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Excerpts from Jim Conrad's
Naturalist Newsletter
Entry issued on August 9, 2019, from the forest just west of Tepakán; elev. ~9m (~30 ft), N21.053°, W89.052°; north-central Yucatán state, MÉXICO
COLLYBIOID MUSHROOMS
Here well into the rainy season nearly every afternoon a storm deposits at least a little rain, sometimes just a mist, sometimes a shower and sometimes a lot. Litter on the forest floor stays saturated. Normally it's too dry here to see many mushrooms, but that's not the case now, though not many species are represented, and mostly they're so small that most people don't notice them. One such is shown below:
That little colony sprang up overnight after a heavy rain. Note the white stems darkening toward their bases. A shot showing spore-producing gills on a cap's underside is shown below:
The twig was so small that I carried it home and kept it in a can in the shade, so I could watch what happened to the mushrooms. Mainly, during the dry days they tended to shrivel so that I was sure they'd died, but with the next rain they resuscitated, though after three or four days the stems became slender and black, and the caps enlarged somewhat, as shown below, with my finger for scale.
I've tried several times to identify mushrooms similar to these and never have achieved a name that felt good. I'm somewhat sure that they're what Michael Kuo at MushroomExpert.Com calls "Collybioid Mushrooms," a name embracing several genera and many species. Even up north where mycologists have long studied the fungi, the taxonomy of this group is a mess. Down here where few studies have been done, there's a fair chance that our little white twig-decayer is a species new to science, but who knows?
You might enjoy reading Michael Kuo's page on Collybioid Mushrooms, which includes a decent key to species, though they're North American species, not tropical Mexican ones.