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Paraisaria pseudoheteropoda

by Michael Kuo, 10 October 2024

A friend of mine in grad school wrote an awesome poem about cicadas, and how they wait for years and years underground with "only the mole's blind grief" for company. It's a good thing she did not know about Paraisaria pseudoheteropoda, a fungus that parasitizes underground cicada nymphs, shooting a small club fungus upwards, out of the nymph and through the soil; her poem might have taken a turn toward the macabre.

Paraisaria pseudoheteropoda, found in the lower Midwest and the southeastern United States, is rarely collected, and only recently named. With its orangish-brownish head and pale stem it looks like many other bug-killing species of what used to be called "Cordyceps," but is now a panoply of proliferating genera. In fact the species is morphologically inseparable from Asia's Paraisaria heteropoda, which also parasitizes cicadas, but the two species are geographically and phylogenetically distinct; thus the pseudo in the species epithet.

Thanks to Brandon Whitt for documenting, collecting, and preserving Paraisaria pseudoheteropoda for study; his collection is deposited in The Herbarium of Michael Kuo.

Description:

Ecology: Parasitic on buried cicada nymphs under oaks and other hardwoods, or under conifers; growing alone or in pairs; summer and fall; originally described from Arkansas (Tehan & Spatafora, 2023); spring; widely distributed east of the Great Plains and south of the Great Lakes. The illustrated and described collection is from Virginia.

Fruiting Body: 2–3.5 cm high; with a well-defined head structure atop a stem.

Head: 5–8 mm across; 5–7 mm high; more or less round, or cushion-shaped; brownish orange, with tiny, darker bumps (the tops of the embedded perithecia); dry.

Stem: 2–3 cm long; 3–5 mm wide; more or less equal; bald; whitish, discoloring brownish.

Interior: Flesh in head and stem firm and white, unchanging when sliced; head with a palisade of embedded perithecia just below the surface, with perithecia extending about 1 mm deep.

Microscopic Features: Perithecia amygdaliform; embedded; up to 700 x 350 µm;. Asci 75–250 x 4–6 µm; narrowly cylindric, with swollen subglobose caps; smooth; hyaline in KOH. Spores about 1 µm wide; narrowly cylindric; septate and breaking up into cylindric spore segments 6–7 µm long, smooth, hyaline in KOH.

REFERENCES: R. M. Tehan & J. W. Spatafora, 2023. (Kobayasi, 1982; Li et al., 2006; Sung et al., 2007; Sung et al., 2011; Sato et al., 2012; Mongkolsamrit et al., 2019; Tehan et al., 2023.) Herb. Kuo 05202401.

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Embedded perithecia

Perithecium

Swollen ascus apex

Spores

Fragmenting spores

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Cite this page as:

Kuo, M. (2024, October). Paraisaria pseudoheteropoda. Retrieved from the MushroomExpert.Com Web site: http://www.mushroomexpert.com/paraisaria_pseudoheteropoda.html