Is this musroom safe?

1941 Views 10 Replies 4 Participants Last post by Guest, Jan 19, 2005

Discussion Starter · Jan 15, 2005

Are the musrooms that you find growing on the sides of trees and stumps in Ohio safe for frogs. I can't really even find a picture to identify the species let alone find out if it's safe or not.
It looks something like this

I was thinking about siliconing it to a cork background, whether it would last long or not makes no difference since they're everywhere in my backyard.

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bbrock

· #2 · Jan 15, 2005

They are safe but will shrivel up if you remove them and silicone them to the background. What you are seeing are actually just the fruiting bodies of a much larger organism living inside that log. So taking the visible fungi is a bit like picking apples. If you place a piece of that log in your viv, there is a good chance that more of those shelf fungi will grow from it for awhile.

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Discussion Starter · #3 · Jan 15, 2005

Ok, thanks, maybe I'll try to spread the spores on my background then, in certain spots.

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Cody

· #4 · Jan 15, 2005

I would put it in a small viv, like a tupperware, that is similar to where your going to have it and watch what happens. Fungus is extremely competetive. I had one that I cultivated about 4 months before, I noticed no deterioriation untill I put it into my viv, within a day it was a mess, mold and other fungus took it over.

I would think that somehow culturing mycelium, either through harvesting a decaying log or by other means would be alot more effective and safe then what I tried. It was a mess

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bbrock

· #5 · Jan 15, 2005

amazinglyricist said:
Ok, thanks, maybe I'll try to spread the spores on my background then, in certain spots.

You can try it but don't be surprised if you don't get any results. Fungi can be pretty picky about the substrate they live on. For example, some fungi seem to only do well in decaying cottonwood or closely related trees. On the flip side, for any cellulose substrate, there is a fungus that will grow on it. In my experience, the best shelf fungi in vivs have grown from pieces of wood that I harvested. When you do that, you are getting spores or hyphae that are already matched up with the substrate they like to grow on. Other fungi tend to appear more by luck. Be warned though that fungi can grow aggressively on fresh substrate but settle down as the carbon substrate becomes depleted. After that there will be a period of sporadic appearance of fruiting bodies and if nothing is changed in the viv, the appearance of fungi will become increasingly rare.

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geckguy

· #6 · Jan 16, 2005

It is possible to culture mushrooms on a brown rice and vermiculite formula in 1/2 pint mason jars or in quart jars on sterilized finch seed. It is rather easy, but strict sanitary precautions must be taken. It is alot of trouble just to get some mushrooms in a tank. Do a search on growing mushrooms, lots of people grow mushrooms to eat such as portobella and shitake mushrooms. However the mycellium needs sanitary conditions to establish itself, which can be hard in a viv. But once establsihed it is pretty good at fighting off other fungi.

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Discussion Starter · #7 · Jan 18, 2005

mushrooms

i dunno about that species, it looks pretty soft but if you find some that look like that with a hard bark like "shell" on the top you can cut them off the tree and put them in a viv but you need to dry them out first, how to do this is to bake some sand in the oven and then put a thin layer on the bottom of a tray, put the mushroom on top of this and then pour on the rest of the hot sand. leave it like this for 24 hours and then take the mushroom out and brush the sand off with a paintbrush. you can now sillicon it to the back panels or wherever you want, this will only really work with hard wood like species because soft ones become to brittle and fragile after they've been dried out. do a google image search for "genoderma applanatum" to see what to look for.

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Discussion Starter · #8 · Jan 18, 2005

These are pretty hard musrooms, I could barely break them off of the logs and trees they were growing on, I would need a knife to get the bigger ones off of the logs, I couldn't even come close to breaking them off.

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Discussion Starter · #9 · Jan 19, 2005

i bought some dried ones just like the ones piictured. i cant remember where i got the from, but they came in three sizes. i got one of each soze, but never used any. i either got the from t&c, blackjungle, or vivarium concepts.

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jhupp

· #10 · Jan 19, 2005

Polypore fungi such as these are not a group of fungi I would recomended trying to establish in you tank. They tend to be delignifiers, and while most are supstrate specific (within a certain range) as Brent pointed out, if they were to get established they could ravage your wood scape in a very short time. If you are looking for an ID on them, try David Arora's book.

Jay

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Discussion Starter · #11 · Jan 19, 2005

What about if I were to coat them with a thin layer of something like epoxy resin? And them mount them to the back wall then?

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