Laces or Liquorice?

Nothing could prepare me when walking through a local woodland and seeing this strange scene in front of me. It looked like black laces or liquorice. I had seen a similar picture before but couldn't recall what it was, but I knew it would be something to do with fungi - but what was it?  At home I trawled trough my fungi reference books but there was no picture of anything like this.

What I didn't realise at the time was that originally these threads would have been whiter, and had turned black with age and being exposed to the elements. The log that they were covering had no doubt lost it's outer bark (this was a fallen rotting log), thereby exposing the threads underneath. It was like a scene from 'war of the worlds', and certainly looked strange if nothing else.

So what was it?
They are mycelial threads which spread through a tree, and more importantly, from one tree to another. The black bootlace-like 'rhizomorphs' make up parallel branches of fungal hyphae. The threads in my picture shown above have developed beneath the bark of a hardwood tree, with the bark falling away to reveal what's going on underneath. In this case they have bunched up to form substantial threads some 5cm or so in diameter. When growing through the soil, these rhizomorphs can link the Honey Fungus mycelium from an infected tree into a new host tree which can be several meters away.

 

Honey Fungus, picture copyright of Pat O'Reilly of First Nature. Top picture copyright of N J Davies