Notes: Ok, this might be the last one id’ed for the Dec 2007 Pt. Reyes mycoblitz (by me at least…). This in is clearly a Galerina. But in terms of Smith and Singer, it is an unknown species.

I took this one off the id table in the red barn there, so I don’t know where they came from or the habitat. Although with the number of bent stipes, they grew on the top and edge of something, so probably on the side of a fallen dead log. Mostly they are brown and Galerina like.

The first micro-shot is of a gill edge at 400x in Meltzer’s. Here the cheilocystidia are finger like, and sub-acute blunt ends. The spores are strongly dextrinoid. Also pleurocyst. were observed.

The second micro-shot is of the cap surface at 400x in Meltzer’s. This one is kinda interesting, there isn’t any pileocyst. obs. here. The hyphae here don’t appear to be in a gelatin matrix, but they might be on top of a gelatin matrix. But the intersting thing here, is that the surface hyphae are not radially aligned. The hyphae are in a single sruface layer, but in this layer they are interwoven. This is a feature I haven’t seen in other Galerinas where surface hyphae tend to be mostly radially aligned, with little random wander.

The third micro-shot is of spores from the stipe apex in KOH at 1000×. Here the spores are kinda different than others in Galerina in that they are not pointed, but oblong. Also the exosporal covering is very loose in these, and pulled away from the spore in a kinda loose wrinkled bag the spore sits within. The monograph has a section of “calyptrate” spored species, where the exosporal covering pulls away, but not like this, there they describe it pulling away from the plage area, and connected tight to the spore at the apex. Also the calyptrate section is Galerinas that look like Cortinarius, and these don’t look like that.

So, I’ve gone through the Smith and Singer monograph, and I believe these aren’t in there (but not sure, I’ll be more confident as I look at more samples). Perhaps something like these is described in another source, but other than a section in Fungi of Switzerland, and some work done by a guy at Univ. of Oslo, there isn’t much else out there on Galerina.