Weird fungus - bright orange. What is it?

[conuly]

It was growing on our nearly-dead tree outside my window. I couldn't get a good picture of it, but the limb fell down recently (honestly, the best thing to do would be to chop down the whole tree now, but nobody listens when I say that) so I went up and took two pictures, one of the underside and one of the... uh... otherside.

Comments

[velvetchamber.livejournal.com]

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.

[appadil.livejournal.com]

There's also mycology here on Livejournal.

[conuly]

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.

[velvetchamber.livejournal.com]

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.

[conuly]

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.

[velvetchamber.livejournal.com]

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.

[ser-kai.livejournal.com]

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.