...and Amanita muscaria

Found a nice patch of these just a mile from my home here in Auburn, right near a stand of loblolly pines.  It's an amazing trove of sporocarps in all stages, from the just emergent buttons to large individuals with planar pilei and the warts on the caps washed off.  These are your poster children for the mushroom.  If you see a mushroom represented in the media, it's usually one of these guys.  From the home of the Smurfs to Mario Bros and on and on and on.  

I went out looking just in the neighborhood with one of my friends, and we can upon scads of things.  More to follow...

Amanita citrina!

I came across this mushroom while I was depositing a check at my credit union. The willow oak in the background is in an island of asphalt, and is most likely the host for this ectomycorrhizal species.  It had been warm and rainy over the previous couple of days, and I was getting mushroom vision:  seeing mushrooms everywhere whether they were there or not.  I had a lot of work to do to finish out the term, getting final exams ready, etc, but I knew that the mushrooms were coming up and the freeze was coming too.  Fortunately I happened upon this fellow.  It looked very Amanita-y from the top,  warty veil remnants on the cap, brilliant white stipe, and with a little digging, you can see the volva at the base.  The cap had a pale yellowish green cast to it.  Weber and Smith helped get this very quickly to Amanita citrina.  The volva sure enough looked like a sliced loaf of bread, and the cap smells like raw potatoes, and I got a nice white spore print from it. 

Life imitates art (?)

Mycologists love to put the fun in fungi.  Dr. Dennis Desjardin is definitely up there in my book of the funniest mycologists I've never met.  He named a species of Phallus after a colleague (noting "with permission" in the manuscript), and now, he's added another species description to his credit, which he's named after Spongebob Squarepants, Spongiforma squarepantsii.  Desjardin participated in the description of the genus in a previous paper, which indicates just strange this group is.  At first glance, even the expert mycologists could not tell if the specimens were ascomycetes or basidiomycetes!  Closer inspection by microscopy and even closer via DNA sequence analysis revealed Spongiforma to be basidiomycetes, actually gasteroid (truffle-like) boletes.  The basidiocarps are sponge-like in appearance, and the authors thought the photomicrographs resembled Bikini Bottom, thus the new species was named for the world's most famous marine fry-cook.

So far, the group has only been found in southeastern Asia and the adjacent super-archipelago. S. squarepantsii was found in a dipterocarp forest on the island of Borneo.

Busy busy busy

A nice little Pluteus cervinus on an old rotten log

It's been raining, so I've been out hunting mushrooms.  As I mentioned previously, I went out on the Tuskegee National Forest with some of my students, out on the Bartram Trail (or Bertram Trail, if you believe the sign, which you shouldn't).  That was a couple of weeks ago, now, and already I've been at it again.  Last week I gave a talk to my new friends in the East Alabama Orchid Society about mycorrhizal fungi and orchids (a very cool story I'll elaborate on later, I promise).  Earlier this week I gave a talk to my daughter's kindergarten class about mushrooms, and this morning I went out to the Alabama Nature Center in Millbrook, AL to talk to some of their nature educators about identifying mushrooms and other macrofungi.  They do have a beautiful site out there, so I'll be sure to head back, and I suggest you do too.  After me flapping my lips for close to two hours, we got to go looking for some mushrooms.  Even though it had only rained yesterday (and some last week) we saw some neat stuff out there: Cortinarius (pictured, species?  not sure I even want to go there), Hygrocybe chlorophana (I called it Hygrophorus, which it used to be, same family, still a waxy cap, nice yellow thing) Hypholoma fasciculare (sulfur tuft, formerly known as Naematoloma), and lots of polypores and what-not.  It looks like we're getting more rain, which is good news!  And to top it off, I just got a copy of Taylor Lockwood's Mushroom Identification Trilogy in the mail.   I'll let you know what I think of it by and by.  Good times!

Cortinarius sp., with fresh cortina!

Kingdom for a day

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. 

Know Your Mushrooms, my review

I finally got to see "Know Your Mushrooms" (2008), the documentary by director Ron Mann. I've blogged about this movie a couple of times before, how it was being made, how it features music by the Flaming Lips.

The film was shot primarily at the Telluride Mushroom Festival in Colorado, and features Larry Evans, a mycophile and "mushroom gypsy". Also featured is Gary Lincoff, who is the technical consultant on the film. They go on a foray, give lectures, and even have a mushroom parade.
The film explains and expands upon many of the common ideas about mushrooms. The most common mushrooms (Agaricus bisporus), mushrooms as sources of hallucinogenic substances, wild mushrooms as edible and choice vs. poisonous and toxic.

