Puerto Rico Foray 2025

Hongos en la Isla del Encanto

Good afternoon, friends,

Late Sunday night I returned from our first Puerto Rico Mushroom Foray. I cohosted the trip with Kurt Miller, a local mycologist, and my friends at Catskill Fungi. This foray recreated a trip I did with Kurt, Gabriela, and John, back in 2022, but this time we expanded the itinerary and brought a group along with us. We had a core group of fourteen with us over the eight days, and we were fortunate to be joined by a handful of folks from the island for a couple days here and there.

Heading into the trip I was a touch apprehensive about how the group dynamics would unfold, but the group exceeded all my expectations. Some of the participants I knew going in, and some I met for the first time. We even had one of my old coworkers from Central Park join us, which meant a lot to me — shoutout to Harry. Each person was open-minded, thoughtful, and happy to go with the flow. A very easy to group to travel with and learn with, and the bond we developed felt familial by the end of it. Someone even laughed so hard they peed their pants.

Photo of our group at Eye on the Rainforest in Patillas (photo credit: Monique). 3T, our host, is pictured third from the right in the front row.

The Route

We spent the first three nights in San Juan. That included a trip to Old San Juan where we found flamingo chanterelles growing right at the base of El Morro, the 16th-century Spanish fort, and UNESCO World Heritage site; a visit to Max at Wild Culture Mushrooms where we learned about mushroom cultivation on the island; a tostones cooking workshop led by Kurt’s wife, Yaritza; and a day trip out to El Yunque where we mushroomed and swam in waterfalls.

We left San Juan and headed toward Patillas on the southern part of the island. We spent the next two nights at Eye on the Rainforest, a thousand-acre tract of forest that’s devoted to Puerto Rican plant conservation and sustainable forestry. We met Thrity (3T), the steward of the land and all-around force of nature, who has been there since the turn of the century. She shared with us the history of Puerto Rican hardwood tree conservation as well as the hardships and setbacks Eye on the Rainforest (and the whole island) suffered after Hurricane Maria in 2017.

She did put a call out for volunteers, and it’s a shame we weren’t there for more time to help out, but if you’re interested you can stay at the preserve and volunteer a few hours a day to plant, weed, maintain trails, or do general cleanup for a mere $25/night to cover room and board. I will be back.

Pink Chanterelles (Cantharellus coccolobae) which were growing with Sea Grape (Coccoloba uvifera) at El Morro. We cooked them up with eggs the next morning.

The last leg of our trip was in Rincón, a surf town on the west coast. We got to look for mushrooms around Domes, a decommissioned nuclear power plant that now serves as a backdrop for some of the best surf on the island. We also got a geology lesson from a local geologist surfer, Mike, and got to eat fresh fruit and process Aloe with Amy on her land that also serves as an outdoor classroom.

It’s impossible to compress the whole trip into a few paragraphs, but I took a lot of pictures of the fungi we saw, so if a picture is worth a thousand words then hopefully the mushrooms can convey the message. There were points at which the large, gilled mushrooms were a bit elusive — particularly in El Yunque — but there were more than enough at each stop throughout the trip. Selecting a few from each location was difficult, but without further ado, the mushrooms of our 2025 Puerto Rico Foray:

El Yunque Mushrooms

Big Laughing Gym (Gymnopilus imperialis)

We found these large, potentially psychedelic, Big Laughing Gyms growing right on the side of the road in the rainforest.

Mycena section Exornatae

These incredibly small, incredibly short-lived bonnet mushrooms were growing out of a dead palm frond.

Hygrocybe occidentalis

A vibrant red mushroom from cap to gills to stipe.

Ergot (Claviceps paspali)

This pathogenic fungus infects wild grasses and can be used to create the psychedelic substance LSD. The fruiting body grows from a sclerotium (a dense ball the fungus creates to store nutrients) shown in the photo on the right.

Eye on the Rainforest Mushrooms

Rainforest Horsehair Marasmius (Marasmius crinis-equi)

This fungus has airborne mycelium, the texture of horsehair, and is a parasite on plants. The picture on the right shows a bird used this aerial mycelium as nesting material. One of my favorite finds from the whole trip.

