Oyster Mushroom

oyster mushroom (or oyster fungus) Pleurotus ostreatus, is so named because it looks something like an oyster, and has a slippery texture. It grows abundantly on the trunks of dead or dying deciduous trees, and sometimes fence posts (or even, as a 19th-century observer called Plowright discovered, on the dry skull of a dead, stranded whale), in temperate regions throughout the world, from autumn to winter. It withstands cold, and even snow.