By Maureen Fellinger

Creating a spore print is a hands on tool that is used in identifying mushrooms. Even if you do not have a microscope to view the spores, simply observing the color of the print puts you on the path to identification. Here is a quick guide on the steps for creating your own spore print:

Find the mushroom that you are curious to learn more about! Avoid taking a mushroom that looks too young or too old, as these specimens may not produce spores. If you are hiking in the mountains, mushrooms growing in higher elevations generally don’t release spores at lower elevations. Luckily, I am located in Ohio so I don’t have to worry about that at all! Do not pick every single mushroom you see to make a spore print. I generally create spore prints when I notice an abundance of a fungi that I am not familiar with.

Carefully cut off the stalk of the mushroom. The specimen above was fairly delicate and a piece of the cap fell off. I decided to roll with it and say that it is an artistic fungi interpretation of Pac-Man. The cap should be placed gills or pores side down. I generally like to use a white sheet of paper, but others sometimes use black sheets, or even aluminum foil. If the cap feels very dry, you can put a drop of water on the cap to help release the spores.

Cover the specimen with a container to reduce the air flow and keep the specimen uncontaminated. Anytime I order takeout from a restaurant, I keep the containers to use for spore printing. Takeout containers are also great to keep for sharing foraged mushrooms with friends!

You will want to leave the specimen under the container for 12-24 hours. I have had mushroom release spores sooner than 12 hours, but it is a good rule of thumb to leave it undisturbed for several hours.

Once 12-24 hours have passed, take off the container, and gently lift up the cap of the mushroom. Spores are powdery and are easily disturbed by touch or the slightest waft of air. You can preserve the spore print but spraying a light sealant onto the paper.

For this particular specimen, you can see that the spore print color is dark brown. If you have a microscope, you can scrape off some of the spores with a scalpel onto a slide to observe the spores up close. I do not own a microscope, so I checked in with other mushroom enthusiasts and mycologists on help with identifying the specimen. By observing the physical characteristics of the mushroom, the habitat it was growing in, and the the color of the spore print, we were able to identify this specific specimen as Candolleomyces candolleanus.

*The writer is Agraria’s Education Administrator.