Creating Spore Prints for Species Identification (2024)

FAQs

How to make a spore print for identification? ›

Put a drop of water on the top of the cap to help release the spores. Cover the cap with a paper cup or glass and leave for 2-24 hours, depending on the humidity and the freshness of the mushroom. The spores will fall on the paper, foil or glass, making a spore print pattern.

The spore print is the powdery deposit obtained by allowing spores of a fungal fruit body to fall onto a surface underneath. It is an important diagnostic character in most handbooks for identifying mushrooms. It shows the colour of the mushroom spores if viewed en masse.

Mushroom spore colour is often an essential step in species identification, and creating a "spore print" from a specimen is one way of determining the colour. Spores may be dark or light in colour, and so it's often useful to make a spore print on both black and white surfaces.

Take the stems off the mushrooms using your hands or scissors. Place the mushrooms with the gills or pores facing down onto the paper. Then place the container over the mushroom to create an airtight seal. Leave the mushrooms covered anywhere from a couple hours to overnight based on how fresh the mushrooms are.

White and black paper are commonly used for this purpose – you would make sure half of the mushroom sites over the white paper and the other half sits over the black paper. White paper works well for mushrooms with non-white spore prints, while black paper is ideal for capturing white or light-colored spores.

Spore Prints

Collectors can discover the spores' color by making a spore print. Cut the stem off the cap and place the cap gill side down on a piece of white paper. If the gills are light-colored, placing a wedge of dark paper under part of the cap will show the print of the light-colored spores.

Maintaining the ideal humidity is perhaps the trickiest part of making spore prints. Dry mushrooms won't give a good spore print, but wet ones can make a sloppy mess. If you put a small mushroom on a piece of paper and cover it with a large bowl you may end up with a shrivelled cap and no spore print.

If working with a reusable inoculation loop, heat the inoculation loop red hot in the flame of an alcohol lamp and let it cool down in your hand. Do not touch the spore print, inoculation loop or agar medium. Now rub the spore print until the whole loop has gathered some spores.

Characters differ depending of species group, but most wild harvested commercial mushrooms can be distinguished from look-alike species by macro-features of their body form, cap, spore-bearing surface, stipe, veils and odor. Important features include shape, size, color, topology, ornamentation and texture.

The spore prints are permanent. The illustra- tion shows a spore print from Gymnopilus junonius made in 1988 which still retains its colour. The spores can be sampled but this entails a degree of destruction. spores are known to be hard to germinate, only the lightest of spore prints will be required.

Can you grow from a spore print? ›

Cultivating spores

Once you have a spore print (by following the instructions above) you can then use it to cultivate and grow your mushrooms. This can be done by creating a spore syringe, where the spores are re-hydrated using sterile water and then used to inoculate the growing medium.

Spores may be collected from a spore print, which is a powdery imprint left on a surface by the spores of a mushroom. Spore prints are an important field mark for identifying mushrooms, as their colors can help distinguish between species. A mushroom releasing spores.

The colour of the spores, when seen en masse, is one of the best ways of determining which mycological family the specimen belongs to - for example the Amanitaeae (which have whitish spores), Cortinariaceae (which have rust-brown spores), Entolomataceae (which have pinkish spores) etc.

Cover the mushroom with a bowl (to stop it drying out and to reduce air currents that might spoil your print by blowing the tiny spores around). 3. Leave everything where it is for at least 2 hours or longer (overnight).

Lay the cap of the mushroom with the gills upside down onto a piece of paper. For the majority of specimens, a normal sheet of white paper works fine. However, some mushrooms have white spores- so if you are taking prints for the purposes of identification, you might want to consider also getting some black paper.

Then, to make a spore syringe, scrape the spore print into a glass with sterilized water and pull the solution into a syringe. After you have created a spore print, you can save it for later use, make a spore syringe, apply it to an agar solution or create a liquid culture.

The simplest way to figure out a mushroom's spore color is to look at the gills or pores. This is where the spores grow, so as more and more of them are produced, they change the gills (or pores) to their color. The photo above shows the color progression of the gills as a dark-spored mushroom matures.

To preserve your spore print, spray them lightly with an artist spray or hair spray.