Tuesday morning early my neighbour, Andre called me to photograph this mysterious pale pink mushroom. I had never seen anything like it before so, being as curious as I am, I spent quite a bit of time googling mushroom images with no luck whatsoever. Needless to say I was VERY frustrated. In my wanderings on the world wide web I stumbled upon an amazing website about mushrooms and fungi, called "First Nature". Then I hit the jackpot: the website actually has a facility where you can e-mail photos of mushrooms you are unable to identify and they will try and assist. I was very sceptical at first but nonetheless sent my photographs off into cyberspace. Not really expecting a reaction I nearly fainted when I got the following reply from Pat O'Reilly in Wales of all places!
What a superb find! I am confident that your beautiful (but probably smelly) fungus belongs to the genus Clathrus - it's a kind of 'stinkhorn', therefore. We have a similar species here in the UK - Clathrus ruber - see our page at: http://www.first-nature.com/fungi/clathrus-ruber.php
There is a new Clathrus species, recently
discovered in South Africa and named Clathrus
transvaalensis, which I understand is very pale rather than bright
red, but I have never seen one and can find little information about it. If I
could show one of your pictures on our Clathrus
ruber page there is always a chance that someone might be able to
tell us more about it and confirm an identification. Please let me know if you
would like me to do this (with an acknowledgement of you as the photographer,
of course).
I immediately jumped at the opportunity and agreed. Pat very graciously updated their web page in no time and I am now waiting with bated breath for some response to the call for help in identifying this pink mystery. Here is Pat's e-mail. Go check out the pink mystery's orange cousin - scary!!
I have now updated our Clathrus ruber page - http://www.first-nature.com/fungi/clathrus-ruber.php -
with your picture of the pale specimen plus a call for information. We get
about 3/4 million site visits per year, so let's hope that someone can tell us
a little more about the cage fungi that occur in South Africa...