Talaromyces palmae

This ascomycete mold is specific to palm nuts. We found the mold only once this trip, despite seeing palm nuts everywhere we went, but when we did find it, it was on every palm nut around the parent palm.

Tropical Chicken of the Woods? (Kusaghiporia talpae)

This large polypore, in the same family as Chicken of the Woods (Laetiporus), was growing out of dead roots in the soil. This was the largest mushroom we found throughout the week, but unfortunately we were too tired to cook up this exotic polypore.

Rincón Mushrooms

Stinky Sphere (Clathrus crispa)

This tropical stinkhorn produced its gleba (spore matter) in the middle of the circular openings. Flies, attracted by the smell (which was different than that our northeastern stinkhorns), would eat the gleba and transport the spores to other parts of the forest.

Trogia cantharelloides

These mushrooms look like your run-of-the-mill LBMs (little brown mushrooms) from above, but when you flip them over they look like a chanterelle and have vibrant purple gills.

Tropical Woodear (Auricularia brasiliensis)

This mushroom had hairy, concentric bands on the top, like a Turkey Tail (Trametes versicolor), but was rubbery and gelatinous underneath, like a Woodear.

Last Mushroom Found:

Before we went to the airport, we did a little scouting for our next Puerto Rico Foray (mark your calendars for January 2027). It had rained the past two days in San Juan, and Kurt wanted to find some Amanitas that grow with the seagrapes (Coccoloba uvifera) and are particularly responsive to rain. We found both the species we were looking for, and one that had a particularly nice spot on a limestone cliff overlooking the ocean.

Beach-loving Ringless Amanita (Amanita arenicola)

The Non-Fungal Interactions

On our drive from Rincón back to San Juan, we met Veronica with Coco Conservacion Costera. She hiked us out to one of Puerto Rico’s three train tunnels, built in the middle of the twentieth century. No longer operational, it now mimics a cave environment and is inhabited by bats and the Guabá.

The Guabá is a whip spider (Phrynus longipes) that lives in the cutout in the middle of the tunnel that served as a refuge for people caught in the tunnel when a train was coming. Like Shelob in her lair, Veronica told us that she lives in the cutout and would be there when we got to the middle of the tunnel. We trepidatiously walked into the darkness and when we shined our lights into the cutout, lo and behold there she was.

You don’t really get a sense of the size of this arachnid, but she was much larger than what any of us were comfortable with.

Star Jelly (Nostoc commune)

At Eye on the Rainforest we found a cyanobacterium (a photosynthetic bacteria) that erupts from the soil during rain and amasses large colonies of these gelatinous fruiting bodies.

Tree Millipede (Anadenobolus arboreus)

We saw these all over the island. They live in trees and are only found in Puerto Rico and the lower Antilles. I recently learned that millipedes are herbivores and centipedes are carnivores.

This trip was special. I can’t reiterate enough how much the group rocked. Time felt suspended. A lot of trips I’m pretty cognizant of what day it is, what the plan is for the day, and when I’m going home, but that was not the case this past week. Now, that may not be exactly what you want to hear from one of the facilitators, one of the people in charge of making sure we got to where we were going on time and in one piece, but it truly was totally tranquilo. Everyone took a chance on us leading our first foray, stepped out of their own comfort zones, and it made for not just a memorable experience, but a spiritual one.

Reacclimatizing has definitely been a transition. I was swimming in the ocean on Sunday and then shoveling snow on Monday. Now I’m watching Bad Bunny music videos and reminiscing on what was. Benito said it best when he said, “No me quiero ir de aqui” or “I don’t want to leave here”.

Mushroom Events this week with the Upper Cape Naturalist Club

• Thursday, December 18th, 6:00-7:30 pm: Winter Fungi Talk at Bourne Library

• Saturday, December 20th, 10 am-noon: Winter Fungi Walk at Breivogel Ponds Conservation Area, Falmouth

The winter solstice is on Sunday. Longer days are on the horizon,

Aubrey