What Do Stinkhorn Fungi Eat?

Spores

• Stinkhorn are unable to produce their food through the process of photosynthesis, as plants do. They acquire nutrients from dead -- or even living -- plants, animals, or other fungi.

Nutrients

• The smell of a stinkhorn, which is like putrefying meat, and its black slimy mass of spores, exist to attract flies. The flies soon discover that the stinkhorn has not lived up to expectations and they move on -- taking with them spores stuck to their mouth parts and legs. When the flies land on something that really is rotting, the spores rub off and several stinkhorn fungi have found a good source of nutrition and a home.

Network

• Like many large fungi, the only visible part of a stinkhorn is the fruit body, attached to which is an unseen network of threads called "hyphae." These are a very efficient feeding system.

  A hypha is a cylindrical thread-like filament, less than 10 percent of the thickness of a human hair in diameter. Individually, they are invisible to the human eye but hundreds of them together in what is called a "mycelium" can be seen.

Systematic

• The many thousands of hyphae attached to each stinkhorn systematically work their way through the fungus's food source, which may be soil, leaf litter, rotten wood, animal or bird dung, or a dead creature, depending on the species of stinkhorn.

Germination

• Stinkhorn spores have been found in fly and bird dung. Spores have been known to germinate inside flies, and the hyphae of the fungus grow outwards from the dead body of the fly.