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Excerpts from Jim Conrad's
Naturalist Newsletter
Entry issued on January 27, 2002, from the woods near Natchez, Mississippi, USA
STINKHORN
On Monday the season's first Stinkhorn, MUTINUS ELEGANS -- a weird but fairly common sort of mushroom -- appeared among the leaf-mulch in one of our organic gardens. It's called a stinkhorn because it stinks, and if you look at the picture of one at the right you'll see why country folks sometimes call it Dog-pecker Mushroom, or some such honest name. Some books call it "Devil's Dipstick," but I think that that's just a made-up name to get around the fact that it looks so like a dog's penis.
Stinkhorns secrete a disreputable-smelling, greenish goo. Flies and other insects attracted by the stench walk over the goo's surface. In doing so the fungus's spores stick to the feet, and when the insect flies away it carries those spores to new locations, thus serving as the mushroom's dispersal mechanism. This strategy must be effective because stinkhorns are found worldwide.
Something curious about the stinkhorn life cycle is that the part aboveground "hatches" from a distinctly egglike structure that forms in the ground. The first such "egg" I shoveled up in the garden I thought was surely a turtle egg. It had a somewhat leathery "shell" and a more or less gelatinous interior, just like you might expect a turtle egg to be like. However, stinkhorn eggs are strictly fungal, and you can eat them, too -- just slice and fry. I've read that you can eat the aboveground part, too, but it's mostly hollow and it stinks, so I can't imagine it being very appetizing.
Stinkhorns teach that just because you CAN do something, that doesn't mean that you SHOULD do it.