If you live in an area long enough you get familiar not only with the species that exist in your space but also their size and form. Take Puffballs or Earthballs (Scleroderma sp.) for example. If the scientific name has a slightly medical sound to it, it is because scleroderma is a disease causing hardening of the skin. The term originates from two Greek words, skleros meaning hard, and derma meaning skin. The term is also the genus of this group of ‘hard-skinned’ puffballs.
Puffballs are a type of fungi that produce spores internally. If you cut open an immature puffball (see picture above), the middle is filled with ripening dark brown spores. This mass is called the gleba and in scleroderma fungi it is slightly purple. When ripe, the skins splits (pictured right) and the spores are released (pictured below). As kids we used to wait until the puffball was almost ripe and then kick it, releasing a huge brown cloud of spores – not that I would advocate that method of spore dispersal these days.
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The puffballs on the rocky slopes of Junction Hill are somewhat smaller than a table tennis ball in size – hardly worth the effort to kick at all. Last Sunday we joined the Kinglake Landcare Group and the Field Naturalist Club of Victoria on one of their Fungi Forays, this time in the Jehosephat Gully section of Kinglake National Park. Some of the puffballs in this area are bigger than tennis balls. Given the World Cup is in full swing I’d like to say they were as big as soccer balls, but that would be an exaggeration. These fungi were impressive in size, nonetheless.
So, Kinglake has thicker fogs, heavier rains and now, bigger puffballs than Flowerdale. Personally I prefer less fog, even if our puffballs are smaller.
Focus on flora and fungi 