Small Stagshorn

Small Stagshorn (Calocera cornea) produces slender, upright, mostly unbranched yellow spikes that emerge in rows or scattered troops from dead wood. Individually they are inconspicuous, but a well-colonised log can carry hundreds of them, giving the surface a bristling yellow stubble.

Calocera belongs to the Dacrymycetes, a group whose members are recognised microscopically by tuning-fork basidia: each basidium forks into two prongs rather than bearing four separate sterigmata. This places them well away from the coral fungi they superficially resemble, and closer to the small orange jelly blobs of Dacrymyces.

The texture of Calocera cornea is the most surprising thing about it. Rather than the soft wobble of a Tremella, it feels tough, waxy and rubbery, more like a piece of gelatin left too long in the fridge, and the spikes are noticeably resilient when bent.

Fruiting body

Upright cylindrical to narrowly club-shaped or awl-shaped spikes 3–20 mm tall and only 1–3 mm thick, usually simple and unbranched, occasionally forked at the tip in older or crowded specimens. They arise singly, in rows following a bark crack, or in dense scattered troops.

Surface and texture

Smooth, sometimes slightly sticky when wet, with the whole outer surface fertile. Texture tough-gelatinous and elastic rather than soft and collapsing; the spikes resist crushing and spring back when bent. The base is not obviously rooting into the wood.

Colour

Egg-yellow to golden-yellow, sometimes with an orange cast, fading to pale ochre or dull orange as it dries. Drying material shrinks into hard, dark orange, horn-like slivers, hence the specific epithet cornea.

Flesh and spore print

Flesh homogeneous and gelatinous, without fibrous strands, ring, volva or distinct stipe. No colour change when cut or bruised. Spore print whitish to pale yellowish.

This species is found on dead broadleaved wood: fallen logs, stumps, large branches and worked timber, usually where the bark has partly fallen away. Beech, oak, birch and many other hardwoods are used, and it frequently follows the line of a crack or a cut surface where the mycelium reaches the air.

It fruits from summer through to late autumn and persists into winter in mild areas, being one of the commonest small fungi on decaying hardwood in temperate woodland. The distribution is broad across Europe, North America and much of temperate Asia.

Calocera cornea is a saprotroph causing brown rot in dead wood, a decay type in which cellulose is removed while modified lignin remains, leaving the residual wood brown, crumbly and cracked into cubical blocks. This is characteristic of the Dacrymycetes as a whole and contrasts with the white rot of most jelly fungi in the Auriculariales.

The small size of the fruiting bodies is offset by their abundance: a single mycelium can push out hundreds of spikes across a log surface, each shedding spores from its entire outer face. Their tough gelatinous construction lets them dry and revive repeatedly through a long autumn, so a colony remains productive over many weeks.

Calocera viscosa (Yellow Stagshorn) is much larger, up to 10 cm tall, distinctly antler-branched, more orange, and grows on conifer wood from a tough whitish rooting base buried in the substrate; C. cornea is small, mostly unbranched, on hardwood, and not rooting. Dacrymyces stillatus (Common Jellyspot) shares the colour but forms flat blobs and cushions rather than upright spikes.

Small yellow club fungi in Clavulinopsis, such as Clavulinopsis helvola, grow from soil and leaf litter rather than wood and have brittle, non-gelatinous flesh that snaps cleanly. Young Calocera pallidospathulata is paler and develops flattened, spoon-shaped tips instead of pointed cylinders.