Three candidate earthstar lineages from foragers’ baskets

An earthstar is hard to mistake for anything else. As the fruit body matures it tears its outer layer, which folds back to form star-shaped rays and lifts the spore sac above the litter. Telling the species apart inside the genus is much harder — the differences come down to the number of rays, the structure of the opening at the top of the sac and the ornamentation of the spores, and those characters can vary even within a single site.

Dr hab. Julia Pawłowska of the Faculty of Biology at the University of Warsaw told the Polish science service Nauka w Polsce what came out of examining such specimens by molecular methods. The material comes from FunDive, a European citizen-science project in which foragers, walkers and schoolchildren do the collecting and mycologists do the identification. Two years of the project have produced more than five thousand specimens. Earthstars alone accounted for over five hundred occurrences from across Europe in one year.

The phylogenetic tree built from that material showed three lineages that match no described species. Pawłowska says everything points to three species entirely new to science, while noting at the same time that the papers are still being prepared. The distinction matters here. Until a description has been through review and published under the rules of nomenclature, a new species does not formally exist — it has data, but no name.

Poland does unexpectedly well in this project. By number of specimens collected it ranks third in Europe, behind Italy and Finland. That is not a matter of exceptional diversity in Polish forests, but of how many people want to go out and look — and that is a variable one can actually change.

For a reader of this site there is a practical conclusion. A rare fungus tends to be found not by a researcher on a planned expedition, but by somebody who happened to be walking past. A network of observers covers ground more densely and across the whole season, in places no single team would reach regularly. There is one condition: the observation has to reach somebody who will check it, together with a date, a location and preferably a dried specimen.

Earthstars are a good example of why such collections are worth more than the species list they produce. Several of them appear in the Polish regulation on the protection of fungi — among others Geastrum campestre, Geastrum lageniforme and Geastrum fornicatum. A record of a protected species is information you need before decisions are taken about a site, not after.

The limits of this report are worth stating. What exists is an announced description resting on a phylogenetic tree, not a published one. The number three may still change in review, the names are unknown and the localities have not been made public. That is why this entry is marked as a report rather than a peer-reviewed result, and we will return to it when the paper appears.

The people who found these fungi are to be named among the co-authors.

Taxonomic status — 29 August 2026

The report still rests on a PAP interview published on 8 May and updated on 12 May 2026. Julia Pawłowska says a phylogenetic tree reveals three earthstar lineages matching no described species and that papers are being prepared. By 29 August we found no formal descriptions providing names, diagnoses, type specimens and a place of publication. These three should therefore not be added to the count of described species, nor confused with an unrelated MycoKeys paper describing three Chinese earthstars. This remains a valuable, explicitly preliminary story about the reach of citizen science; its status should change only when the protologues appear.