Bloodred Webcap

The Bloodred Webcap is one of the most vividly coloured fungi of northern conifer forest, a small mushroom saturated with deep wine-red pigment from cap to stipe base. It belongs to the group of webcaps once separated as the genus Dermocybe, now treated as a subgenus of Cortinarius, characterised by small dry-capped fruitbodies with brilliant red, orange or yellow pigments in cap, gills and flesh.

Those pigments are anthraquinones, chemically related to the colourants of lichens and of madder root, and they are stable enough that the species has a long history of use in dyeing wool, giving shades from rose to deep crimson depending on the mordant used. The pigment is also a practical field character, since it soaks the flesh and the veil fibres, not just the surface.

As with all webcaps, young fruitbodies carry a cobwebby cortina, here tinted red, and mature ones drop rusty brown spores that dull the gill colour with age.

Cap

Small, 2-5 cm across, conical to convex at first and flattening with a low blunt umbo. The surface is dry, matt to finely silky-fibrillose, coloured a deep blood-red to dark wine-red, sometimes browner at the centre with age but never slimy or shining.

Gills

Adnate, moderately crowded and fairly narrow, coloured the same intense blood-red as the cap when young. As spores mature the red is progressively veiled by rust, giving a dull reddish-brown at full maturity, though red usually persists at the gill edges.

Stipe

Slender and often slightly curved, 3-7 cm long and only 3-8 mm thick, equal or narrowing a little at the base. It is red like the rest of the fruitbody, overlaid with paler reddish silky fibrils, and the reddish cortina leaves a diffuse fibrillose zone dusted rust by falling spores. Reddish mycelial threads often bind moss and litter at the base.

Flesh & spore print

The flesh is thin and reddish throughout, not changing when cut, and gives a red stain to paper or cloth rubbed against it. The spore print is rusty brown, the spores small, ellipsoid and finely warted.

This webcap fruits in damp conifer woodland, chiefly under Norway spruce and pines, and occasionally with birch growing among conifers. It prefers acid, humus-rich, mossy ground and is typically found pushing up through feather moss, Sphagnum or a thin needle litter, often in scattered troops rather than singly.

The season runs from late summer into autumn, later in mild years. It is widespread and common through the boreal forests of Scandinavia and northern Europe, in mountain spruce forest further south, in Scottish and northern English conifer woods, and across the northern coniferous belt of North America.

Cortinarius sanguineus is ectomycorrhizal with conifers. Its hyphae form a sheath around the fine roots of spruce and pine and a Hartig net between the outer root cells, moving water, nitrogen and phosphorus into the tree while receiving carbohydrates in return. On acid, mossy, nutrient-poor forest soils this exchange underpins much of the tree's mineral supply.

The red anthraquinone pigments are produced in the mycelium as well as the fruitbody and may help deter grazing invertebrates and screen the fungus from light exposure at the soil surface. The mycelium is perennial and slow-spreading through the moss layer, so colonies often reappear in the same patch year after year once conditions turn wet and cool.

Cortinarius semisanguineus is the classic confusion: it has the same blood-red gills but an olive-brown to tawny cap and a yellowish stipe, so the red is confined to the underside. Cortinarius cinnamomeus has a cinnamon to olive-brown cap and saffron-yellow to golden gills rather than red ones.

Cortinarius malicorius shows deep orange gills and an olive cap with an orange veil zone low on the stipe. Cortinarius puniceus is a larger, more robust red species of broadleaf woodland, especially under oak and beech, rather than a small conifer-forest mushroom.