Mushroom Monday: Pear-shaped Puffball

Mushroom Monday: Pear-shaped Puffball

Welcome Mushroom Monday fans!  Today’s Mushroom Monday mushroom is the pear-shaped puffball.  It’s shaped like a fruit, is found in different places than many other kinds of puffballs, and its original scientific name is a little funny.

The pear-shaped puffball is a puffball-type mushroom like the common earthball mushroom that we’ve featured before.  Like other puffballs, it releases its spores by opening up and releasing them in a puff.  Unlike a lot of other puffballs, it is found growing on wood, rather than the soil.

The pear-shaped puffball is generally shaped like a pear, as the name implies, but it can also be shaped like a sphere.  It’s yellow/brown in color, with little bumps on the surface and small spines when it’s young, and it’s white on the inside.  They can be found in clusters and they grow on wood (both conifers and hardwood) that’s decaying, both on stumps and on branches that have fallen.  It can be found across North America and other places in the world.  It’s a saprophytic mushroom and gets its energy from dead and decaying organic matter.  The part you see is 0.5 to 1.5 inches in width and 0.5 to 1.75 inches in height.  Unlike some other mushrooms you might have seen, it has no gills.

When the mushroom is young, the part you see is solid.  As it gets ready to release its spores, the inside changes into a bunch of spores in a powder form.  These are puffed out of the mushroom when it releases its spores.

The original scientific name of the pear-shaped puffball was Lycoperdon pyriforme. The Lycoperdon part roughly means wolf passing gas.  This name may come from the scent of the mushroom. The pyriforme part of the name indicates it is shaped like a pear.

We hope you liked learning about today’s Mushroom Monday mushroom, the pear-shaped puffball.  You can check out our other Mushroom Monday posts and follow us on social media to learn more about mushrooms and keep up with us.