Week 7: Fungi

Date: May 19, 2013
Weather: sunny, light wind, few light clouds
Temp: 60 F
Time: 5:30pm-6:30pm
Location: Discovery Park

This week, we set off into the forest as foragers of fungi. We were a little skeptical of finding mushrooms a) this late into Spring and b) because you seem to stumble across them accidentally when you are not looking for them! However, the Kingdom Fungus includes yeasts, molds, and lichen as well as mushrooms (since these are mere the fruiting bodies of underground mycelium fungus organisms), and we knew lichens would be abundant. We brought a paper bag along for collecting specimens, since in class this was recommended as on of the better ways to store mushrooms short term... putting them in plastic bags or Tupperware makes them slimy fast. Here are some of the few mushrooms we've already seen in the past 6 weeks:

Hare's-foot Inkcap

Marasmius (genus) growing in grass

Amanita (genus), likely Panther Amanita, growing in
woody material in the shade of some tress 

Oyster Mushroom, growing on a dead tree snag

I include the locations of the mushrooms, since this, and really any possible information about the mushroom can aid in the painstakingly specific process of identifying mushrooms. The major mushroom forms are
-Gills
-Pores
-Teeth
-Jelly
-Wrinkles
-Puffballs
-Oddballs
-Cup
and these can be helpful in narrowing down the mushroom to at least a family. Wandering through the woods this evening, we found several lichens growing on trees.

Here is an interesting lichen growth under a tree branch

Most of these lichens we were able to grab and put in our "goodie bag." We searched high and low (but mostly low) for our mushroom friends. After about an hour, the only ground dweller that greeted us was a slug startled by the upturned leaf litter as we searched around.

Looks like it didn't find any mushrooms either

So we turned around after collecting some lichens and headed back. Upon stopping to observe some Siberian Miner's Lettuce that I spotted part way into a wooded area, lo and behold! My theory was correct: you find mushrooms the minute you stop looking! From a distance, we were able to see some large bulbous mushrooms poking their heads out of the ground!

Success!

We saw four of them, and two were already strangely perfectly uprooted and ready for me to throw into our paper bag. They were all gathered around a dying Alaskan Yellow Cedar. Based on our first glance and the little we had learned in class, we guessed it was some kind of Puffball. We continued the rest of the way home, pleased with our find.
That night however, I decided to ditch one of the samples. As I pulled it out of the bag to inspect it, I found we had an unexpected hitchhiker

Apparently I brought home the home of an
unsuspecting millipede!

Looking into our bag, this is what we came up with:

Our loot

Oak Moss Lichen

Methuselah's Beard Lichen

Hammered Shield Lichen

A dried up fungus?

Our scaly mushroom

Top view of mushroom reveals a brown cap

So originally, like I said, we assumed this was some kind of puffball mushroom. However, upon looking through our guide, we realized the puffballs are much more stemless and less scaly. Another distinguishing feature is that on the inside, they are white and meaty like a button mushroom when immature, but, when they mature, the entire inside turns into a huge spore vessel, that will actually "puff" spores when disturbed.

A true puffball

There was one way to find out:

Cross-Section!

 The mushroom dissection proved to be entirely useful! This was definitely not a puffball. In fact, it had very distinct gills:

Free, veiled gills

The terminology we eventually determined was correct to describe this was "free, veiled gills" meaning the gills do not attach to the stem and the cap provides a veil underneath the cap. We finally decided this to be a Shaggy Parasol, even though the book describes their season as Sept-Oct...

Shaggy Parasols, genus Lepiota

However, this has at least three look-alikes described in the book, one of which, the Reddening Lepiota (L. americana) maybe the more likely choice as its season is late June-Oct. However, this one is usually found in close clusters, and we found ours at least a several feet away from each other...

Reddening Lepiota (Lepiota americana)

What do YOU think...? Seems like this mushroom hunting and IDing business is just as hard as it looks!