Fabulous fungi and slug-fest at Dundreggan!

In the last 10 days I’ve been out twice to Dundreggan, meeting up with some specialist biodiversity surveyors from the British Myriapod and Isopod Group. That rather cumbersome title refers to centipedes and millipedes (Myriapods) and woodlice and pill bugs (Isopods), and the group had chosen to spend a week at Dundreggan, contributing to our biodiversity surveys of the estate, for their annual field trip.

As it turned out, the week was mostly wet, and the rain hindered the surveyors in the search for their subjects, although when I was with them we did come across several different millipedes and reasonable numbers of a common centipede (Lithobius forficatus). This latter was particularly active, and whenever we encountered it, either by turning over a stone or searching inside a rotten log, it would run away very quickly back into cover, taking advantage of its 15 pairs of legs (despite their common generic name, few centipede species actually have 100 legs).

We also found a few different but common species of woodlice, usually inside dead wood, where they feed on dead plant matter, helping to recycle the nutrients back into the ecosystem. Woodlice are the largest terrestrial group of crustaceans, the more familiar members of which are aquatic – crabs, lobsters and shrimps, for example.

However, the days belonged to a different group of organisms, many of which also play a key role in the recycling of nutrients in the forest – fungi. One benefit of the very wet summer we’ve had this year is that it has produced a fabulous abundance of fungi in the past few weeks, and in some places it was hard to avoid stepping on them, they were so profuse on the forest floor! Amongst the common species were the fly agaric (Amanita muscaria), one of which had attracted the attention of a black slug (Arion ater) – the mollusc was very photogenically positioned on top of the mushroom, eating a circular area in the centre of the cap.

Chanterelles (Cantharellus cibarius) were particularly prolific in the birchwood and both I and the group of surveyors each easily collected enough for several nights’ meals, without making any noticeable dent in the overall abundance of them in the forest.

There were plenty of other fungi fruiting as well, and in the space of a few square metres I came across at least a dozen different species, including some interesting and unusual ones.

The new all-ability visitor footpath we’ve created through the birch-juniper woodland in particular provided a habitat for two readily-identifiable and distinctive species – the orange peel fungus (Aleuria aurantia), which as its common name suggests, resembles a piece of orange peel, and the bay cup fungus (Peziza badia), which grows in a characteristic cup-like shape. Both of these were growing at the edge of the path, a habitat where they are often found.

One of the most beautiful species I came across was the crested coral fungus (Clavulina coralloides), which grows in delicate, coral-like branching forms. In a small area there were numerous clumps of this exotic-looking species, poking through the moss and plant debris on the forest floor.

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In the damp conditions, slugs were out in abundance, taking advantage of the fungal abundance to have a feast – I saw them eating a wide range of different fungi during the day, while many other fruiting bodies bore the evidence of previous feeding by slugs, with distinctively-shaped sections missing from their caps and tell-tale slime trails left behind. I was able to get a close look at one slug gorging itself, with the rasping action of its toothed-tongue (known as a radula) clearly visible.

Just as with human cultures throughout the ages, when times of feasting have often been followed by romantic liaisons and couplings, so too did it seem as though the slugs were making a real party out of it. Whilst walking through the woods I came across a couple of pairs of black slugs mating – the days indeed had turned out to be real slug-fests!