You can often smell a stinkhorn before you see it. This is what happened today in The New Forest. The smell of something dead was a smell I remembered from my childhood when I first tracked it down to this unusual mushroom.
Stinkhorns first appears as an egg partly submerged in the ground. The mushroom slowly bursts out and forms the very phallic looking fungi, its cap is covered in a sticky smelly substance, called a gleba which contains the the spores. Fly’s are very attracted to it, they devour the gleba and get covered in spores which then get distributed to other places where they can grow.
It is said some Victorians were so embarrassed by these fungi that they would destroy them if they found them to prevent impressionable young ladies from seeing them.
Within a few hours the fly’s clear the cap of the gleba.
Continued Reflections from my world. 