By Mary Reid Barrow
Photos by Mary Seemueller
“A row of about eight bright orange-red alien spikes in the lawn” caught Mary Seemueller’s attention recently.
“My SEEK app identified them as a devil’s stinkhorn,” Mary wrote. “The flies were very attracted to them!”
I remember, “Linkhorn, stinkhorn,” as a teasing chant that children from other elementary schools would say to my kids at Linkhorn Park Elementary School. But the word is not just a childhood taunt but also is the common name of a mushroom.
The stinkhorn does indeed live up to its name. It doesn’t have the musty smell of a mushroom but the rancid odor of something rotting. That is why flies not only love stinkhorns but also why they are the stinkhorn’s main pollinator.
You don’t see these mushrooms very often, but once you do, you will never forget them.
A stinkhorn doesn’t look like a mushroom. It is reminiscent of something we are not prone to discussing in LRNow posts. Five or more inches tall, the mushroom is red, to pink, to orange, sometimes with a chocolate “icing.”
As Mary explains it, “I had to chuckle reading about Darwin’s daughter collecting these mushrooms and burning them in secrecy behind locked doors, because of their phallic appearance, to protect the morals of young maidens!”
Mary discovered the new arrivals out in the field where her miniature horse grazes. Stinkhorns are most often found for the first time after they arrive in a new batch of mulch or wood chips, but Mary said she hasn’t purchased any mulch, that they only use their own pine needles when needed. Each mushroom would have popped up out of a small “puffball” structure. Mary found the stinkhorns growing in a grassy area close to where the horse leaves its droppings.
“Not sure if that is a clue?” she added. “Maybe flies left spores they picked up on their travels? The flies seemed to really be attracted to that chocolate-like coating.”
“The Latin name, Mutinus elegans, “makes me smile and I prefer that to devil’s stinkhorn,” she said.
Look up “mutinus” and you’ll see how conflicted those folks were when they named this mushroom!
