This is a flowerhead and standing-dead blades of Spartina cynosuroides, big cordgrass, the sister species to smooth cordgrass. Big cordgrass grows in intermediate-salinity situations, and smooth cordgrass patches in higher-salinity situations will grade into big-cordgrass stands as salinity falls going up an estuary. The flowerhead of big cordgrass is distinctly more brushlike than that of smooth cordgrass, and the leaf blades almost always have a longitudinally running smooth keel at their centers (absent in smooth cordgrass). Next to nothing is known about the fungal decomposers of big cordgrass shoots.