Truffle Genus: Macowanites

Macowanites chlorinosmus basidiospore scale = 10 µm

Kingdom: Fungi Phylum: Basidiomycota Order: Russulales Family: Russulaceae

Spore Characters

Generally similar to Gymnomyces but often longitudinally asymmetric.

View photos of Macowanites spores

Sporocarp Characters

Similar to Gymnomyces but with a prominent columella and stem. Macowanites is intermediate between Gymnomyces and the mushroom genus Russula.

View photos of Macowanites sporocarps

Name Derivation

Named by Hungarian mycologist Karoly Kalchbrenner (1807-1886) (1876) in honor of the botanist Peter MacOwan (1830-1909) who collected the type species in South Africa. The Greek suffix -ites (indicating a close connection) was appended to differentiate it from Macowania, a genus in the aster family.

Distribution

Hypogeous under ectomycorrhizal conifers and hardwoods in western and southeastern North America, the former U.S.S.R, South Africa, and Australasia.
Season: Summer and autumn.
Species known from North Temperate Forests: About twenty.

Keys and Descriptions

Singer and Smith covered the genus in 1960. Later, Smith (1963) described new species and revised the key; Pegler and Young (1979) and Miller (1988) describe and illustrate representative spores. Trappe et al., (2002) present a complete list of all species and have corrected the nomenclature in the previous publications. Some mycologists place Macowanites species in Russula.