Creating Spore Prints for Species Identification (2024)

FAQs

Creating Spore Prints for Species Identification? ›

Put a drop of water on the top of the cap to help release the spores. Cover the cap with a paper cup or glass and leave for 2-24 hours, depending on the humidity and the freshness of the mushroom. The spores will fall on the paper, foil or glass, making a spore print pattern.

For white-spored mushrooms use black paper or clear plastic or glass. If you intend looking at the spores under a microscope, then whatever colour the spores are making the spore print on a microscope slide or (better still) a slide cover slip is ideal.

Take the stems off the mushrooms using your hands or scissors. Place the mushrooms with the gills or pores facing down onto the paper. Then place the container over the mushroom to create an airtight seal. Leave the mushrooms covered anywhere from a couple hours to overnight based on how fresh the mushrooms are.

Although the spore print is generally used to help identify the genus of a specimen, on occasion it can be used to help distinguish between similar species. For example, the lookalikes Russula crustosa and Russula virescens have yellowish and white spore deposits, respectively.

Put a drop of water on the top of the cap to help release the spores. Cover the cap with a paper cup or glass and leave for 2-24 hours, depending on the humidity and the freshness of the mushroom. The spores will fall on the paper, foil or glass, making a spore print pattern.

Cover the mushroom with a bowl (to stop it drying out and to reduce air currents that might spoil your print by blowing the tiny spores around). 3. Leave everything where it is for at least 2 hours or longer (overnight).

Lay the cap of the mushroom with the gills upside down onto a piece of paper. For the majority of specimens, a normal sheet of white paper works fine. However, some mushrooms have white spores- so if you are taking prints for the purposes of identification, you might want to consider also getting some black paper.

To preserve your spore print, spray them lightly with an artist spray or hair spray.

Maintaining the ideal humidity is perhaps the trickiest part of making spore prints. Dry mushrooms won't give a good spore print, but wet ones can make a sloppy mess. If you put a small mushroom on a piece of paper and cover it with a large bowl you may end up with a shrivelled cap and no spore print.

Such a collection of Russula spore prints is more precise than any printed colour chart and can be very useful as the prints of many species are of subtly different shades. The colours will fade a little in a few years but can easily be replaced with new samples.

How do you inoculate spore prints? ›

If working with a reusable inoculation loop, heat the inoculation loop red hot in the flame of an alcohol lamp and let it cool down in your hand. Do not touch the spore print, inoculation loop or agar medium. Now rub the spore print until the whole loop has gathered some spores.

Once you have a spore print (by following the instructions above) you can then use it to cultivate and grow your mushrooms. This can be done by creating a spore syringe, where the spores are re-hydrated using sterile water and then used to inoculate the growing medium.

In this quantity the colour is easy to see. The commonest spore colours are white and various shades of brown. Note that the colour of the gills need not be the same as the colour of the spores. If your spore print is very weak (or not there) put the cap and tub back down and leave it for longer - even overnight.

Mushroom spore colour is often an essential step in species identification, and creating a "spore print" from a specimen is one way of determining the colour. Spores may be dark or light in colour, and so it's often useful to make a spore print on both black and white surfaces.

The meadow mushroom has light pink to blackish brown gills, and a blackish brown spore print.

The process for making a spore print is pretty simple. Basically, you just need to allow spores to fall from the cap of a mature mushroom and onto a piece of paper, tinfoil or glass. This method below works well for both gilled mushrooms and mushrooms with pores.

The spore prints are permanent. The illustra- tion shows a spore print from Gymnopilus junonius made in 1988 which still retains its colour. The spores can be sampled but this entails a degree of destruction. spores are known to be hard to germinate, only the lightest of spore prints will be required.