Fungi activity - spore printing (2024)

FAQs

How to do a fungi spore print? ›

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.

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.

Printer paper. Black or white will usually work some mushrooms have very light or dark spores so you may want to try on both. A glass bowl or cup large enough to cover the mushroom.

A spore print makes spores on fungi appear, it is useful for identification and study. Sometimes mushrooms can look exactly identical from the outside, but after doing a spore print, they can actually be a completely different species!

Remove the stem of the specimen and place the cap of the mushroom on the spore print card with the gills (or pores) facing downward. Cover it or leave it undisturbed overnight and compare the colour of the resulting print with descriptions in your field guide.

To prevent smudging, 'fix' your spore print with hair spray. Did it work? If there is no pattern the mushroom might be too old or too dry, or you may need to leave it for longer (sometimes fungi take up to a day to release their spores).

Spore prints are usually white to cream, black, or shades of red, purple, or brown. The poisonous false parasol (Chlorophyllum molybdites) has a green spore deposit.

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.

Such a collection of Russula spore prints is more precise than any printed colour chart and can be very useful as the prints of many species are of subtly different shades. The colours will fade a little in a few years but can easily be replaced with new samples.

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

Can you frame a spore print? ›

5. Lift the jar and remove the mushroom to reveal your mushroom spore print! Allow it to air dry for two hours before storing it in a safe dry place. You can also fram the spore prints in a frame as art.

Your spore print will look like the spokes of a wheel. For an irregular shaped mushroom like a morel, you can wrap it in a cone and get your print that way. You can preserve these by using contact paper or laminating your print.

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.

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.

Remove the stem from a fresh mushroom, then put the cap gill side down onto a piece of paper or sterilized tin foil. Put a drop of water on the cap, then cover it with a bowl and let it sit for 24 hours. Remove the bowl and cap to reveal your spores.