Stench

A beautiful sunlit glade in the Gaunless Valley in County Durham, on an idyllic late summer afternoon ...... and there's a sickly stench drifting down-wind. A decaying corpse? Sewage? No, just ..........

..... a stinkhorn toadstool Phallus impudicus, with an attendant swamp of bluebottles, protruding through the wood sorrel leaves. That netted cap of the fungus is coated with a gelatinous mass of brown, sticky spores when it first reaches maturity, but by the time I found this one the flies, attracted by the evil smell, had either eaten them already or carried most of them away on their feet. Stinkhorn spores can pass through a fly's gut without harm and are dispersed in their droppings.

John Ramsbottom, in his classic Mushrooms and Toadstools in the New Naturalist series, published in 1953, relates several entertaining anecdotes about stinkhorns. "The stinkhorn is often the cause of needless anxiety about sanitation", he observes, and mentions how he was able to pinpoint the fungus as the cause of noxious smells that were ruining the business of a tea room on the Norfolk coast. He also mentions that in a letter to The Times in 1865 the correspondent put forward the theory that the fungus could cause cholera and similar epidemics. Of more interest to the naturalist, he relates how the fungus is very attractive to slugs, that can detect the smell from a distance of 'six or seven yards away", on account of their ultra-sensitive antennae. Apparently they visit the fungus at night and help to disperse the spores by eating them. Rather them than me.....