Found a few weeks ago, always wondered when these came up in my area.
Mmmm nature’s gushers
Seriously, this is no fair! If they look like candy then they should taste like candy and be as safe to eat as candy
These guys are edible, you could definitely candy them but I would be hardpressed to find enough to make it worth the effort. No flavour to them but a fancy little mid-hike snack.
I candied some Naematella Aurantia recently and was surprised that they actually have a good bit of flavor on their own. Those are a whole different Order of jellies though.
I did end up eating a few of these, they tasted like water but the texture was surprisingly pleasant.
Cool! I just read their wiki page and it says
A snowbank fungus, it is most common at higher elevations after snowmelt in the spring.
Snowbank fungus is a new term for me. Not sure yet what makes a fungus thrive through snow. Maybe they have anti-freeze proteins?
Does your area get a lot of snow?
They don’t grow in snow while temperatures are still freezing or anything, they grow using the moisture from melting snow once the weather starts to warm up. They just pop up so quickly that you’ll often find them poking out of snowbanks which haven’t fully melted.
I see. So it is not necessarily that their mycelium are better at surviving the freezing temperatures, but rather that either they fruit quicker once conditions are acceptable or that their fruiting bodies are more cold tolerant. Thanks, it’s interesting.
We typically get a lot of snow, sometimes 9ft in a single winter or more but the last few years have been pitiful. This was at a slightly higher elevation (I am at about 500 metres). I often see people in washington and oregon find this mushroom throughout the winter, I thought it would be later for my area but not the beginning of June.
9ft of snow?! I only experienced such deep snow in an urban setting while living in Connecticut for a year. I spent a few years in Oregon but the snow in the area never got so deep while I was there. When I was in the US I was not yet able to identify many fungi as I was mainly obsessed with animals (especially salamanders) back then, so unfortunately I did not really appreciate the diversity of fungi there. Although once in Oregon I did attempt to dye some socks using a wolf lichen (Letharia vulpina) and a pressure cooker. That did not end well.
Am I the only one who finds these things magical? I love mycology and no one can convince me it’s not somehow related to the fae. (J/k just in case anyone who hates woo woo in their science sees this, but it’s fun to imagine that’s what medieval people probably thought).
Definitely magical and exciting to come across all sorts of fungi, take them home and learn about them. I often take friends and family out to find edible mushrooms and I end up picking the least amount of the edibles in the group because I like to fill my basket with mushrooms I have never seen.
