Amaurodon aquicoeruleus

This appeared on the underside of a slab of eucalypt bark that was lying on the ground in a suburban garden. The white scale bar in Photo 2 represents 5 millimetres. Photo 3 shows the spore print generated by this specimen. The line of dense colour (where the bulk of the spores fell) is about 2 centimetres long. Smaller numbers of spores fell over a larger area. Many people know how to get mushroom spore prints (if not, see: http://www.cpbr.gov.au/fungi/spore-prints.html). Much the same process works with a fungus that produces a flat fruit body on a piece of wood. Place the wood so that the fruit body faces down but make sure that the fruit body is not in contact with the paper (e.g. by supporting the ends of the wood on matches). Cover it all with say a tub to keep up the humidity level and wait. I left my set-up overnight and in about 10 hours enough spores had dropped onto the paper to allow the mass to be easily seen with the naked eye. I cut out a minute piece of paper from the spore print of Photo 3, mounted it in tap water on a microscope slide and Photo 4 shows you what I saw immediately. I have used no stain. The spores measure close to 5 microns in diameter. The spores you collect in a spore print are mature, so have gained their full size, colour, ornamentation. In Photo 5 I show a few more spores (again in tap water, with no stain) but this time I have mounted a minute fragment of the fruit body on a microscope slide. When you take such a fragment you will generally pick up a mix of mature and immature spores. In this photo you see some spores not yet with a deep blue colour, whereas all the spores taken from the spore print were a deep blue.