The Origins of a Closed Bolete

Boletes are a distinctive group of mushrooms in which the underside of the fruiting body is covered by tubular pores instead of gills. Though boletes are classified in the fungal order Boletales, not all members of this order produce bolete-type fruiting bodies (as exemplified in an earlier post). Consider, for example, the case of Gastrosuillus.

'Gastrosuillus' sp., copyright Danny Miller.

Gastrosuillus was recognised in 1989 for a small group of species found in North America that closely resembled members of the more typical bolete genus Suillus (the slippery jacks) except for their production of secotioid fruiting bodies, in which the pores are distorted and do not form a flattened plane, and may remain covered by an external membrane (secotioid fruiting bodies may be considered an intermediate form between typical mushrooms and the gastroid fruiting bodies of fungi such as puffballs). All Gastrosuillus species were extremely rare, known only from single locations or even single collections. Gastrosuillus suilloides and G. amaranthii were found in California, G. imbellus in Oregon, and G. laricinus in New York State. All four were found on the ground in conifer forest; fruiting bodies of G. suilloides could be buried (Bessette et al. 2000).

From its inception, a close relationship with and possibly even derivation from members of the genus Suillus seems to have been on the cards for Gastrosuillus. It should be noted that Suillus was not the only bolete genus with a secotioid satellite: as Gastrosuillus was to Suillus, so Gastroboletus was to Boletus, and Gastroleccinum was to Leccinum. So it should have come as little surprise when a molecular analysis of Gastrosuillus species by Kretzer & Bruns (1997) found them to be nested within Suillus, nor forming a single clade within that genus. Instead, the western species were well separated from the New York G. laricinus. As a result, Kretzer & Bruns advocated the synonymisation of the two genera.

Typical form of larch bolete Suillus grevillei, copyright Luridiformis.

But the demotions didn't stop there. Not only was Gastrosuillus laricinus nested molecularly within Suillus, it appeared to be nested within a particular species, S. grevillei (conversely, the California species form a distinct lineage that is, so far as we know, entirely secotioid; the Oregon G. imbellus has not been examined molecularly owing to difficulties in extracting DNA from the single known specimen). The sole known location for G. laricinus lies within the range of S. grevillei, with the two species having been found in close proximity, and the indications were that G. laricinus was a very recent derivative of S. grevillei or possibly even a mere growth variant. Again, this is not entirely without precedent. Secotioid variants have been recorded of other mushroom species, and secotioid-like forms of the agaricoid mushroom Lentinus tigrinus have even been shown to be the result of a recessive allele of a single gene. Kretzer & Bruns (1997) therefore suggested that G. laricinus be synonymised entirely with S. grevillei. This action does not appear to have gained universal acceptance (for instance, the two are provisionally treated as distinct by Bessette et al., 2000) but is certainly worthy of consideration.

REFERENCES

Bessette, A. E., W. C. Roody & A. R. Bessette. 2000. North American Boletes: A color guide to the fleshy pored mushrooms. Syracuse University Press.

Kretzer, A., & T. D. Bruns. 1997. Molecular revisitation of the genus Gastrosuillus. Mycologia 89 (4): 586–589.