One night downtown, I came across a fearsome and fascinating sight: clumps of thin yet plump tendrils casting shadows like giant spiders across the ground, with slimy, curling, striated brown heads webbed in black goo. I snapped a quick photo on my phone as a reminder to return.
If you’ve only paid attention to mushrooms when buying, cooking or eating them, you may be surprised, like I was, to learn that shrooms are mere “fruiting bodies”—ephemeral reproductive appendages grown by the real fungal organisms living mostly underground. Like me, you may also be surprised to learn that some 20,000 types of mushrooms have been identified—and that that represents a tiny fraction of the total number thought to exist. Many mushrooms are difficult to find and study, it turns out, in part because their “fruiting” period can be quite short.
Returning after a few days to properly photograph the gooey ones, I experienced that kind of elusiveness firsthand. The mushrooms had completely disappeared, leaving behind only dark, sinewy surface patches that brought to mind rubber tire shreds. I realized later the mushrooms had been some variety of “inky cap,” whose hoods effectively melt, over the course of mere hours, into a viscous black liquid, causing them to curl upward and better disperse the spores within. Marveling at that information and feeling unsatisfied with those patches, I went foraging downtown for other mushrooms to photograph.
In their vulnerability to hungry squirrels, zealous groundskeepers, their own genetics and, of course, human feet, the examples shown here may not have survived the days between photography and publication. But the originating fungi beneath those feet are surely alive and well.








Written and photographed by Dan Mims.