Mushroom spores are invisible to the naked eye, but there’s a cool trick you can do to visualize them. It’s called spore printing.
Making a spore print is a cheap and low tech method to collect spores from a mushroom. You can use a spore print to check the color of the spores, which is a key feature when identifying a mushroom. You can also collect the spores to grow that mushroom and even to make art!!
Mushroom spore print art by Erin Frost. Source: Milkwood Permaculture
The method I’m explaining here is very simple and it can be used for both, mushrooms with gills and with pores. I’ve made a comic strip showing the process step by step.
If you’re planning on looking at the spores under the microscope, you can use a glass slide instead of the B&W paper. Also, if you know the color of the spores beforehand, you can use a piece of paper of the opposite color (white for dark-colored spores, black for light-colored spores).
Here’s a spore print I made of a mushroom with dark purple spores on a piece of white paper:
And that’s it. Piece of cake!
Fall is upon us and mushrooms are already popping all over. So, if you’re interested in learning how to identify mushrooms, get out there, collect some specimens and make some spore prints!
I hope you enjoyed this post. Let me know in the comments if you have any questions and happy spore printing!!
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