Much More than Morsels of Morels in the Month of May

For Michigan and much of the upper Midwest and Northeast, May marks the beginning of the six-month mushroom-hunting season and is heralded by a unique cast of tasty fungi. I recently received an email from the Michigan Mushroom Hunter's Club that listed the 26 species of common macrofungi that can be found in May. This list comes from a 1986 article by Walt Sturgeon entitled "May in Michigan Means Morels and More", which is what my alliterative header pays homage to. I wanted to share the list here, both as a phenological resource as well as a reference of edibility. The names are updated to reflect current taxonomy:  

1. Artomyces pyxidatus - Edible, and tasty, in my opinion! 
2. Caloscypha fulgens - Unknown.
3. Coprinellus micaceus - Edible, but must be cooked soon after harvesting due to enzymatic deliquescence.
4. Coprinopsis atramentaria - Edible, but deliquescent like C. micaceus, and should not be consumed with alcohol because of the presence of coprine!
5. Disciotis venosa - Edible and apparently very good, but you should make sure you are not eating a similar-looking brown cup fungus. Reassuringly, "venosa" means veined, not venomous. 
6. Exidia glandulosa - Eh.
7. Flammulina velutipes - Edible, but make sure you are truly eating F. velutipes and not a deadly lookalike like G. marginata. 
8. Galerina marginata - Deadly poisonous.
9. Gyromitra brunnea - Questionable due to the potential of containing gyromitrin, but widely consumed. I previously discussed my experience with this species here.
10. Gyromitra esculenta - Deadly poisonous due to high levels of gyromitrin, but consumed in some parts of the world once prepared properly. 
11. Gyromitra korfii - Questionable due the potential of containing gyromitrin, but widely consumed. 
12. Gyromitra leucoxantha - Questionable due to the potential of containing gyromitrin. 
13. Gyromitra perlata - Questionable due to the potential of containing gyromitrin. 
14. Morchella americana - Edible; previously discussed here.
15. Morchella angusticeps - Edible.
16. Neofavolus alveolaris - Edible, apparently, to my surprise.
17. Pholiota highlandensis - Unknown. 
18. Pleurotus ostreatus - Edible.
19. Pluteus cervinus - Edible.
20. Polyporus arcularius - Inedible.
21. Polyporus squamosus - Edible.
22. Sarcoscypha austriaca and S. dudleyi (listed as S. coccinea, a western US species) - Edible; previously discussed here.
23. Tubaria furfuracea - Unknown, and probably not worth trying. 
24. Urnula craterium - Edible, and suprisingly good; previously discussed here. 
25. Verpa bohemica - Questionable due to incidences of poisoning, but widely consumed.
26. ​Verpa conica - Questionable due to incidences of poisoning, but widely consumed.

First off, kudos to Michael Kuo for his excellent descriptions of 25/26 of the items on this list. Where would we be without him? ​Second, while going through the original list I was impressed with the amount of change that has taken place over about 30 years. Beyond name changes, species concepts have altered drastically for many of these groups. While some, like Galerina marginata, are examples of a clumping of what used to be multple species into one name, most research seems to expand the number of North American species and discover cryptic diversity. Much more work remains to be done, though. Neofavolus alveolaris represents a few different species in the United States, one of which was just described (Neofavolus americana by Xing et al. 2020), and Pluteus cervinus is certainly a stand-in for a diverse group of species that deserves attention. 

The mushroom situation nowadays truly is different. My challenge is to find not only all the species on this list, but also the mushrooms have been discovered in the past few decades, and others that have only recently arrived. Take the morel situation. Thanks to recent investigations by Michael Kuo and others, we know that there are actually eight different morel species in Michigan. In addition to Morchella americana and M. angusticeps, we have M. diminutiva, M. prava, M. punctipes, M. septentrionalis, and M. ulmaria; M. exuberans, the western post-fire morel, was recently found for the first time in Michigan and is therefore another addition to this list (Miller et al. 2017). Another recent arrival is Pleurotus citrinopileatus, the golden oyster mushroom. Native to northeastern Asia, golden oysters were introduced to the United States as a very tasty cultivated mushroom. Only in the past few years, though, they seem to have "escaped" cultivation and can now be found growing in the wild as massive cascading clusters. Just in the past two days they were spotted in Michigan (e.g., on iNaturalist). While exceedingly delicious, their rapid spread and prolific growth could radically change fungal communities with unknown consequences. 

An impressive 11 of the 26 fungi in the list above are not yet represented in my quest towards eating 1001 fungi. I'm excited to see how many of them I can try this month! How many of these fungi have you, will you, or did you find in May? Are there any other tasty edibles not mentioned here that can be found around this time? 

References

Miller, A. N., Raudabaugh, D. B., Iturriaga, T., Matheny, P. B., Petersen, R. H., Hughes, K. W., … O’Donnell, K. (2017). First report of the post-fire morel Morchella exuberans in eastern North America. Mycologia, 109(5), 710–714. https://doi.org/10.1080/00275514.2017.1408294

Xing, J.-H., Zhou, J.-L., & Cui, B.-K. (2020). Two new species of Neofavolus (Polyporales, Basidiomycota) based on morphological characters and molecular evidence. Mycological Progress, 19, 471–480. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11557-020-01574-8