Showing posts with label parasite. Show all posts
Showing posts with label parasite. Show all posts

Monday, 25 May 2020

Living on Others

It's all interconnected, is Nature. And here is the perfect illustration; a parasite from the plant world, broomrape (Orobanche sp.). It might be Thistle Broomrape, Orobanche reticulata, but then it might be quite a number of similar but different broomrapes. The lack of any green makes them very obvious, in this year's wet and sunny Spring:
No greens for me, chum


The wet spring has also meant a bloom in funghi, and this, I think, is Tremella mesenterica, growing on a felled oak in the woodlands. In a few years, the funghi will have liquidised the tree, enriching the humus and helping recycle the nutrients back to the new trees already growing around it.



 
We are alive thanks to these cycles and recycles...ad infinitum.

Sunday, 19 January 2020

Rotten beauty

It's been an autumn and winter full of fungi. Here are a couple:

A jewelled field mushroom

This might be a Pleurotacia, but then it might be a lot of other species too. It is a parasite on the stump of a dead pine tree:

Gilded gills