Mushrooms in My Story: The Aseroe Rubra

What’s with the sudden mushroom business? Is this a mushroom blog now? And why does this mushroom like Cthulhu wearing lipstick?

I have questions for the first two questions and nothing to say about the last one, even though it is I who asked it.

This is most certainly not a blog dedicated to mushrooms though I will have a series of posts up on mushrooms in the days to come to promote Electric Velocipede’s very last issue. BUY THE ISSUE! BUY ALL THE ISSUES!

My story “The Fungi That Talk Softly” name drops random scientific names for fungi for emphasis and while that creates a certain atmosphere, names are meaningless without a visual.

Example:

“However, there is one human name that every fungus from the domesticated black mold to the tentacled Aseroe rubra knows. That name belongs or rather belonged to Rostislav Kazakchiev, one rather peculiar human with the desire to fathom and translate the fungal language.”

Who is the mushroom behind the name? Who is Aseroe rubra and why does it know so many things?

In one word, nightmarish. Is anyone surprised it hails from Australia? No one. Thought so.

This amazing species belongs to the stinkhorn family although it actually resembles eldritch nightmares complete with puss (I personally find it to be mesmerizing). The bright red is offset the brown slime, which attracts flies with its sweet smell of carrion to reproduce. I don’t think anything meant to smell like a decomposed corpse can be edible, but I read on the Internet that you could in theory eat it. Why one would do that is beyond that.

Let’s a breakdown of its scientific name, which is a mixture of Greek (Asē/αση ‘disgust’; roē/ροη ‘juice’) and Latin (ruber ‘red’). Scientists have found a classy way to call this fungi “disgusting red juice”.

Fun fact: The mushroom starts off as a white egg, which erupts to form this gaping, tentacle wound. It’s like nature figured out how to hatch a real Alien egg.