Cinnabar Polypore - Pycnopore cinabre
As an aspect of my attempts to become more aware of the woods around the lake as a living, integrated ecosystem, I started looking at the ways that what seems dead is really alive.
Saprobic fungi are those that live from transforming dead trees. The process of ‘white rot’ converts the basic elements of the dead tree back into soil, while giving life to the fungi.
The Cinnabar Polypore does that work on dead deciduous trees, sprouting out of cracks in the bark of fallen trees quite dramatically. The glowing orange-red (it runs through a few shades in that range) is hard to miss, and it starts as a thimble-sized bubble and then grows to a large bracket.
The Cinnabar in the image is a little less than halfway from having burst through the bark to its bracket stage. Other newer/younger eruptions are visible along the trunk.
We lose a lot of trees these days to a fairly dramatic increase in violent wind storms. Walking through the Britannia Conservation area it is easy to see that various life forms working away on the fallen. One of the neat things about these fungi is that they are not obviously impeded by the cold.
Cinnabar Polypore - Pycnopore cinabre
As an aspect of my attempts to become more aware of the woods around the lake as a living, integrated ecosystem, I started looking at the ways that what seems dead is really alive.
Saprobic fungi are those that live from transforming dead trees. The process of ‘white rot’ converts the basic elements of the dead tree back into soil, while giving life to the fungi.
The Cinnabar Polypore does that work on dead deciduous trees, sprouting out of cracks in the bark of fallen trees quite dramatically. The glowing orange-red (it runs through a few shades in that range) is hard to miss, and it starts as a thimble-sized bubble and then grows to a large bracket.
The Cinnabar in the image is a little less than halfway from having burst through the bark to its bracket stage. Other newer/younger eruptions are visible along the trunk.
We lose a lot of trees these days to a fairly dramatic increase in violent wind storms. Walking through the Britannia Conservation area it is easy to see that various life forms working away on the fallen. One of the neat things about these fungi is that they are not obviously impeded by the cold.