The Tiniest "Bird's Nest"

Explanation: How can a bird's nest be this tiny? Answer: when it's not from a bird.

This is a "bird's nest fungus," a fairly common species found on decaying wood in the dense wet forests of Pacific Northwest U.S.

And what a striking resemblance it has to a tiny bird's nest.

So what are we seeing here?

The "eggs" are structures called peridioles that contain spore bodies called gleba (fungi do not have true seeds like plants do). (And you DID know that fungi are not plants, right?)

The "nest" is a cup, also called a peridium, that serves to disperse the "egg" peridioles by the splashing of raindrops.

This is quite an ingenious evolutionary solution to the problem of dispersal in these dense temperate rainforests.

Notice the nearly empty cup, where rain drops have already splashed the peridiole "egg" contents away, dispersing the spores to continue the lineage.

Also notice the gelatinous glue-like material in the cup, which holds the peridioles until they are ready to disperse. In cup fungi, tiny threads instead hold the peridioles in place, but that is not the case in bird's nest fungi.

More amazingly, species of this genus Nidula can reproduce both sexually and asexually.

So what does the tongue-twister of the name Nidula niveotomentosa mean? "Nidula" means "little nest" ... for obvious reasons. "Niveotomentosa" is a bit more involved. Break it apart. "Niveo" is similar to the word "nivia," a Latin root for "snow," but in this case it refers to the snow-white color of the cup. "Tomentosa" derives from the word "tomentose," meaning covered with short wooly hairs or threads or filaments; check out the photo above, and you'll see how the outside of the cup is indeed true to this name.

So the whole name essentially means "little white nest with dense wooly hairs." Wow, the name makes sense!

One more grand surprise from this tiny, unassuming fungus: this species produces a ketone chemical that has the flavor of raspberry! Some microbiological experiments have suggested that this fungus could be used to produce a natural raspberry flavoring.

This is yet another great example of why we should be conserving biological diversity in this increasingly crowded world of ours -- we never know when some organism will provide a new flavor, food, or pharmaceutical!

How tiny is this? Check out the scale of these tiny organisms in the main photo
at the top of this page; how many might fit on one of my fingertips?

The "nest" cups are only 4-6 mm tall and nearly as broad.
And the peridiole "eggs" are a mere 0.5-1.0 mm in diameter.
(I took the above photo with a very high-powered macro lens.)

EPOW - Ecology Picture of the Week