06/10/2026
🍄 💛 Yellow Brain / Witch’s Butter / Weirdo 🍄💛
Tremella mesenterica - if ya feeling fancy.
An absolute weirdo inside and out this one 🤨 For starters, just look at it... Weird! Amazing colour, especially on a dull day, but very odd looking. Feels weird too!
But that's not all that makes this mushroom unusual. It has a very strange life cycle quite unlike other fungi species.
It begins as microscopic airborne spores flying through the air until they find a suitable host. Each spore contains one set of genetic material. Once a suitable host is acquired they germinate into 'yeast-like' cells that multiply. This can take a really long time.
Eventually two compatible yeasts will meet, fall in love and fuse together to form 'dikaryotic hyphae' - cells with two nuclei. Think of it a bit like a double yolker 🥚
But it doesn't end there! This mushroom needs ANOTHER mushroom to complete its life cycle. There's a few it likes, all of them from the same family but without it the mushroom just doesn't come.
When the fruiting body finally does appear it can dehydrate and rehydrate many times without damage. Inside the fruiting body is where the the cell with two yolks finally fuses together to create one new set of genetic material.
And off it goes again!
Fascinating stuff! Such a complicated life cycle and such a strange looking thing.
But can we eat it Lucy?!? 🤔
Welllll ... No not really. There are reports of folks consuming but I'm not convinced on this one. In general most foragers leave it be other than to give it a good flick as you pass, very satisfying. Just because something won't poison you doesn't mean you have to just eat it. It doesn't have much nutritional value and I can't imagine taste or texture is anything to enjoy either.
Best left to admire both for it's beauty and ridiculous complexity. Nature is WEIRD and I love it 🥰
