Devil's Fingers Identification Guide

The moment of recognition

Nobody forgets the first one. Typically you are on a woodland edge, a mulched garden bed, a shady lawn margin or a grassy path through conifer plantation, and lying in the litter is something that looks like a red sea creature that has been dropped there — four to eight bright scarlet arms splayed outward from a common base, their upper surfaces blotched with something black and glistening. The smell reaches you at the same time, sharp and putrid, and there will usually be flies.

Before you go further, scan a metre around the find. You will nearly always see companions at other stages: intact white eggs half buried in the litter, eggs that have split and are showing a wedge of red, and specimens still in the phase where the arm tips are joined at the top in a closed arch. Having all the stages in front of you makes the identification far easier than working from a single collapsed specimen.

Step one: the egg

The fruitbody begins as a soft, off-white to pale greyish or pinkish egg, 2 to 4 cm across, sitting partly buried with one or more white cords running from its base into the substrate. It is soft to the touch, and slightly springy rather than firm.

Cut an egg in half from top to bottom. There should be a thin outer skin, then a thick, clear, jelly layer, then the compressed folded arms of the young fruitbody arranged around a hollow centre, with the dark spore slime already laid down on their inner faces. The presence of that gelatinous layer and folded arms, rather than a miniature capped mushroom, places you firmly in the stinkhorn group.

Step two: emergence, and the arch stage

As the egg splits, a short, pale, spongy pseudostem pushes up, carrying the arms with it. For a brief period — often only a few hours — the arms remain fused at their tips, producing a closed, cage-like dome or arch on a short white column. Photograph this stage if you catch it, because it is the phase most often mistaken for a different genus.

The arms then separate at the top and swing outward and downward, curving back like tentacles, and the whole structure settles into the sprawling star that gives the species its common name.

Step three: the arms in detail

Count them. There are usually four to eight, most often five to seven, and they radiate from a common short base. Each arm is 5 to 10 cm long, tapering from a broad base to a narrow tip, and the whole open fruitbody spans anywhere from 10 to 20 cm.

Colour is a strong scarlet to pinkish-red, occasionally more orange in weathered specimens, and the colour is in the tissue, not painted on the surface. The texture is spongy and chambered, and if you look closely at the outer face you can see the honeycomb structure of the wall. Arms are hollow or at least deeply chambered in section and are fragile — they tear easily and collapse within a day or two.

Look at the upper (inner) surface of each arm. It is not smooth: it is strongly wrinkled, ridged or pitted into an irregular network of shallow chambers, and it is on this network that the spore slime sits.

Step four: the spore-bearing surface

There are no gills, pores or teeth. The fertile material is the gleba: a dark olive-brown to blackish, glistening, sticky layer confined to the wrinkled inner faces of the arms, usually heaviest toward the base and middle of each arm and thinning toward the tip. Fresh specimens are almost entirely blackened on the inner surfaces; after flies have worked on them for a day the black is patchy and you can see the red network showing through.

That combination — dark slime on the inner face of free, separated red arms — is the single most useful character of the species.

Step five: base, volva and cords

Dig gently at the base of an open specimen. You will find the collapsed remains of the egg forming a soft whitish to greyish sac, or volva, wrapped around the short pale pseudostem. There is no true stalk in the sense of a tall column: the arms sit almost directly on the volva, raised at most a couple of centimetres.

From the base of the volva, white cords run away into the litter. Trace one and it usually leads into woodchips, rotting leaf litter, buried twigs or the fibrous debris around old stumps.

Step six: section, flesh and spores

Cut an arm across. The wall is spongy, chambered and thin, coloured red through its thickness rather than superficially, and the interior of the arm is hollow. There is no latex and no true bruising reaction: the tissue is so soft that handling simply tears and darkens it, and whole fruitbodies slump to a dull brown within a couple of days.

A spore print is neither possible nor needed. Spores are carried in the slime and moved by insects rather than shed into the air. For microscopic confirmation, wipe a trace of gleba onto a slide: the spores are very small, smooth, and narrowly elliptical to rod-shaped, roughly 5 to 7 micrometres long by 2 to 3 wide.

Habitat, distribution and season

This is a decayer of plant debris rather than a partner of tree roots, and it strongly favours disturbed, mulch-rich or heavily littered ground: garden beds, woodchip paths, hedge bottoms, grassy woodland rides, plantation edges and old sawdust heaps. Native to Australia, Tasmania and New Zealand, it has been carried around the world with plant material and is now widely established in Europe and increasingly recorded in North America, so the population you meet may well be a recent arrival in an amenity planting.

Fruiting runs from summer through autumn, sometimes later in mild areas, and it is closely tied to rain: expect a flush a few days after a soaking, and expect eggs to sit dormant through dry weeks and then open almost simultaneously.

Separating it from its relatives on structure alone

Cage or lattice stinkhorn. The classic confusion, and it is settled by whether the arms are joined. In the lattice species the arms are fused into a closed, hollow, roughly spherical network of interconnected bars with holes between them, and the gleba is carried on the inside of that cage. In our species the arms are free for almost their whole length, joined only at the very base once open, and the gleba is exposed on their upper faces. If you find one in the brief arch stage, look at the tips: an arch that is about to break apart is different from a permanently fused lattice, and the arms of the arch are broad, tapering and few in number rather than forming a many-holed cage.

Columned stinkhorn. Here two to five thick columns rise from the volva and remain joined at the top, forming an arch that never separates, with the gleba concentrated on the inner faces near the junction. Our species separates completely and spreads flat.

Starfish fungus. Superficially very similar in outline, but structurally distinct: it has a definite central disc, usually with a small depression or opening in the middle, and the gleba forms a dark ring around that centre rather than running out along the arms. Its arms are typically forked into paired tips, and they sit on a short but distinct whitish stalk.

Squid stinkhorn. Three or four orange to reddish arms that stay joined at their tips and rise from a short white stalk, giving a spindle or claw shape rather than a spreading star.

Single-spike stinkhorns. One tapering column with slime on the upper part is a different genus entirely; the character to check is simply how many arms leave the volva.

Eggs. A stinkhorn egg with jelly and folded red arms cannot be confused with an Amanita egg once cut, because the latter is firm throughout and contains a folded miniature capped mushroom with visible gills.

Field summary

Four to eight free scarlet arms spreading from a soft whitish sac; dark olive-black slime on the wrinkled inner faces; spongy, chambered, hollow arms; no true stalk; white cords into mulch or litter; strong putrid odour and attendant flies; summer to autumn after rain.