Summary:
Section Basipedes. Features include 1) small size, 2) a somewhat hygrophanous, striate cap that is whitish to watery gray and under a hand lens may have scattered coarse spines, 3) pale gray gills that become whitish, 4) a thread-like, bluish gray to whitish stem with fine white fibrils and attached to a circular flat striate disc at the base, 5) its habitat, and 6) a white spore deposit. Smith''s description is for M. stylobates (Fr.) Quel. Redhead''s is for M. stylobates (Fr.) Kummer but he refers to Smith''s description as for the same species.

Cap:
0.3-1.5cm across, obtusely conic to convex becoming bell-shaped, umbonate, or flat, with margin curving in slightly or sometimes flaring or recurved; somewhat hygrophanous, watery gray with a whitish margin; fading to pallid or nearly white; smooth or under a hand lens cap may have scattered coarse spines especially around disc but soon bald, moist, translucent-striate, becoming sulcate [grooved], (Smith), 0.2-0.7cm across, convex to bell-shaped; grayish sepia fading from the margins inwards to grayish white leaving a faintly vinaceous buff center; "minutely and sparsely squarrose-scaly as seen under low magnification" (Redhead, who also refers to the presence of 'spines' on the cap)

Flesh:
thin; pallid, (Smith)

Gills:
attached by a line or very narrowly adnate, close to distant, 8-16 reaching stem, 1-2 tiers of subgills, gills narrow becoming broader in middle or even very broad when old, "sometimes seceding and adhering to each other" and thus forming a collar around the stem; very pale gray becoming whitish; edges even, (Smith), ascending adnate, moderately spaced, narrowly ventricose, 2 tiers of subgills; whitish to faintly grayish white, (Redhead)

Stem:
(0.5)1-6cm x 0.05-0.1cm, equal, attached to a flat circular radially striate disc at the base, stem not markedly fragile; "bluish gray when very fresh but soon fading through watery gray to whitish, sometimes whitish from the first and occasionally somewhat grayish when faded"; "covered with fine white scattered fibrils or delicately pruinose", becoming bald, (Smith), 1.3-4.7cm x 0.02-0.06cm, equal, cartilaginous, "arising from a fimbriate whitish cottony striate basal disc" up to 0.1cm in diameter; whitish to faintly grayish in lower part; mostly polished and bald but with a scant pubescence in lower part, (Redhead)

Odor:
none, (Smith), not distinctive (Redhead)

Taste:
none, (Smith), not distinctive (Redhead)

Microscopic spores:
spores 6-8 or 8-10 x 3.5-4.5 microns, narrowly elliptic, faintly amyloid; basidia 4-spored, rarely 2-spored; pleurocystidia not differentiated, cheilocystidia abundant and variable, 26-38 x 8-13 microns, colorless, usually clavate with 2-5 thick obtuse projections arising from near the apex, sometimes more or less covered with numerous protuberances over the enlarged part and the neck more or less contorted; gill trama of greatly enlarged cells, pale vinaceous in iodine; cap trama with a pellicle that usually gelatinizes in KOH or water mounts, the surface hyphae covered with short rod-like projections, occasionally some of the hyphae become aggregated into peg-like structures (which cause the appearance of scattered coarse spines under 10x lens), tissue beneath the pellicle entirely of greatly enlarged cells that are pale vinaceous in iodine, (Smith), cap cuticle a thick gelatinous layer a third to a half the cap thickness, "hyphae embedded in a gelatinous matrix, somewhat ascending and interwoven, spreading out in a coralloid fashion over the surface where covered with diverticulae, occasionally aggregated in gelatinous acute protruding scales", 1-3.5 microns in diameter, smooth, clamped, nonamyloid, thin-walled, (Redhead)

Spore deposit:
white (Phillips)

Notes:
Mycena stylobates has been found at least in WA, ID, MB, NS, ON, MI, PA, and TN, and has been reported from NC, (Smith). It was examined from BC, Czechoslovakia, and Sweden, it has been reported from eastern Russia, and is reported to be widespread in Europe, (Redhead). There are collections from WA, MI, and NY at the University of Washington. It has been reported from North Africa (Maas Geesteranus).

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