I received command of the lectern yesterday, to present the Organism of the Day (Exidia recisa, pictured above) and to lecture on the biology of my favorite Kingdom, the Fungi. It was certainly a fevered race to present information about five phyla in about 40 minutes (minus the spiel on E. recisa). In the earlier section, I did manage to get time at the end to discuss two grades of fungi (grades being groups that are share similarity but not by recent common ancestry, e.g. winged things), the lichens and the imperfect fungi. The latter section was much more hurried, and I think many student hands were strained by furious notetaking, and my own vocal cords by the shear tumult of words such as ascocarp and basidiospore and dikaryon. While I loved the opportunity to share information about the Fifth Kingdom, it would have been nice to slow down and languish on the finer details. The students have an exam tomorrow, and in order to keep up with our semester-long march through life's rich tapestry, we needed to soldier on.
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