Anybody know what this thing is? I saw it in the back yard while fertilizing the ixora.

It's hollow, and those are holes in it, like a whiffle ball. I thought that it was some kind of toy at first.

[Update]

At Michael Mealing's suggestion in comments, I did a search on "stinkhorn," and it does indeed resemble this. There wasn't any noticeable stink to it, though (I got right down on it to smell it). Then again, I don't have the most sensitive schnoz in the world.

[Another update]

Yes, it does look exactly like a clathrus crispus. It makes geographical sense, too, since the climate on the Virgin Islands is not dissimilar to that of south Florida. And this site says that it's common in the Caribbean and Florida.

It looks like a variety of stinkhorn. Does it have a distinctly bad smell to it?

Yep. It looks like a "whiffle ball stinkhorn" or Clathrus ruber.

Actually no. After looking a bit more I think what you have is clathrus crispus.

I was hoping there'd be a morel to this story.

"I was hoping there'd be a morel to this story."

Or at least "A shortcut to Mushrooms".

It looks like the beginning of a horror movie... bizarre.

The old saying in mycology is, "...if it looks like something from outer space, it's a mushroom..."

Hey, I'm from Tampico, Mexico, & I've found one of this things in the garden too; it was like a month ago, and now they are growing everywhere...! does anybody knows how to kill them? some people told me that they are poisonous...

has anyone found out how to kill these things that are all over my garden? They smell so bad!

Help!

I found 2 of these in my backyard, and I live in Illinios. One had a stem and the other didn't

I had a foul odor around my back door, in fact, so strong I could not sit on my porch. It smelled alot like a dead rat. Instead of getting better as the week passed it got almost unbearable. I was determined to find the culprit so while investigating I found this cathrus ruber, a beautiful orange-red in color and lacy in appearance. It has a brown slim that really looks nasty and smells awful. I live in South Georgia, USA, where the weather is very humid. I have lantana planted around the house, we had just had a big freeze so the folliage had turned brown and was damp underneath the mulch, the fungi was growing all along the flower bed. I harvested three 5 gallon buckets of the foul smelling fungus and put it in our burning pit. How can I rid my flower bed of this nuisance?