Stalked Lattice Stinkhorn
Lysurus periphragmoides
Also called stalked lattice fungus, simblum stinkhorn
A tall stinkhorn with a slender whitish stalk carrying a globose, orange-red latticed head whose mesh spaces are filled with dark olive spore slime.
Overview
The Stalked Lattice Stinkhorn combines two structures usually found separately in the family Phallaceae: a long, hollow, columnar stalk of the kind seen in Phallus and Mutinus, and a latticed head of the kind seen in Clathrus. The result is a distinctive silhouette — a pale post capped by a small orange globe of interlocking arms.
It is widely known by the older name Simblum sphaerocephalum, and appears in literature as Simblum rubescens as well; modern treatments place it in Lysurus. Whatever the name, the head structure is unmistakable: a closed network rather than free arms, but held aloft rather than sitting on the ground.
It is a fungus of warm climates and enriched, open ground, most often noticed in lawns, pastures, manured soil and mulched beds after heavy summer rain.
How to identify it
Stalk
The stalk is 5–15 cm tall and 1–2.5 cm thick, hollow, spongy-chambered, and whitish to pale yellow or faintly pinkish, sometimes tapering slightly toward the top. It emerges from a whitish, sac-like volva at ground level with a white basal cord.
Head
The head is a subglobose to broadly ovoid lattice 1.5–4 cm across, made of stout arms fused into a network with polygonal to rounded meshes. The arms are orange, red-orange or reddish, often more intensely coloured than the stalk, and the head is clearly demarcated from the pale column below.
Gleba and flesh
Dark olive-brown to blackish spore slime fills and coats the interstices of the lattice head, giving it a dark, glistening look between the bright arms. Once insects have cleared the slime the bare orange network is exposed. All tissue is fragile, water-filled and honeycombed, and the fruiting body collapses within a day or so. The egg stage is a whitish to buff ball roughly 2–4 cm across.
Where and when it grows
It fruits on rich, disturbed, open ground: manured pasture, well-fertilised lawns, garden beds, compost, straw-covered soil, roadside verges and mulched plantings. It is far more a fungus of open, sunny ground than of closed forest.
The season is warm and wet — summer into autumn in temperate margins, more sporadic year-round in the tropics. It is widespread in warm regions across the Americas, Africa, Asia and Australia, and in North America it is best known from the southern and central states, sometimes appearing further north in hot, humid summers.
Ecological role
The species is saprobic on plant residues, straw, dung-enriched soil and woody debris. Its mycelium spreads as pale rhizomorphs through the upper soil, forming eggs at the surface that expand rapidly when moisture and warmth coincide, sometimes producing many fruiting bodies across a lawn at once.
Dispersal is entomophilous: the pungent gleba held at the top of the tall stalk is well positioned to release odour into moving air and to present a conspicuous target for flies, which feed and then carry spores away on their bodies.
Similar species
Clathrus ruber has a very similar latticed structure but no stalk at all — its cage sits straight on the volva and is much larger. Lysurus mokusin has a comparable pale stalk but ends in a few short, free, fluted-continuing arms rather than a closed globose mesh, and its stalk is distinctly ribbed.
Blumenavia species have arms that are free above and joined below, producing an open cage on a short base. Phallus species also stand tall on a pale stalk but bear a single thimble-shaped, unperforated cap that hangs free from the apex, often with a network of ridges but never an open lattice of separate arms.