Veiled Lady Identification Guide

Finding One Before It Collapses

Veiled Lady is a tropical and subtropical stinkhorn, and it does not wait for you. The whole spectacle, from the egg splitting to the stalk elongating and the lace skirt unfurling, happens in a few hours, usually in the early morning after warm rain, and the fruit body has slumped into a puddle of slime by evening. To see one intact, walk mulched garden beds, bamboo groves, plantation edges, greenhouse borders and rich leaf litter in the wet season, and walk them early.

The first impression, when you do find it, is unmistakable and unlike any gilled mushroom: a white, spongy column standing upright out of a whitish sac, carrying a dark olive, slimy, thimble-shaped head, with a wide lacy white net hanging from beneath the head like a crinoline. Nothing else in the fungal world looks like that. The second impression is olfactory. The smell is strongly fetid and carrion-like and reaches you before you see the fungus; flies are already crawling on the head.

Starting at the Egg

Half the identification can be done before the fungus opens. Look at the soil around a mature specimen for whitish to pinkish, partly buried eggs 2 to 6 cm across, soft to the touch, anchored by thick white mycelial cords.

Slice one vertically with a sharp knife. Inside you should see, from outside in, a thin tough outer skin, a thick layer of clear gelatinous jelly, and then the folded, compressed young fruit body: the pleated white stalk coiled at the centre, a dark olive-brown layer of gleba wrapped over the head, and, crucially, the tightly folded lace of the skirt packed between the head and the stalk. Seeing that folded net in section identifies the species while the fungus is still closed.

Reading the Mature Fruit Body

Work from the top down.

The head, or receptacle cap, is 2.5 to 4 cm tall, conical to thimble-shaped, and attached to the stalk only at the very top, hanging free at its lower edge. Wipe or wash away the slime and the surface beneath is strongly reticulate, sculpted into a raised network of ridges enclosing shallow pits, chalk-white to pale cream. At the apex there is a small smooth white disc pierced by a central pore.

The gleba is the olive-brown to blackish, thick, sticky spore slime coating the head. It is the spore-bearing surface, and it is the source of the odour. Flies remove it steadily, so an older fruit body can have a partly bare white netted head with slime remaining only in the pits.

The skirt, or indusium, hangs from beneath the head. It is pure white, delicate, and formed of a wide-meshed net of polygonal to rounded holes, flaring outward and downward, often reaching most of the way to the ground and spreading 5 to 15 cm across. In fresh material it is crisp; in an hour or two it goes limp and clings to the stalk.

The stalk is 10 to 25 cm tall and 1.5 to 3 cm thick, white, cylindrical and tapering slightly upward, hollow, and built of a spongy chambered tissue that is honeycombed when you cut across it. It is fragile and snaps easily.

The base is a saccate volva, the remains of the egg wall, persisting as a loose whitish to pinkish or brownish cup with white rhizomorphs running out of it into the litter. Excavate it rather than pulling, because the volva is a required part of any good record.

Spores: Why There Is No Print

Do not try to take a spore print. Stinkhorns do not shed spores into still air; they produce them in the sticky gleba and rely on flies and other insects to carry them away, which is why the odour is so powerful and so specifically carrion-like. A head laid on paper will simply leave a foul smear.

To see spores, take a pinhead of gleba on a needle, mount it in water under a coverslip, and look at high power. The spores are extremely small, smooth, thin-walled, elliptical to cylindrical, roughly 3 to 4 by 1.5 to 2 micrometres, and hyaline singly, olive in mass.

Substrate, Season and Ecology

This is a saprotroph of rich organic matter: bamboo litter and rotting culms, garden mulch, woodchip beds, leaf mould, rotting stumps and buried wood. It has a strong association with bamboo groves across its tropical range, which is why the fungus is often named for bamboo in local usage. In temperate regions it appears in heated glasshouses and in imported mulch.

Fruiting is tied to warmth plus heavy rain, so in monsoon climates it comes in flushes and in equatorial climates it can appear at almost any time. Fruit bodies often arise in small groups, with eggs at several stages of development around one open specimen.

Ecologically it is a wood and litter decomposer with an insect-based dispersal strategy, and the whole architecture, the tall stalk lifting the gleba into moving air, the reeking slime, the pale reflective net catching light on a dark forest floor, is built around attracting flies.

Separating the Look-alikes on Structure

Once you have accepted that you are looking at a stinkhorn with a skirt, the field narrows to a handful of possibilities.

Phallus impudicus and Phallus hadriani have the same white stalk, volva and slimy pitted head but no skirt at all. Phallus hadriani additionally has a lilac to pinkish-violet volva and grows in coastal sand dunes.

Phallus duplicatus has a skirt, but a short one: it extends only a short way below the head, forming a collar rather than a full-length curtain, and never reaches the ground.

Phallus merulinus, P. multicolor and their relatives have skirts and stalks flushed with yellow, orange or pink rather than pure white; if the net is coloured, you are not looking at the plain white species.

Mutinus species have no separate hanging cap and no skirt at all. Their spore slime is smeared directly onto a tapering, pointed, orange to scarlet apex.

Clathrus, Lysurus, Aseroe and their relatives dispense with the stalk-and-cap plan entirely, producing latticed spheres, columns or star-like arms.

Finally, an unopened egg can be mistaken for a small puffball. Cutting it settles the matter at once: a puffball is uniformly white and firm inside with no jelly layer and no folded structures, whereas a stinkhorn egg shows the gelatinous layer and the compressed head, stalk and net.