Chrome-footed Bolete

The Chrome-footed Bolete is one of the easiest boletes to name on sight because it wears three unmistakable colours at once: a rose-pink cap, a white stipe flecked with pink to reddish scabers, and a base soaked in vivid chrome-yellow. The yellow foot alone, exposed with a gentle dig, settles the identification.

The species has moved between genera repeatedly, having been placed in Leccinum for its scabers, in Tylopilus for its pinkish spore print, and finally in its own genus Harrya, erected once DNA work showed it was not close to either. That taxonomic history is a good illustration of how misleading single field characters can be at genus level.

It is a familiar summer mushroom of eastern North American mixed woods, frequently fruiting in numbers along mossy trail edges where hemlock and birch meet oak.

Cap

The cap is 4-14 cm across, convex then broadly convex to flattened, with a dry, finely velvety to smooth surface that can become slightly sticky in wet weather. Colour is a distinctive rose-pink to purplish-pink or salmon, fading with age and sun to pinkish-tan or dull buff. The margin is even and may overhang the pores slightly when young.

Pores

The pore surface is white to cream when fresh, slowly turning pale pinkish or pinkish-brown as the spores mature. Pores are small and round, and the tubes are depressed around the stipe. Bruising causes little or no colour change, or at most a faint brownish stain.

Stipe

The stipe is 5-14 cm long and 1-2.5 cm thick, usually tapering upward from a slightly thickened base. It is white to pinkish and ornamented over its length with fine pink, reddish or brownish scabers arranged in vertical lines rather than a raised net. The bottom 1-3 cm, including the basal mycelium, is a vivid chrome- to lemon-yellow that is often hidden in the soil.

Flesh & spore print

The flesh is white and unchanging in the cap, and yellow in the stipe base, matching the exterior. The spore print is pinkish-brown to vinaceous-brown.

This bolete grows on soil and in moss in mixed and deciduous forest, most often where eastern hemlock, birch, aspen or oak are present. It favours damp, mossy ground, stream banks, and shaded trail margins, and fruits singly, scattered, or in small troops.

The season runs from early summer through early autumn, with heaviest fruitings after prolonged summer rain. It is widespread in eastern North America from the Maritimes and Great Lakes south along the Appalachians, and closely related pink-capped, yellow-footed boletes are known from eastern Asia.

Harrya chromapes is an ectomycorrhizal partner of both conifers and hardwoods, notably hemlock, birch and oak. The fungus builds a hyphal sheath over the fine roots of its host and extends exploratory hyphae far out into the litter and mineral soil, absorbing nitrogen and phosphorus that it trades for host-derived carbon.

Its frequent occurrence in moss beds reflects the moist, acidic conditions its hosts favour. Fruitbodies are short-lived and are heavily colonised by fly larvae, so the reproductive tissue is recycled quickly into the forest floor while the perennial mycelium persists in the soil from year to year.

Leccinum species share the scabrous stipe but have brown, orange or white caps, lack the chrome-yellow base, and generally stain grey to blackish in the flesh. The Violet-gray Bolete (Tylopilus plumbeoviolaceus) also has white pores ageing pink and a pinkish-brown spore print, but its cap is deep violet-purple and its stipe is smooth to faintly netted, never scabrous or yellow-footed.

Tylopilus rubrobrunneus has a large purplish-brown cap and a smooth pale stipe with no scabers. Boletus species with pink tones in the cap can be separated at once by their olive-brown spore prints and their yellow, often blue-staining pore surfaces.