New era in mycoblogging for me

Wow. So with the new iPhone I can talk and it will write down what I am saying to put on my blog. That is super cool but can I say fungal terms like coronaria send (NB. Cortinarius) basidiospore and have it understand? Okay, not quite. Quarts in the area's courts in areas CEO RTI and ARI US. How about amanita? (Doesn't capitalize) How about Armillaria? Hi pozzolana (Hypoxylon) crepitus (Crepidotus) try Caloma (Tricholoma) them out Aloma (Naematoloma) Agaricus boletus from a Topsys (Fomitopsis). Oh okay not perfect but still a pretty funny thing. (And it doesn't punctuate very well, either. Parenthetical remarks are my edits)

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.

Site Redesign

Yes, I've been quite active in the blogosphere recently, and have just redesigned this site. Prominently featured are: a new background featuring some nice LBMs I found here in a lawn, and a new masthead featuring an anomalous mushroom, Phylloporus rhodoxanthus, the gilled bolete. Boletes typically have tubes, but the trait of having a lamellate hymenium (a.k.a. gills) is polyphyletic, which means that not all things with the trait have it by common descent. A familiar animal example of this would be wings, a character shared by birds, bats, and insects; the three groups are only distantly related, with lots of unwinged taxa in between.

Gills are found in the traditional Agaricoid fungi (with some losses of gills), and in many (but not all) Russuloid fungi (which look like agarics to most folks). Gills are also found in some polypores, like Lenzites and Daedalea (the latter really being an in-betweener), as well as the split gill fungus, Schizophyllum commune (below). Interestingly, none of the Ascomycota have gills.

Back to P. rhodoxanthus, you can see in the picture that the gills are a bit different, in that they have little stubs, like they want to fork or form tubes, but then they don't. Paxillus spp., also in the order Boletales, tend to have forked gills too.

Anyway, I hope you, dear reader, appreciate the new look. Hopefully I'll keep posting new stuff with some frequency. We've been getting a lot of rain here, so perhaps if it warms up a bit I'll be posting some of my discoveries along the way.

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.

Lots of interesting stuff out there....

I've been remiss in my blogging, especially so since there are SO MANY FUNGI fruiting out there, with all the rain we've been having. I recently went out with a friend to Tuskegee National Forest, where we saw a ton of stuff. And just about everywhere you look in the loveliest village on the plains, you see fairy rings.
Here's one.
And another.
And another.
And yet another. Really, these things are EVERYWHERE. I've blogged about them before, like in my neighbor's yard (UPDATE: she moved away! The new neighbors do not appear to be so mycophobic).

Today I was out in the woods near Tuscaloosa, and saw some fine fungi out there. I'm most jazzed about the gilled bolete I found, Phylloporus rhodoxanthus (sensu lato). I knew of its existence, and I can't remember if I'd ever found one before, but I saw the cap from above (being taller than most mushrooms) and thought "Aha, bolete!"

Turning it over, I was quite pleasantly surprised to find this:
It reminded me of a time (in California) when I picked up a Douglas-fir cone with a mushroom growing out of it, which I thought was Strobiluris trullisatus, and was surprised to find teeth (it was Auriscalpium vulgare). This mushroom looks just like a gilled mushroom (or "agaric") only with a bright yellow hymenium like a bolete. This particular one did not stain blue, which can happen, but does have forked gills (click on photo to zoom in), like a transitional form between true gills and the poroid (actually tuboid, boletes have tubes, not pores).
Also on the topic of boletes, I found some nice specimens of Strobilomyces dryophilus, "old man of the woods", good enough to eat, which I just might do!

Boletes

Found some more boletes. I think I'm ready to try some. They look like
B. hortonii But I'll drop some ammonia ok just to be sure. Also looks
like some are being parasitized by Hypomyces (white stuff)

More Mushroom News!

It seems as though mushroom news is trying to keep pace with mushroom fruiting. Which is to say, there's been quite a lot of it.

It British Columbia, three men died at an industrial mushroom facility in a 'composting accident', prompting a wave of farm inspections. The worst composting accident I've had to date is a bad case of maggots. Just gotta dry that pile out and try to keep the meat and dairy out of it.

In other mushroom related news, two new video games are coming out from Nintendo. Mushroom Men: Rise of the Fungi, for DS, and Mushroom Men: The Spore Wars for the Wii. The basic premise is that a meteorite strikes the earth, and rather than wiping out dinosaurs or creating a race of zombies, it makes the mushrooms sentient and animate. According to the website, nice edibles like boletes (Boletus spp.) and morels (Morchella spp.) form utopian societies, while poisonous genera like Lepiota and Amanita become, surprise surprise, jerks. I did espy a bolete with gills, rather than tubes, which is just silly. Enemies include jackalopes, chihuahuas, rabbits, spiders, and moles.
Les Claypool, formerly of Primus fame, has written music for the games. You can hear some at the website for the game. Someone needs to tell this other yahoo that mushrooms don't have to 'come to life'. They are already plenty alive, even if they aren't motile. Sigh, zoocentrism strikes again.

And finally, if you're travelling through Macau or Hong Kong, you may want to stay away from canned cream of mushroom soup for a little while. Nothing grave, just a little foul smell when you open the can. Really, you should be trying the local stuff anyway.

My neighbor, mycophobe

My neighbor, bless her heart, hates mushrooms. She has a lovely fairy ring of mushrooms that sprouts up everytime it rains. She dutifully plucks every single mushroom and chucks them in the street. These pics aren't of her yard, but are nearby.
Tropical Storm Fay came through our corner of Alabama, and now the whole place is bursting forth with succulent basidiocarps, the more technical terms for most mushrooms. We've seen some more boletes coming up too, and I'm still not planning on eating them.

In other news, I've added Wisconsin to the list of States I've visited. WooHoo!

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.