Tear Dropper

The Tear Dropper is a resupinate crust fungus, meaning its whole fruiting body is a flat skin spread over the underside or side of a piece of dead wood, with the spore-producing layer facing outwards. Genera of this kind are grouped loosely as corticioid fungi, and they make up a large, often overlooked share of the fungi on any fallen log.

Its common name refers to the clear watery droplets that stand on the fertile surface of an actively growing, well-hydrated fruitbody — a phenomenon known as guttation, produced when the mycelium takes up more water than it transpires. The scientific epithet carries the same idea of sweating or weeping.

It is distinctive among small pale crusts because the fertile surface is neither smooth nor porous but finely toothed, carrying a dense pile of short blunt spines that give it a rasping, velvety look under a hand lens.

Fruiting body

A thin, tough, closely adnate crust, usually well under a millimetre thick, spreading in elongated patches along the underside of fallen wood and often following bark fissures. Fresh material is slightly waxy and pliable; dried material becomes hard and brittle and may crack into small plates.

Fertile surface

Cream, ivory or pale ochre, ageing to buff or dull tan. The surface is covered in short, crowded, blunt spines or granular warts a fraction of a millimetre long, giving a finely toothed texture. Clear or slightly milky droplets frequently sit among the spines on fresh, moist fruitbodies and dry to small darker resinous spots.

Margin

The edge is thin, paler and often finely fringed or fading gradually into the wood surface rather than ending in a raised rim.

Flesh and spore print

The context is thin and pale. Spores are white in deposit, so the fungus never dusts the surrounding wood with colour. Because most corticioid crusts overlap in field characters, confident naming usually rests on the combination of conifer substrate, fine spines and droplet formation.

Found on dead, usually barkless conifer wood: fallen branches, decorticated logs, old stumps and worked timber lying in woodland. It favours the sheltered underside of the wood where humidity stays high, which is also why guttation droplets are so often visible.

It is a fungus of cool temperate and boreal forest, widespread across northern Europe, northern Asia and North America, and is most often noticed from autumn into winter when moisture is plentiful. Fruitbodies are perennial in the sense that they persist and re-hydrate over long periods, so patches can be found in any month.

The Tear Dropper is a saprotroph, drawing its nutrition from the structural polymers of dead conifer wood and forming part of the sequence of fungi that reduce fallen timber to soil. Crust fungi of this kind colonise wood after the bark has loosened and work through the surface layers, releasing enzymes into the wood beneath the thin fertile skin.

Reproduction is straightforward: basidia on the spiny surface release wind-dispersed spores that must land on suitable exposed conifer wood. Because the fruiting layer is so thin, the fungus invests little tissue in reproduction and can maintain a fertile surface over long stretches of substrate.

Numerous pale toothed crusts share the same habit. Steccherinum species have longer, more clearly separated spines and are usually flushed ochre, salmon or pinkish, often with a small reflexed cap edge. Radulomyces molaris forms much coarser, blunter teeth on dead oak rather than conifer, and Dentipellis fragilis is soft, white and fragile with long slender spines.

Smooth pale crusts such as Peniophora and Hyphodontia species lack the fine spiny pile, while Phlebia species are gelatinous and radially wrinkled. None of these regularly produce the standing clear droplets that give the Tear Dropper its name, and none combine the fine granular teeth with a hard, tightly attached cream crust on decorticated conifer wood.