Ear-pick Fungus Identification Guide

The First Impression and the Setting

This is a fungus you find by deciding to look for it. The setting is pine woodland: plantation Scots pine or its relatives, native pinewood, dune pines, a park with mature conifers, or the needle-carpeted verge of a forest track. Spruce stands also produce it.

What you are scanning for is small and dark. A single fruitbody stands 2 to 5 cm high and carries a cap barely larger than a fingernail, dark brown to nearly black, held out sideways on a thin bristly stalk. Against brown needle litter it reads as a shred of bark, a fallen leaf fragment, or a dead insect. Kneel down, look across the litter at a low angle rather than straight down, and the silhouettes appear: a wire with a small dark spoon on the end.

Once your eye adjusts, they are often abundant, several stalks from a single spot and dozens across a good patch of litter.

Start With the Cone

The substrate is the strongest single character in the whole identification, and it is usually hidden. This species fruits from fallen conifer cones, chiefly pine and less often spruce, and those cones are typically buried under a season or two of needles and moss, sometimes completely out of sight.

So the first move after spotting a fruitbody is to trace it downwards. Slide your fingers into the litter beside the stalk and lift gently, keeping the stalk intact. What comes up should be an old, weathered, often blackened cone with the stalk base gripping one of its scales. If the stalk instead ends in wood, in soil, or on a twig, you are looking at something else and should start again.

Collect the whole assembly, cone included. It preserves the diagnostic connection and makes the specimen far easier to interpret later.

Reading the Cap

The cap is 0.5 to 2 cm across, occasionally 3, and kidney-shaped or semicircular in outline, attached to the stalk along one edge rather than at the centre. Young caps are convex with an incurved margin; older ones flatten and the margin can become slightly wavy or lobed.

The surface is the giveaway. It is densely clothed in short stiff hairs, giving a matt, felty or velvety feel and a texture that reads clearly under a hand lens as a pelt rather than a skin. Colour is dark brown, purplish-brown or greyish-brown when young, deepening towards blackish with age, and faint concentric zones are sometimes visible.

Texture is tough and leathery rather than fleshy. A fresh cap bends and springs back; a dried one becomes hard and brittle but revives after rain, which is why fruitbodies persist for many months and can be found in almost any month of the year.

The Spore-Bearing Surface

Turn the cap over. Instead of gills or pores, the underside is covered with crowded, downward-pointing spines or teeth, each 1 to 3 mm long, tapering to a fine point, and packed close enough that the surface looks like a miniature brush.

Colour progression is worth recording: pale greyish, pinkish-grey or purplish-grey in young specimens, then greyish-brown, then a dark brown that eventually matches the cap. Hold the cap up to the sky and the teeth catch the light individually. Nothing about this surface is smooth, wrinkled, poroid or gilled, and that combination of teeth plus a side-mounted stalk plus a cone is effectively unique.

The Stipe and Base

The stalk is 1 to 6 cm long and only 1 to 2 mm thick, cylindrical, wiry, and tough enough to bend without snapping. It attaches at the cap margin, occasionally slightly inside it, so the whole fruitbody has the profile of an old-fashioned ear scoop, which is exactly where the common name comes from.

It is the same dark brown as the cap and just as densely hairy, sometimes shaggier towards the base. Where it meets the cone it usually widens a little and is surrounded by a small tuft of coarse dark hairs and a patch of brown mycelium binding needles to the cone scale.

Flesh and Colour Change

Split a cap lengthwise with a razor or fine blade and look at the section with a lens. The flesh is very thin and clearly two-layered: a dark, dense, hairy upper zone forming a cortex, and a paler, tough, fibrous lower zone from which the teeth arise.

The tissue is dry and leathery. There is no latex, no juice, and no colour change on cutting or bruising - it is simply too tough and too dry to bruise, and that unresponsiveness is itself a recorded character.

Taking a Spore Print

A print is achievable with a little patience. Cut the stalk short, then rest or pin the cap so the teeth face downwards a few millimetres above a piece of dark paper, and enclose the whole arrangement in a covered container overnight. Small fruitbodies release few spores, so a longer wait and a still atmosphere both help.

The deposit is white and will only show properly against a dark background. Under the microscope the spores are small, roughly 4.5 to 5.5 by 4 to 5 micrometres, broadly ellipsoid to nearly round, and finely spiny. Most usefully, they are amyloid: a drop of Melzer's reagent turns them blue-grey. Amyloid, spiny, near-spherical spores separate this family cleanly from most other toothed fungi, which have smooth non-amyloid spores.

Substrate and Season

The fungus is a decomposer of conifer cones and the litter immediately around them. It has no root partnership, so the tree matters only as the source of cones. Look on and under cones of pine above all, spruce sometimes, in plantations, native woods, dune systems, shelterbelts and parkland, including cones washed into ditches or half-buried in track edges.

Fruiting peaks from late summer through winter, but old fruitbodies persist and revive, so records exist for every month. A single cone often supports several stalks at once, and a productive cone may fruit again in later years.

Separating It From the Look-alikes

Genuine confusion is rare, because habitat, teeth and lateral stalk together are matched by nothing else. The comparisons worth making are these.

Strobilurus tenacellus and Baeospora myosura. Both fruit from buried pine or spruce cones at a similar size, so the setting and stature match. Both, however, have gills on the underside, a central stalk, and pale cream to greyish caps that are smooth rather than hairy. Turn the cap over and the question is settled instantly.

Hydnum species. They carry teeth, but they are fleshy, pale orange-buff to cream, several centimetres across, with a stout central stalk, and they grow from soil in association with tree roots rather than from cones.

Hericium species. Teeth again, but hanging from a cushion or a branched framework on dead wood, white to cream, with no cap and no stalk in the usual sense.

Phellodon and Hydnellum. Tough soil-dwelling toothed fungi with brown or zoned flesh. They are much larger, funnel- or top-shaped, with a thick central stalk, and they grow from mineral soil under trees.

Steccherinum, Mycoacia and other toothed crusts. These spread flat over dead wood as spiny sheets with no cap and no stalk at all.

Xylaria and small dark ascomycetes on cones. Similar dark colouring and similar habitat, but their fertile surface is a smooth or pimpled crust, never spines.

A Working Sequence

Spot the silhouette at a low angle. Lift the litter and find the cone. Check that the stalk joins the cap at its edge. Turn the cap over and confirm teeth. Note the hairy dark surfaces throughout. Print white on dark paper if you want the final confirmation.