with a villose to pubescent greyish white vestiture which is more conspicuous when dry", (Redhead(54)), 2-6cm long and up to 0.1cm wide, "more or less equal, very thin and tough"; brown to blackish brown "beneath a coating of minute hairs", (Arora)
Veil: partial veil absent (Miller)
Odor: none (Miller)
Taste: mild (Miller)
Microscopic spores: spores 7-9 x 3-4.5 microns, narrowly elliptic to subcylindric, smooth, nonamyloid, colorless, thin-walled; basidia 4-spored, 20-24 x 6-6.5 microns, clavate, with basal clamp connection, occasionally with a secondary basal septum; cheilocystidia abundant, 13-20 x 5-6 microns, colorless, clavate "with 6-12 irregular, simple or branched, finger-like apical growths" up to 12 microns long, "walls thin and slightly refractive"; clamp connections mentioned for basidia, cap trama, and stem trama; the stem has clustered swollen clavate cells or setiform hairs with swollen basal cells that "form a small disc immediately above the point of emergence which is a narrow isthmus between the stipe and the subsurface mycelium.", (Redhead(54)), spores 7-10 x 3-4.5 microns, cylindric, smooth, not amyloid, hairs on cap dextrinoid, (Arora)
Spore deposit: white (Arora)
Habitat / Range
gregarious on needles of Picea sitchensis (Sitka Spruce) and Tsuga heterophylla (Western Hemlock), on needle beds that are on bare or partially moss covered ground, noted "along the margins of roads through spruce forests and, along the Pacific coast, common on the ridge tops of treed shore dunes exposed both to periods of drying offshore breezes and periods of heavy fog"; in eastern North America on needles of Abies balsamea (Balsam Fir) and Picea (spruce), (Redhead(54)), single, scattered or in groups on needles, twigs, and debris of conifers especially spruce, (Arora), late summer and fall (Miller)
Similar Species
Crinipellis piceae differs from Marasmius in having coarse dextrinoid hairs on cap, and frequently a ciliate cap margin (Arora). Crinipellis setipes [here a synonym of C. scabella] 1) does not form the "minute basal disc at the point of emergence from its substrate" that is found in C. piceae, and 2) favors hardwood debris - but has been found on pine needles and spruce twigs, whereas Crinipellis piceae favors spruce needles - but also grows on fir and hemlock, (Redhead). C. scabella (with its synonyms C. setipes and C. stipitaria) favors hardwood debris and the roots of grasses and other plants.
Redhead(54), Redhead(6), Arora(1), Miller(14)*, Laessoe(1) (discussing C. stipitaria and C. perniciosa), Moser(1) (discussing C. stipitaria), Desjardin(6)*, Siegel(2)* References for the fungi
