conuly | Weird fungus - bright orange. What is it?

Hm. Looks like Honey (http://www.keithlaban.co.uk/68_3.jpg) fungus (http://www.lantratraining.co.uk/images/honey3.jpg).

Which, uh... can be very bad (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Armillaria) for the surrounding plants.

Then again, it could be something else. What the hell do I know??

No, I don't think so. It definitely doesn't have a stalk, and hasn't had a stalk in the past year it's been sitting there.

Hm. Ok. Because the second picture examle I put doesn't seem to have stalks either, so I wasn't sure/

*shrug* very sleep deprived, dont mind me.

The form of the Honey fungus is a gilled basidomycete, whereas the fungus growing on that tree is of a shelf fungus form, so I'd say that it is definitely not a Honey mushroom.

If you (Conuly) are really curious about getting to know what it is, I'd suggest borrowing a fungus book from the library, or even find a fungus ID community on f.ex. flickr.com and ask for help there.

There's also

mycology here on Livejournal.

I was trying to avoid having to look through mounds of pictures. You just *know* it'd be the very last option in the book by the time I was done :)

But thank you for the advice, I may do so if you guys can't answer it.

Id guess that looking through a book is actually pretty easy with this fungus, because there can't be that many solid shelf fungi of that colour. On the other hand if you were looking to ID a white/very pale gilled bacidomycete at a young stage it'd be a pain.

You think? Might try that, then. I did think it was pretty unusual, because I've certainly never seen anything like it, but then, there's lots of things I've never seen anything like.

I don't think it is in any way very unusual, but it does have a strong colour, which makes it easy to look for by flipping through pages, and then it is a shelf fungus, and many of them have a tendency to hang around for years, so they get noticed and put in books, they also have different growth patterns, so that probably makes it possible for you to pick this particular one from other possibilities of similarly coloured shelf fungi. I'd guess it's really just the question of fliping though the book looking for colours, and putting in a slip if you find one that's shelf shaped, and then comparing the pictures and description to the real thing.

We have fungi just like that growing on our sandpit timbers! I think they're cool. Pretty impressive when you take into account that I'm half a world away, nearly.

The bottom photo is a bit out of focus- could you tell me if the underside had visible pores or not?

No, it doesn't.

The underside is what's really throwing me for a loop, here- the top photo looks for all the world like the Cinnabar-Red Polypores I collected last fall, but they're entirely the wrong color beneath, and the lack of visible pores is a confound since it could imply either no pores or very tiny pores.

My best guess is Beefsteak Polypore if it's soft and fleshy or Varnished Conk if it's hard and woody, but I'm really going out on a limb... especially because both of those generally prefer the base of trees to the branches. Shelf fungi in general can negatively impact the health of a host plant, but a lot of them also go for deadwood so if you haven't seen this fungus before now, it might have moved in because your tree was already so dead.

The tree has been largely dead for years now, though it hasn't affected entire limbs (mostly) until recently. Like I said, I think the best thing would be to take it down entirely. It's lost enough wood through storms that it's no longer tall enough to actually damage our house or our neighbors, but still.

Also, the color is slightly duller than it should be on the underside picture - that bit of orange at the top should be closer to what it is above. But there are definitely no visible pores - what you see in terms of structure is what you get, I was pretty careful to angle my phone to make it look right instead of just like any random wood chip.

I'm not really trying to contradict you on the pores issue, but I'm not aware of a single North American species shaped like that which wouldn't have either gills or pores, however teeny and hard to see without squinting through a hand lens. There are some polypore species whose pores absolutely can't be seen without high-resolution magnification, but the only ones I know of are smaller and paper-thin.

...It occurs to me that your fungus may have taken a tumble when the branch fell and we may actually be looking at it upside down. If so, it could be the Cinnabar-Red after all, with the knobbly poreless "underside" being the cap, which fades with age (http://www.messiah.edu/Oakes/fungi_on_wood/poroid%20fungi/images/Pyc%20cinnabarinus%20habit%20LG.jpg), and the bright orange "top" being the pore surface (http://www.messiah.edu/Oakes/fungi_on_wood/poroid%20fungi/images/Pyc%20cinnabarinus%20pores%20FH.jpg).

I think it's almost certainly a cinnabar red, myself. I don't think I've ever run across another shelf fungus that colour.

No - before it fell, the orange part was still the top.

And I really can't *see* pores, though it's certainly possible they're just really tiny.

I'm afraid, not being a mycologist, the best you're goign to get out of me is that it looks like a slice of yam.

Picnoporus cinnabarinus - try the Google images to see if it fits.

That looks like a chicken fungus, not the same as the unidentified fungus. I have in my possession a piece of fungus exactly like what the OP is trying to identify. I too am trying to identify it. To confirm her findings I have a couple of pics on my flickr account http://www.flickr.com/photos/9169986@N07/2338642496/ take a look. There are no pores on the top side (the light colored side) the deep orange red velvety side IS definitely the underside. There is a central stump/stalk on the orange red side that the fungus seems to sprout grow from, and that stalk is firmly attached to the wood in which it grows.

I have a friend perusing a field guide to see if it is there, will post again if so.