Ascocarp

The morel, Morchella, an edible ascocarp, not a mushroom, favored by gourmets, is a mass of apothecia fused together in a single large structure or cap.

The asci are globose, deliquescent, and scattered throughout the interior cavity i.e. as in Eurotium or arising in tufts from the basal region of ascocarps as in Erysiphe.

The truffles, for instance, have solved this problem by attracting animals such as wild boars, which break open the tasty ascocarps and spread the spores over a wide area.

However, unlike the cleistothecium, the peridial wall of a gymnothecium consists of a loosely woven "tuft" of hyphae, often ornamented with elaborate coils or spines.

The unitunicate asci are usually cylindrical in shape, borne on a stipe (stalk), released from a pore, developed from the inner wall of the perithecium and arise from a basal plectenchyma-centrum.

Sometimes the perithecia are "free" (individually visible from the outside), but in many species they are embedded in a dense sterile tissue of haploid cells called a stroma (plural: stromata).

[3] This is similar to a perithecium, but the asci are not regularly organised into a hymenium and they are bitunicate, having a double wall that expands when it takes up water and shoots the enclosed spores out suddenly to disperse them.