Bloody Brittlegill

Russula sanguinea — also published as Russula sanguinaria — is among the most saturated red mushrooms of European pine woods. Unlike the shiny, watery red brittlegills of wet moss, its cap is dry, matt and firm, holding its deep blood or carmine colour without bleaching to pale patches.

The species is easily recognised by its coloured stipe. Where most red-capped brittlegills sit on a plain white stalk, this one usually has a stipe washed pink to rosy red over part or all of its length, sometimes strongly enough to match the cap. Combined with pale cream gills that run very slightly down the stipe, this makes for a distinctive silhouette.

It is a species of sandy and calcareous pine ground, and in coastal dune woodland it can appear in large troops. Within the genus it belongs to a group of firm-fleshed species with coloured stipes and cream spore prints.

Cap

5-10 cm across, convex then flattened and often shallowly depressed at the centre. The surface is dry and matt, sometimes minutely velvety, and only becomes slightly greasy in prolonged wet weather. Colour is a deep blood-red, carmine or rose-red, usually even across the cap though occasionally paler and more orange at the margin. The cuticle peels only a short way in from the edge, and the margin stays smooth without grooving.

Gills

Pale cream to a slightly deeper ochre-cream, crowded, narrow, and notably adnate to slightly decurrent — they run a short way down the top of the stipe. Forking near the stipe is frequent. They are brittle and may develop rusty spots where damaged.

Stipe

4-9 cm long and 1-2.5 cm thick, firm and often club-shaped, white but usually flushed rose, pink or red over much of its length. The colour is strongest along one side or towards the base in many collections. There is no ring and no volva.

Flesh & spore print

Flesh is white, firm and unchanging, or slowly yellowing in the stipe base. The spore print is pale cream. Spores are ellipsoid with warts partly joined by fine connecting lines.

The Bloody Brittlegill is mycorrhizal with pine, above all Scots pine and other two-needled pines, and occurs on sandy, gravelly and calcareous soils. It is typical of coastal dune pine woodland, chalk downland plantations, sandy heaths with scattered pine and managed conifer stands on light soils.

Fruiting runs from July to October. It is widespread through Europe and around the Mediterranean, and has spread with planted pine into other temperate regions. In dune systems it often fruits in large scattered troops along paths and open sandy clearings.

As with other brittlegills, this species is an ectomycorrhizal symbiont. The fungal mantle it forms around pine feeder roots increases the effective absorbing surface enormously, allowing the tree to draw water and mineral nutrients from dry, poor sand that unaided roots could not exploit. In return the fungus receives a steady supply of carbon compounds from the pine canopy.

Mycorrhizal networks of this kind are a key part of dune and heathland pine stability, binding loose sand with hyphae and buffering the trees against summer drought. The firm fruit bodies persist longer than those of thinner-fleshed brittlegills and are colonised by beetles and fly larvae over several days before decomposing into the litter.

Russula rosea (also known as R. lepida) has similarly firm flesh and a matt pink to red cap, but it grows with beech and oak rather than pine, and its cap is a chalkier, more washed pink. The Sickener (Russula emetica) has a shiny, easily peeling scarlet cap, a plain white stipe, more distant gills and a white spore print, and it prefers wet mossy conifer ground.

Russula velenovskyi is smaller with a brick-red cap that flattens with a low central bump and a stipe only faintly pink-flushed. Russula sardonia shares the pine habitat but has a dark purple cap, primrose-yellow gills and a violet stipe. The matt blood-red cap combined with a red-flushed stipe and slightly decurrent cream gills identifies R. sanguinea.