This makes for a fun homeschool science lesson. If you are interested in making a spore print but have no interest in harvest wild mushrooms, you can do this experiment using mushrooms right from the grocery store. If you do come upon a mushroom that is a little dry, you can attempt to rehydrate it by adding a few spritzes of water. The mushrooms you are choosing should be fresh. Other mushrooms, like a shelf or bracket fungus, can be placed straight onto the paper. You only need the cap to make a spore print. When using mushrooms with a clear cap and stem, remove the stem first. If your print is a match, you now have a positive ID! Tips For Choosing the Right Mushrooms While a single mushroom spore cant be seen by the naked eye, a pile of many spores canand the color of a mushrooms spores, seen en masse, is a crucial identification feature. If you are using a field guide to assist you, you can simply read in the description of the mushroom how the spore print should appear. Spore prints of Stropharia aeruginosa, Cortinarius croceus, and Pluteus americanus. This printable chart shows you how to indentify a variety of species based on spore print. How to Identify Mushrooms Based on Spore Prints In the morning, you should be able to remove the mushroom from the paper and see a clear print of the spores that have fallen from the mushroom. I suggest covering the mushroom with a glass bowl or something to prevent it from being disturbed. Set the mushroom aside for a few hours or even overnight. Some spores are so light in colour that they may not be well visible on just a white sheet alone. I like to overlap the mushroom onto the white and black paper. When you have a fair sampling of mushrooms, or even just one, place the mushroom on the black or white construction paper. Just make sure to wash your hands and never ingest anything you can’t identify. To make spore prints, you will first need to go out and harvest mushrooms! If you are new to mushroom hunting and feeling a little anxious, don’t worry. You can also collect the spores from a spore print to cultivate your own mushrooms at home. Your field guide will tell you what your mushroom’s spore print should look like. This will help you become more familiar with the make up and structure of the mushrooms you are wishing to harvest. If you are just learning to forage, I strongly recommend making a spore print of all the mushrooms that you find. Spore prints vary from mushroom to mushroom in colour, scent and even shape. Creating spore prints can help you distinguish between different species. So many types of mushrooms can look similar to each other. It is one of the best ways to determine the ID of a mushroom. What is a spore print?Ī spore print is a method of collecting the spores from a mushroom. There are many resources out there to teach you how to be a more educated forager but really, it all comes down to practice.īefore harvesting massive amounts of wild mushrooms, I spent years becoming more and more comfortable with picking, dissecting, smelling and making spore prints of mushrooms around the woods. How are you to know which is harmful and which is safe? Learning to mushroom hunt can be a little daunting at first. Interested in science, technology, engineering and mathematics? Then, please support a community-supported project aiming to increase the quality and the visibility of well-written, high-quality, STEM-related content.Chicken of the Woods or Laetiporus species. Proud member and supporter of the #minnowsupportproject - brought to you by and the logo below to learn more Let me know in the comments if you have any questions and happy spore printing!! So, if you’re interested in learning how to identify mushrooms, get out there, collect some specimens and make some spore prints! Here’s a spore print I made of a mushroom with dark purple spores on a piece of white paper:įall is upon us and mushrooms are already popping all over. Also, if you know the color of the spores beforehand, you can use a piece of paper of the opposite color (white for dark-colored spores, black for light-colored spores). If you’re planning on looking at the spores under the microscope, you can use a glass slide instead of the B&W paper. I’ve made a comic strip showing the process step by step. The method I’m explaining here is very simple and it can be used for both, mushrooms with gills and with pores. You can also collect the spores to grow that mushroom and even to make art!! You can use a spore print to check the color of the spores, which is a key feature when identifying a mushroom. Making a spore print is a cheap and low tech method to collect spores from a mushroom. Mushroom spores are invisible to the naked eye, but there’s a cool trick you can do to visualize them.
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