What’s the best looking fungus in the land? Right now this one has my vote. Polypores are fungi with many tiny holes, or pores, on the undersides of their shelves. They are also called “bracket fungi.”
Fungi provide a critical part of nature’s continuous rebirth by recycling dead organic matter into useful nutrients. They digest food outside their bodies by releasing enzymes into the surrounding environment and breaking down organic matter into a form they can absorb.
Without fungi, forests would become choked with logs, sticks and dead plants; nothing else is able to perform the function of reducing these forest byproducts back down into soil.
“Poly” means “many.” Checking out the underside of one of the shelves, it’s easy to see why it’s called a polypore. The pores are used to release spores into the air, which is the way fungi reproduce.
The shelves (or brackets) are the fruiting bodies of the organism – they are also known as conks. Most of the fungus is embedded in fallen wood. The pores are all perfectly vertical, as the spores must be able to fall out of the pores without sticking to the sides.
Cinnabar-red Polypores are often found on fallen cherry trees (like this one). They are widely distributed in North America, but a number of sources state that they are rare, so finding these today was an unexpected surprise.