Wood Ear Identification Guide

First Impression and Setting

A damp, grey winter afternoon in a hedgerow or a neglected corner of woodland, and something on a dead elder branch catches the light in a way that wood should not. Wood Ear grows in clusters and tiers of rubbery, translucent, brown discs, each one lobed and folded so convincingly like a human ear that the resemblance does most of the identification for you. The fruit bodies feel cool, elastic and faintly slippery, and they wobble when you tap the branch. In dry spells the same cluster shrinks to hard, black, shrivelled crusts glued to the bark, only to swell back within hours of rain — a rehydration trick that is itself a strong clue.

Reading the Overall Shape

Each fruit body is 3 to 8 cm across, sometimes reaching 12 cm, and shaped like a shallow cup, a disc or an ear. It attaches to the wood laterally, by a narrow point or a very short stubby stalk, so that the body hangs or projects outward rather than sitting flat. The margin is wavy, folded and often deeply lobed, and neighbouring bodies fuse along their edges into rosettes and shelving clusters. Thickness is only 1 to 3 mm. Hold a fresh one up to the sky: it is translucent, and you can see light through the flesh and the shadows of the veins.

The Two Surfaces

Getting the surfaces the right way round is the core of the identification. The outer, upper, convex surface is sterile. It is matt and finely velvety, clothed in short greyish hairs that show best under a lens or when the surface is dry, and coloured tan, grey-brown or purplish-brown, often paler than the other side. The inner, lower, concave surface is the fertile hymenium. It is smooth, glossy, and strongly undulating, thrown into vein-like ridges, wrinkles and folds that radiate and branch exactly as the whorls of an ear do. Its colour is a rich date-brown to reddish or purplish brown, greyish when dry. There are no gills, no pores and no teeth anywhere — the spores are produced directly from that smooth, wrinkled face, and the absence of any organised spore-bearing structure is diagnostic for the jelly fungi.

Flesh, Texture and Colour Change

Slice one across with a sharp knife. The cut is clean and the flesh is uniformly gelatinous, firm, elastic and slightly cartilaginous — it bends and springs back rather than snapping. In section you can see a thin outer layer of downy tissue over the gelatinous middle. Squeeze it and water is released; the fruit body is largely water held in a jelly matrix. There is no colour change when you bruise or cut it; the only transformation is drying, which turns it hard, dark brown to nearly black, and reduces it to perhaps a tenth of its wet volume. Odour is faint and unremarkable, and there is no latex.

Taking and Reading a Spore Print

Jelly fungi do give spore prints, but they are less familiar to work with. Choose a fully expanded, freshly rehydrated specimen. Cut it from the wood, lay it concave side down on dark glass or black card, and cover it with a bowl to hold humidity. Because the hymenium is not vertical and the surface is undulating, deposition is uneven and slow, so leave it overnight rather than a few hours. The result is a white to very pale cream print, often thin and confined to patches beneath the deepest folds. Under a microscope the spores are unmistakable: long, curved and sausage-shaped — allantoid — roughly 16 to 19 by 6 to 8 micrometres, quite unlike the small ellipsoids of most gilled fungi. If you have access to a microscope, the septate basidia, divided by cross-walls into four cells, confirm the family at once.

Substrate and Season

Wood Ear is a white-rot decomposer of dead hardwood, and in Europe it is overwhelmingly associated with elder, Sambucus nigra. Dead attached branches and standing dead stems of elder in hedgerows, scrub, damp woodland margins and neglected ground are the classic hunting sites. It also occurs on beech, ash, sycamore, willow, spindle and other broadleaves. It is a genuine all-season fungus, present year-round, but it is at its most conspicuous and best hydrated from late autumn through winter and into early spring, when mild wet weather follows a frost. Because the fruit bodies revive rather than rot, a single cluster can be watched through several cycles across a whole winter.

Separating the Look-alikes on Morphology Alone

Auricularia mesenterica shares the rubbery texture and brown colouring but grows as effused, resupinate brackets and shelves spreading over the wood, with a hairy, concentrically zoned grey-green upper surface and a purplish, wrinkled underside. It forms shelves, not ears.

In North America the ear-shaped Auricularia species are split by substrate and hairiness: the conifer-associated species and the hardwood species differ in the length and density of the hairs on the sterile surface and in spore size, so record the host tree carefully.

Exidia glandulosa and its allies form black, blister-like, brain-shaped cushions studded with tiny pimples. They are softer, more watery, less elastic, and never develop the clean cup or ear outline or a downy back.

Tremella foliacea builds a rosette of thin, wavy, leaf-like brown lobes radiating from a common base. It is more brittle and jelly-like, lacks a velvety outer surface, and has no distinct concave fertile face.

Peziza and other cup fungi can be brown and cup-shaped on rotten wood, but their flesh is brittle and waxy: press the margin and it cracks or snaps rather than flexing. They also lack the veined, folded inner surface and the downy exterior.

A Working Checklist

Ear- to cup-shaped, laterally attached, 3 to 8 cm; flesh gelatinous, elastic, translucent and only millimetres thick; outer surface matt and finely downy; inner surface smooth, glossy and veined with ear-like folds; no gills, pores or teeth; dries hard and black and revives with rain; white spore print with sausage-shaped spores; on dead hardwood, especially elder, mostly in the cool wet months.