Poronia erici/punctata

An individual fruit body is small, roughly spherical and less than a millimetre in diameter. However, fruit bodies often occur in colonies, embedded within a mass of sterile tissue (or stroma). The stroma is somewhat nail-shaped, with a broad head and a tapering ‘tail’. The disk-like apex of the stroma is white but bears one or more black punctures in it. Each puncture is the mouth (or ostiole) of a fruit body and the spores are released through the ostiole. The rest of the stroma is black. The disk may grow to a centimetre or so in diameter, with 20 or more ostioles (and hence 20 or more fruit bodies within the stroma) but you may also see disks only a millimetre in diameter and with only a single ostiole/fruit body.

Poronia erici/punctata stromata are found on herbivore dung and the tails of the stroma are embedded in the dung so that only the black-spotted white disk shows.

Poronia erici and Poronia punctata are two macroscopically similar species (with embedded ‘tails’) that have been reported from Australia.  

Look-alikes

Poronia oedipus has an exposed ‘tail’ with a raised disk and has not been reported from the Canberra Nature Map region.