‘Fairy ring’ forming mushroom fungus.............

 

My friend Dr. V.V. Sarma of Pondicherry University initiated a brief on ‘fairy ring’ forming fungi. I am writing below a 'fairy ring' that I and my wife saw last year in Thailand.

 

I had just then joined Mae Fah Luang University, Chiang Rai, Thailand, as a Visiting Professor, in the first week of June 2013. We were provided accommodation in the University guesthouse quarters within the campus.

The Mae Fah Luang University campus is one of the most beautiful and picturesque places in Thailand with well-laid asphalted roads, neatly grown huge avenue trees, artistically cultivated flowering plants, well-maintained expansive lawns and a number of water-conserving ponds and artificial lakes. It is a residential University with apt ambience for students and teachers to live, study and teach/learn. Accomodated in this charming campus, I and my wife seized the opportunity and took long walks almost every morning. Rainy season had already set in and the weather was very nice.

End of June 2013 on a wet Sunday, during our early morning walk, we noticed a few whitish-brown, fairly big mushrooms appeared below a rain-tree (Samanea saman), just outside our quarters. As walked further, I was pleasantly surprised to see numerous big, initially creamish-white and later turned brown, well-grown mushrooms with white huge annulus sheath hanging from the neck of the stipe, but all appeared in a large circular ring form below another rain-tree, near the guesthouse reception centre. My wife was exited to see this rare site of a beautiful ‘fairy ring’. Immediately, I called two research students of MFU, Mr. Phonguen and Ms. Linda, who were working on taxonomy and diversity of basidiomycetous fungi for their Ph.D. under the guidance of Prof. Kevin D. Hyde. Within 30 min, they arrived at the site of the fairy ring and commenced their mycological studies. They took photographs, measured the diameter of the fairy ring, carefully picked up a few mushrooms for lab studies and scribbled plenty of notes in their field notebooks. I too clicked a few pictures. I had seen fairy rings a couple of times earlier in the forests of Western Ghats in southern India but this was certainly a big one and a very happy encounter which I could show and explain to my wife. Ms. Linda promised that she will get back to me with the correct name of the fungus when she had completed her studies.  

Fairy rings are not very common but formed by ectomycorrhizal mushroom-forming fungi in the forests, grasslands and meadows. It is the appearance of mushrooms of a single species in a circular ring shape. Radial growth of the vegetative part of the fungus underground and rainy wet soil conditions facilitate appearance of the mushrooms in a ring shape, year after year. The present ring was of about 5 meters in diameter and appeared at the base of the rain-tree. I am sure that we will be seeing the fairy ring at the same site, perhaps a slightly bigger ring,  this year also.

Several species of basidiomycetous fungi are known to form fairy rings. I was told that the present fungus could be a species of Amanita or Calocybe. I don’t know. A few pictures that I have taken on that day are given below.

 

 

 

D. Jayarama Bhat