Scattered to gregarious or subfasiculate. Growing in a wide variety of habitats, e.g. burnt heaths, naked peat, Sphagnum bogs, boggy ground under conifers. Summer to autumn. Occasional but widely distributed.

Pileus 10-40 mm across, conical campanulate with a more or less prominent umbo, flattening with age, and often radiately wrinkled, not or little translucent-striate, pruinose, glabrescent, dark sepia brown to almost black when young, pallescent with age, becoming dark grey-brown to dingy brownish, margin incurved, then spreading, sinuate, becoming scalloped, dingy brownish to pallid. Flesh cartilaginous-tough. Odour mostly indistincive, but also experienced as raphanoid or farinaceous. Lamellae 18-34 reaching the stipe, elastic-tough, ascending, adnate to almost emarginate, decurrent with a tooth, smooth to strongly veined and anastmosing, fairly dark grey-brown, fading with age to pale greyish or whitish, the edge paler. Stipe 30-130 x 2-4 mm, hollow, cartilaginous-tough, smooth to longitudinally finely rugulose or becoming fissured, pruinose, glabrescent for the greater part, lubricous when wet, pallid to whitish above, paler or darker sepia brown below, the base densely covered with long, coarse, flexuous, whitish fibrils and gradually passing into a shorter or longer root.

Basidia 30-50 x 10-15 μm, clavate, 2-spored and clampless or 4-spored with clamps, with sterigmata up to 10 μm long. Spores 11.6-17.5 x 7.6-8.4 μm (2-spored basidia) or 9-12.5 x 6-8.1 μm (4-spored basidia), Qav ~ 1.3-2.0, pip-shaped, smooth, amyloid. Cheilocystidia 24-72 x 5.5-17 μm, forming a sterile band, clavate, subcylindrical or irregularly shaped, covered with few to numerous, fairly coarse excrescences. Pleurocystidia absent. Lamellar trama dextrinoid. Hyphae of the pileipellis 1.8-4 (-6) µm wide, densely covered with warts and short, simple to branched, cylindrical excrescences up to ca. 10 µm long. Hyphae of the cortical layer of the stipe 3-4.5 μm wide, diverticulate, excrescences 1-5.5 x 1-2 μm, terminal cells clavate, diverticulate.

Microphotos of the hyphae of the pileipellis, cheilocystidia and one basidium

Microphotos of cheilocystidia

Mycena magaspora has occured in the literature by several different names ( as M. uracea, M. permixta and M. dissimulabilis). It belongs to sect. Mycena, and can be separated from the other members of the section on account of the dark colour of the pileus, the diverticulate hyphae of the pileipellis, the broad spores, and the occurence on peat, in burnt heaths, among Sphagnum etc., not on decayed wood. A typical character is the cartilaginous-tough stipe, which often is somewhat rugulose, reminding of M. polygramma.

Further images on the Internet:

Renée Lebeuf

First Nature

Hlasek