Found in BorneoIUCN Red List status: Not Evaluated

Glowing fungi are rare: out of the 135,000 named species on Earth, only one hundred are bioluminescent. It’s fairly unusual, too, for a photographer to shoot a still-unnamed species: biologists Dr. Dennis E. Desjardin of San Francisco State University and Dr. Brian A. Perry of California State University East Bay named Mycena silvaelucens two years after Tim took this shot in Borneo. Like other bioluminescent fungi, the forest light mushroom emits a constant light, though, understandably, it is visible to us only after sunset. At night, when humidity is relatively high, the fungus releases its spores, some of which settle on the nocturnal insects and other arthropods that have clustered around its glow; they later carry the spores away to colonise new terrain in the forest. As Dr. Desjardin explains, 'Natural selection may favour the metabolically expensive phenomenon of emitting light to attract spore dispersers over passive wind dispersal in closed-canopy forest.'