Long time no posts!

I now see that my last post was on August 8th?  Crikey! It's been a while.  Not that I haven't been out and about looking for mushrooms and other fungal pursuits,  I've just been busy busy busy.  I'm teaching a Principles of Biology course and it's taking a lot of my time.  I try to use a few fungal examples every now and again, but for these folks fungi are just something that you put on pizza or perhaps something that spurs you to throw your bread away.  

I've been adding a few things to my bookshelf as well, including Bessette et al.'s North American Boletes, and the How To Identify Mushrooms series.  But to be honest, I haven't been able to look at them much yet.  Also, I got my compound microscope fixed up, so I'm able to look at some fungi on the scale at which they typically operate (remember, fungi are fundamentally microorganisms!).  Hopefully, I'll be able to put some of my photomicrographs up soon enough.  Okay, back to the lecture writing.  Holler at ya, later, Blogosphere.

Strange news

A friend of mine posted this on Facebook; an article about some orange goo washing up on a beach in Alaska.  At first they thought it might have been microscopic eggs of things.  Now they are saying that it's actually spores of a rust fungus.  Rusts are notoriously difficult fungi to work with because, for one thing, they have up to five different spore stages, and another, they are biotrophic, meaning they require a living host to survive and reproduce.  So if you don't have a living plant host, identification is especially difficult.   This is indeed some very strange news!

Update: 8/19/11.  Looks like I beat MSN to the punch! They're running the story on their front page today, though with few details.  Believe me,  I'll tell you what this thing turns out to be when I find out.  If I may stand on my soapbox for one small minute, this is an excellent example of why scientific illiteracy is a significant problem in our world. 

The Fastest Living Thing in the World

Once again, fungi are collecting superlatives. I had to check to make sure it's still considered a zygomycete (it is) but Pilobolus (not to be confused with the dance company) is reported to be the fastest living thing in the world. 

Zora Neale Hurston, author, secret Alabamian, zombie hunter; PvZ

I apologize for the hiatus.  Actually, there have been lots of mushrooms coming up gangbusters all over, with the passing rainstorms we've been getting, and I've been meaning to post pictures and comments.  So what shook me out of my quiescent period?  It was this YouTube video I stumbled upon, an interview with the author Zora Neale Hurston about her experiences with zombies (yes, real zombies from Haiti).  Though she claimed to be from Florida, Ms. Hurston was actually from just down the road in Notasulga, Alabama.

On rather tangentially related topic, I've become quite enamored of the video game Plants vs. Zombies, which features both zombies (not the real but the fictionalized type) and mushrooms! I know I'm rather late to the party with this.  The designers are quite creative in ascribing zombie-killing powers to an array of plants and mushrooms. In the iPhone version, you can cultivate a Zen garden, including a special section just for your mushrooms.  And it's got a catchy theme song you can hear when you defeat the game.

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.

Spore print technique

I recently invested in one of Taylor Lockwood's DVDs on mushroom identification.  One reason was to address the lack of nature documentaries on fungi being used in the class I taught last term.  In the video, he suggests collecting spore prints in a different way.  Instead of using contrasting black and white pattern (as I have done), he suggests using aluminum foil.  I tried it out with these two sporocarps I collected yesterday, and both great to me, though the spore print on this mushroom is pretty unambiguously dark brown.  I can see a couple of advantages to the aluminum foil technique.  For one, the spores don't adhere to the paper fibers, meaning it's easier to scrape the surface to make a slide of spores.  I can see where it may be helpful in determining spore color in some ambiguous cases as well, and it would be easier to mold a piece of aluminum foil around a mushroom in the field than a piece of paper.  Both formats are easily recycled, so it's a draw on that point. 

In other news, I found a nice fairy ring on campus that sprang up after the rainstorms we've had recently.  We've been in severe water deficit here, and need the rain very badly.  So it was nice to see that it was at least enough for this group of mushrooms.  I collected a couple, just to test the foil method, and to see if they were not Chlorophyllum molybdites, which is what I've seen most frequently around here in fairy rings.  You can see from the photo above that the spore print is most definitely not green but chocolate brown.  Thus, those are more likely a species of Agaricus (which one? I need to delve a bit deeper!)

Happy Birthday to a prominent Alabamian?

Today would have been the 97th Birthday of jazz artist Sun Ra, who first appeared on Earth in Birmingham,AL on this day in 1914 with the name of Herman Poole Blount.  After an experience where he claimed a passage to the planet Saturn, he later legally changed his name to Le Sony'r Ra, and lived in the persona of an intergalactic traveller. 

Sun Ra was a pioneering musician even within the highly creative medium of jazz.  His song titles and lyrics often feature clever word play and focus on the themes of space travel, the empowerment of African Americans, and Egyptology.  His band, the Arkestra,continues to play today, and contains the forward and reverse of his adopted surname (RA), as well as supporting the idea that his intergalactic travels were like those on a great Ark such as Noah's, or that the entire Earth exists as just such an Ark.