The Joe Log - Chlorociboria Aeruginascens

Day 347: The Joe Log is fruiting! Okay, I realize that statement is going to take some explanation, so grab your tea and sit down. The tale begins about a year ago when my botany partner sent me a photo of turquoise-blue disks whose shape seemed to indicate that they were the apothecia of a crustose lichen. However, there was no thallus visible to support that hypothesis, so I believed they were probably fungal in nature, and a small amount of searching my references brought me to Chlorociboria. I wrote back to him excitedly, saying, "I'd give my eye teeth to see one of those in real life!" Little did I know...

A few weeks later, Joe came up to do some yardwork for me and said, "I brought you a piece of that wood that had the blue fungus on it." I raced to the back of his truck and dug it up where he'd stowed it in a plastic bag. The cups were no longer evident, although the stick (roughly 18" long and 2" in diameter) still had a bluish tinge to it. I found a shady home for it in my flower bed, but then after further discussion with Joe about the conditions in which he had found it, I relocated it to a different spot where it was shielded from almost all light beneath the fronds of a sword fern.

Winter came and went, and I began checking it for signs of life early last spring. It hadn't slipped Joe's mind, either. "How's your stick?" he'd ask, and I'd report, "Nothing yet. Maybe it doesn't like it here." Through the summer, the stick dried out despite being in the most humid spot in my garden. I kept checking for any trace of blue. Nothing. A week ago, nothing. Today, in between rain showers, I said, "I think I'll go check on the Joe Log. Not gonna be anything, but y'know, if I don't check, I'll never know." I relocated a spider in order to reach through the ferns, pulled out the rotting, wet, icky stick and turned it over so that the side which had been laying on the ground was toward me and...Chlorociboria! Now with the actual fungus observable, I took a sample cup into the house for dissection. The flesh of the 3 mm disk was blue throughout, not orange inside, which allows me to conclude that it is Chlorociboria aeruginascens.