weeping fungi Fomitopsis pinicola

this is my contribution to FungiFriday by ewkaw. as always i have taken all these photos

photo from Sessvollmoen, Norway Sept 9 2023

many years ago i learned enough about fungi to be able to identify and pick common edible ones in nature. since joining this FungiFriday community i have become much more interested in photographing and learning more about all these intriguing life forms, not just the edible ones, and especially their medicinal properties. so i would like to thank ewkaw and all participants for making this community so thriving and dynamic

in this post i will take a closer look at a quite common yet beguiling wood-decaying fungi Fomitopsis pinicola or red-belted polypore.

if you have ever wandered in a northern conifer forest you have undoubtedly come across them.

it is a perennial species living for many years. as the name suggests there is a red or orange band between the older and the newer growth. that makes it easy to identify.

unless the conk is new first-year growth which may come in rather peculiar shapes.

it grows all year round. i took these above two photos on February 12 this year.

and here are some shots of the same specimen on October 15

some mysterious developments have been going on here.

don't ask me how but presumably it will eventually become more like this specimen taken in a different forest on August 31

and after some years something more like this.

anyway what i really wanted to show was how these fungi 'weep'. i did some research and found this phenomenon is called guttation

the process causing (guttation in fungi) is unknown. However, due to its association with stages of rapid growth in the life cycle of fungi, it has been hypothesised that during rapid metabolism excess water produced by respiration is exuded>

https://www.fungimag.com/fall-2010-articles/mushroom-weepLR.pdf
and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guttation

ah, of course. fungi respire just like us. cellular respiration is the stuff of life. we breathe in oxygen that we use to oxidize or burn carbohydrates acquired from our diet, thereby providing energy for all our bodily processes.
O2 (oxygen)+ C6H12O6 (sugar) gives energy + CO2 + H2O. so as a result of respiration we breathe out carbon dioxide and water.

now let's back up a little and review how wood-decaying fungi get sugar. trees produce sugar by the process of photosynthesis. carbon dioxide+ water+ sunlight energy gives sugar+ oxygen. now a tree needs energy for growth and metabolism just like all living organisms so it respires, using up some of that sugar. but since trees don't move around much they have lots left over and store it as cellulose, which is a complex carbohydrate made up of many sugar molecules chained together.

now back to the fungi, by decomposing the cellulose the fungi obtain sugar and burn it. by oxidizing sugar they get energy + carbon dioxide + water. in periods of rapid growth a lot of cellulose is decomposed and burning that sugar results in excess water which some fungi release by exuding water droplets.

as mentioned, this explanation of guttation is an unproven hypothesis. there are other possible explanations. one is that it occurs after periods of prolonged rainfall making the wood far wetter than usual. then again, perhaps the fungi is just having a bad day.

and i haven't even mentioned the amazing medicinal properties of Fomitopsis pinicola. but check them out here:
https://ultimate-mushroom.com/edible/62-fomitopsis-pinicola.html

so next time you see these seemingly plain everyday fungi, i hope you reflect on how they live and their place in the cycles of photosynthesis and respiration and of life and death. when expressed in the unfamiliar languages of chemistry and biology is not easy to grasp the profound poetry and bewildering beauty before you.