As many of you know, yesterday I was on a field trip for the class I’m taking in mushroom identification, Lords of the Dark Earth. It was quite a day. One of the things I’ve been learning is that mushrooms exist in really interesting relationships with trees and even other mushrooms.

I came across some white blob-like items in the forest and asked our teacher about them.

He said they were called Aborted Entolomas. That’s a mouthful, but they have a common name as well, and that is Hunters Hearts. These are fungi that exist in relationship with another kind of mushroom called Honey mushrooms, or Armillaria. There are various species. It used to be thought that the Honey mushroom attacked the Entoloma, causing it to “abort”, or basically come out as a white blobby thing. This was a reasonable assumption because the honey mushroom is a nasty bit of goods. In fact it is a tree killer.

The picture here shows a cluster of young honey mushrooms. Usually you find them on dead trees. If the trees aren’t dead, they will be. Honey mushrooms kill trees by creating what is known to arbourists as shoe-string root rot, which you can see in the last picture on this post.

It turns out that the scientists were right in that there is a parasitic relationship between the Entolomas and the Armillarias, but apparently, it’s the Entolomas that are attacking the Armillarias. In other words, the name is wrong. The Aborted Entoloma probably should be the Aborted Armillaria. It gets even more confusing. The white blobby items are known as Aborted Entolomas, but if the same fruiting body is not aborted, it is still called an Aborted Entoloma, but in the gilled rather than aborted form. I know what you’re thinking. Can I eat any of these things? Well, honey mushrooms are known as a choice edible, although they do cause stomach upset for some

people. My brother recently had some first-hand experience with that. The aborted form of the Aborted Entoloma – OK, from now on I’ll just call them Hunters’ Hearts – are a choice edible. They’re good fried up with a little oil until they brown. I know this because I cooked some up last night. They have a strong flavour but they’re very tasty indeed. When you fry them up, they shrink by about half. Apparently, the non-aborted form are good to eat too, but here’s the rub. There are plenty of Entolomas that are poisonous and they’re not so easy to tell apart. Some mushroom hounds will pick and eat the ones that occur with the aborted form. I follow that logic, but who’s to say that the non-poisonous ones occur in isolation from their poisonous relatives? I think that’s where I draw a line in the sand. You can’t mistake the aborted form, so I’ll pick those and eat them, but I’ll leave the gilled mushrooms alone.