THE BOSTON MYCOLOGICAL CLUB Sighting: Pseudocolus fusiformis

A pile of wood chips near a parking lot in Sharon, MA, is an odd place to find calamari, but that's where Lawrence Millman found the specimen(s) shown above. Upon closer inspection, however, you will see that they're not actual calamari but a type of stinkhorn called Stinky Squid (Pseudocolus fusiformis).

The Stinky Squid begins life as an "egg." As this egg absorbs water and expands, the tentaclelike fruitbody appears. Each tentacle is coated with an olive-green spore mass (gleba) whose odor is quite rank. Rank, that is, to human nostrils. To flies, the odor is irresistable; as the main vectors of spore dispersal, they're attacted to Stinky Squids like flies to, well, feces. Then off flies the fly, unknowingly spreading P. fusiformis spores wherever it lands. Fiendishly clever, eh?

A tropical species, the Stinky Squid was first reported in North America in Pittsburgh in 1915. A few decades later, it appeared in New England: you can easily imagine the astonishment of the first dour Yankee to find this unusual species in his wood chips.