Suillus luteus

Suillus luteus is a bolete fungus, and the type species of the genus Suillus. It is native to Eurasia, from the British Isles to Korea. It has been introduced widely elsewhere, including North and South America, southern Africa, Australia and New Zealand.

About Suillus luteus in brief

Suillus luteus is a bolete fungus, and the type species of the genus Suillus. Commonly referred to as slippery jack or sticky bun in English-speaking countries, its names refer to the brown cap, which is characteristically slimy in wet conditions. The fungus is edible, though not as highly regarded as other bolete mushrooms, and is commonly prepared and eaten in soups, stews or fried dishes. It is native to Eurasia, from the British Isles to Korea, it has been introduced widely elsewhere, including North and South America, southern Africa, Australia and New Zealand. The fruit body cap often has a distinctive conical shape before flattening with age, reaching up to 13 cm in diameter. Unlike most other boletes, it bears a distinctive membranous ring that is tinged brown to violet on the underside. It forms symbiotic ectomycorrhizal associations with living trees by enveloping the tree’s underground roots with sheaths of fungal tissue. It produces spore-bearing fruit bodies, often in large numbers, above ground in summer and autumn. It has tubes extending downward from the underside of the cap, rather than gills; spores escape at maturity through the tube openings, or pores. The pore surface is yellow, and covered by a membrane when young. The pale stipe, or stem, measures up to 10  cm tall and 3 cm  thick and bears small dots near the top.

The specific epithet is the Latin adjective lūtěus, meaning “yellow”. The fungus was one of the many species first described in 1753 by the “father of taxonomy” Carl Linnaeus, who, in the second volume of his Species Plantarum, gave it the name Boletus luteuus. In addition to the British Mycological Society approved name ‘slippery jack’, other common names for this bolete include ‘pine boletus’ and ‘sticky bun’. In works published before 1987, the slippery jack was written fully as Suillus Gray, as the description byLinnaeus had been name sanctioned in 1821 by Swedish naturalist Elias Magnus Fries. In their monograph on North American species, Alexander Hbert and Harry S. Delbert S. Smith classified Suillus as the neotype of North America’s Suillus luteus. The species was designated as a monotype of the North American Suillus in 1964. In 1986, Alexander Hbert and Harry S. Delbert classified it as ‘North American species’ in their monotype collection of fruit bodies from Sweden. In the same year, the British Botanical Code of Nomenclature changed the rules on the names of fungi, and names can now be considered valid as far back as 1 May 1753, the date of publication of LinNAeus’s work.

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