Glow in the dark jack-o'-lantern mushrooms spotted in Windsor-Essex
No, it's not Halloween yet, but a special type of bright orange fungi have some mushroom enthusiasts glowing with excitement.
Jack-o'-lantern mushrooms have been spotted in the Windsor-Essex, Ont. region just in time for fall. These mushrooms are different from others because of one very interesting feature:
"They bioluminescence — they glow in the dark," said Robert Wright, a self-described mushroom enthusiast and all-around fungi forager.
The orange mushrooms are found all over North America, but Wright said he found the mushrooms just off a path located in Devonshire Conservation Area. Wright said that they are a common sight around Windsor-Essex.
Wright said he found the jack-o'-lantern mushrooms by accident as he was looking for something else.
"I was looking for chicken of the woods mushrooms which can be bright orange as well and they have some of the same growing areas as the jack-o'-lantern mushroom," he said.
"I saw a little bit of orange, backed up a little bit and saw more orange and thought, 'Wow, I found the motherload of chicken of the woods.'"
Upon closer inspection, Wright had found the jack-o'-lantern mushrooms instead.
The mushroom variety is in parts of Michigan as well, said Denis Vidmar, owner of The Mush Hub, a mushroom retailer. But he cautions people who want to eat it.
"Sadly, they're inedible," said Vidmar. "[They're] toxic and can really turn your stomach upside down."
Vidmar says the jack-o'-lantern can be mistaken for another type of mushroom.
"A lot of people will mistake it when going hunting for the chanterelle mushroom," he said.
As to why the jack-o'-lantern mushrooms glow in the dark, Wright says there are multiple theories, but he has one of his own.
"The insects would then get spores all over them because the mushroom, this particular mushroom, grows from the gills," Wright said. "I don't know if that's true or not, but I'll leave that to the experts."
Wright says he had to be patient to get pictures that showed the bioluminescence of the mushrooms.
"Since there was one there, I thought, 'I'll take it home and I'll do a little experiment,'" said Wright. "I set it up in the basement in the dark. I put it on a piece of tinfoil so that any light that did come from it would be obvious. I then set up a timed exposure for about 9 minutes. When I turned the camera back on and booted it up onto the computer, there was an image there."