The film features several quick quizzes including questions about the Humongous Fungus, and some old timey footage from documentaries and other sources as well. And snippets of interviews and talks with mycophiles including composer John Cage, physician Dr. Andrew Weil and Terence McKenna

Also, there is some speculation about the role of psychedelic mushrooms in driving human evolution, the importance of mycorrhizal fungi, and the potential for mycoremediation and mycomedicinals .

At the end, there is a message. "End Fungiphobia now". I highly recommend this film for anyone who cares enough about fungi to have read to this point. While there was little new information for a big myco-nerd like me, the material is accurate, and presents an excellent introduction to the world of fleshy sporocarps.

Cane Creek Canyon Nature Preserve

A good friend of mine from the AU Davis Arboretum invited me along on an Earth Day field trip up to the Cane Creek Canyon Nature Preserve, which is on land owned by Professor Jim Lacefield and his wife Faye. Prof. Lacefield is a geologist and author of the book "Lost Worlds in Alabama Rocks", which is a fantastic reference for any student of Alabama's natural history.

Fossils! and a quarter for scale

The Preserve is in Colbert County, up in northwestern Alabama abutting Mississippi and Tennessee. They've got the biggest population of Alabama azalea (Rhododendron alabamense) in the state, as well as lots of other amazing flora.

The Alabama azalea in blooming glory

Azaleas, rhododendrons, blueberries, huckleberries, and many others are members of the Ericaceae, which is a family with its own sorts of mycorrhizas that are slightly different from typical ecto- or endo-mycorrhizas. Read the page from Penn State for more information.

Cypripedium parviflorum, a ladyslipper orchid.

All orchids are obligate mycotrophs, and all require nutrition from fungi at some point in their life cycle. Like the Monotropaceae (split off from the rest of the Ericaceae), some orchids lack chlorophyll throughout their lives and require nutrition from nearby photosynthesizing plants. That nutrition is mediated by fungi!

Pedicularis canadensis, Orobanchaceae

We also saw lots of the Canada lousewort pictured above. Louseworts are another hemiparasitic group of flowers, meaning they rely upon other plants. However, they do not require fungal mediation but produce their own haustoria with their roots.

As for the rest of the mycota, I didn't see a whole lot out there. Pretty much no mushrooms, but I did see a lot of mayapple rust. Mayapple is quite a common wildflower in the eastern US, and was flowering in great abundance yesterday. The distribution of the rust was very patchy, affecting single individuals here and there.

An uninfected mayapple, Podophyllum peltatum (Berberidaceae)

Mayapple rust is caused by Puccinia podophylli, and is an autecious rust, meaning it only requires one host. Compare this with apple-cedar rust, or cedar quince rust which are heteroecious. I *believe* it is also demicyclic (meaning it lacks a uredinial stage)

The upper (adaxial) leaf surface, note the discoloration and puckering

And the lower (abaxial) surface, with the characteristic aecial pustules.

As the host is not of much economical importance, not much research has been published on this rust for many years.

To sum up, not a great day for fungi, but a fantastic day for expanding my knowledge of Alabama's great flora and geological history.

Boletes!

Howdy, Y'all.
The rain has delivered! While in the field, I came upon these boletes, which I'm pretty sure are Boletus rubellus. I'm not sure if I'm going to try eating them, given what the mushroom
expert has to say about this species. Arora says this species may be edible, but as the old saw goes, "there are old mycologists, and there are bold mycologists, but there are few old, bold mycologists".
These particular mushrooms were in a pine plantation with some oaks mixed in, which has a pretty high water table. The stipes (stems) are pretty thin compared to other boletes, which can be quite bulbous. And, of course, there's the blue stain reaction, as demonstrated at the top right, there.

Boletes are ectomycorrhizal, which explains why they tend to be found only in certain types of forests.

Dead Man's Foot

The fungus of the moment is Pisolithus tinctorius, the dead man's foot (or also the "dog turd fungus". It is so named for the shape of the fruiting body, which erupts out of the earth like the start of a zombie invasion.
Actually, this fungus is one of the "good guys", in that it is ectomycorrhizal. Okay, so decaying otherwise recalcitrant matter is not bad, and being a pathogen is bad if you're a pathogen that people want to use is bad from the perspective of the people who are in competition with the pathogen, but mycorrhizal species are considered "good" by most people. Mycorrhizas (alt. mycorrhizae) are considered mutualistic symbioses between fungi and plant roots. Fungi, being fundamentally microorganisms, can explore the soil much better than plant roots, because of their high surface-volume ratio. Thus they can get at nutrients like phosphorus and other elements that plants need from soil better than the plants themselves. In return for their superior soil scavenging services, the fungi get paid in carbon, sugar, photosynthate, which the plants make from carbon dioxide in the air and send down to their roots.
Spores of dead man's foot are commonly sown in with pine seedlings to help them to get established.