THE NEW YORK TIMES - Over the summer, Lohit Y.T., a river and wetlands specialist at World Wildlife Fund-India, set off with his friends in the drizzly foothills of the Western Ghats in India. They had one goal: to see amphibians and reptiles.
But their herpetology hunt turned into a fungus find.
Dozens of Rao’s intermediate golden-backed frogs were in a roadside pond. But the crew noticed something different about one of the frogs perched on a twig — a curious growth. Upon closer inspection, they realized it was a tiny mushroom erupting from the roughly thumb-size frog’s flank, like an itty-bitty fungal limb. In other words, a mushroom sprouting from a living frog.
The mushroom’s identity will also remain a mystery because mycologists need more than a photo for identification. Sydney Glassman, a fungal ecologist at the University of California, Riverside, isn’t convinced that the growth is even a mushroom. Further evidence — obtaining a genetic sample or seeing the gills and spore color — is needed to make an identification, she said.