Like Being in Florida Again

Ouch... it's gotten very hot here in Worcester. I'm supposed to go on a collecting trip to Purgatory Chasm with my adviser on Tuesday, too. Let's see; 95° and humid, so it ought to feel like about 110°. Yummy. I'm sure there will be plenty of fungi and beetles, though.

It's suddenly like being back in Florida again. One trick I learned from collecting there was to freeze a couple of blue ice packs the night before and take them with me into the field. I keep one in my pack with a cloth so that when I wipe the sweat out of my eyes the cloth is nice and cold. Then I tuck in my shirt and throw the other ice pack down there; it helps in keeping cool and lasts for a couple of hours, at least. When the pack in my shirt gets close to body temperature I swap it for the one in my pack. That's usually good for three to four hours of not having heat stroke.

I'm also going into the field on Wednesday. I'm supposed to be bringing an undergrad from Holy Cross with me and meeting up with another grad student from Harvard at the Wachusett site. If you ask me, anything above 80° is too hot, but 83° is better than 95° and since we'll be at a higher elevation it should be a few degree cooler. No such situation at Purgatory Chasm; it's about 600 ft. closer to sea level than Wachusett. We'll no doubt be taking the full brunt of the miserably hot, muggy weather on Tuesday.

Have I mentioned lately that I'm biology's bitch? Well, clearly I am.

On a much more positive note, I've gotten a number of helpful responses back to an email I've sent around to people who work with beetles. I've already received some useful advice and will be getting sequenceable specimens from as far away as Indonesia and New Zealand over the course of the next couple of months. Coleopterists are a fine bunch of people — almost as much so as mycologists! (I kid, I kid)

As for today, I think I'll stick around here and avoid the heat. I have a paper to finish reading and revising, anyhow. My only venture outside of air conditioned comfort today will be a trip to the supermarket. I was planning to go collecting, but between the price of gas and the 102° heat index, I think I'll take it easy on myself. I hadn't originally planned to collect on Tuesday, but my adviser wanted to hit the field. I'll just do Tuesday instead of today.

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Frustrations of Field Work

I set out to do field work this morning. That was my first mistake.

I'm very much in need of specimens, but fate is not cooperating lately. Today, that took the form of thunder and lightning that wasn't supposed to arrive until much later. Within an hour after arriving at a site near Purgatory Chasm I was making a dash back to my car. I don't mind a bit of rain. It's just water; I get wet, I dry off again. No big deal. Lightning is quite a different story, and since I'm looking for polypores fungi I need to be under the oldest, tallest trees almost by definition (older trees tend to harbor more mature perennial polypores, after all).

I've just come back home empty-handed, essentially having wasted a couple of gallons of gas. I'll have to go out again tomorrow. On the plus side, the impending thunder storm is sure to bring out some interesting fungi and, hopefully, get the beetles more active as well.

On the downside, my plans for the day are pretty well wrecked. I was going to be in the field until 2:00 or 3:00, then take my specimens back to the lab and start extracting DNA. I was then going to do my PCR and get everything ready for the sequencer for next week, meaning that I was going to simply spend the night at the lab tonight. The landlord's son just graduated college and will be having a party here tonight, and LL's out of town anyhow, so sleeping at the lab would have been ideal — if I had something to get done in the meanwhile.

Since I have no specimens, though, I don't have anything to do there. I'm hoping that the party downstairs will be small and/or end early. Otherwise, I may still go crash on a couch in the bio building tonight if I can't sleep here — since I have to get up early and go make another try at tracking down some specimens.

I must admit, I'm in a relatively pissy mood today. Hopefully, tomorrow will be better.

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More Mushrooms from Purgatory

I took another foray through Purgatory Chasm today, spending about four hours hiking about and locating fungi. I had no luck with the black trumpets but did find a few interesting specimens. Photos and info below. Clicking the thumbnails will open a larger image in a new window.

		Typical terrain from Purgatory Chasm. The trees are a mixture of hemlock, spruce, oaks and beech with smaller numbers of birch and maple.
		A rather handsome Amanita which I have been unable to identify to species. The warts (remnants of the universal veil) are friable and membranous. I examined three specimens, one younger and one more mature than this one; none had an annulus and all had an indistinct volva like the one shown. The stipe stains chocolate brown when bruised but the cap does not. The cap, however, loses color when drying, fading to a pallid or very light tan color. Even in the large, mature specimen, the pileus did not become planar. The stipes on the three specimens were between 7.5 and 8 cm in length and the pileus 6 to 7 cm in diameter. I found them growing in an open, sunny area near spruce. If anyone can provide even a tentative ID for this, I'd appreciate it. It's frustrating to leave such a fine-looking mushroom unidentified!
		Clitocybe gigantea, one of the largest mushrooms that mainland North Americans are likely to see. Note my lens cap provided for scale. This is a relatively small specimen at a mere 15 cm diameter; there have been reports of C. gigantea over 40 cm wide! Unlike most other members of its genus, this clitocybe is considered edible in that it isn't toxic. Unfortunately, it's also flavorless and has a texture I can best describe as being like loose, wet Styrofoam. Not everything edible is worth eating.
		Perhaps only a mushroom geek such as myself would find this little gelatinous fungus to have any charisma at all... but I do. Lumped under the common name "witches' butter" are several similar fungi, the most common being the brain-like masses of Tremella mesenterica. This photograph, however, is of Dacrymyces deliquescens, which grows in ranks instead of larger masses. I believe it also has distinctively Y-shaped basidia as well, which species of Tremella don't have.
		Omphalotus olearius, commonly known as the jack-o-lantern mushroom and, in my opinion, one of the most interesting fungi in the world. It's one of the few that is sometimes confused with golden chanterelle, but only by amateurs who don't remember that chanterelles grow only on the ground, Omphalotus only on wood. While this is a poisonous mushroom, the mistake isn't likely to be a dangerous one. Omphalotus has a distinctly bitter flavor that makes it much more likely to be spat out then swallowed. What's really cool about it, though, are two things. First, it's bioluminescent, glowing with an eerie bluish-green glow in darkness. Second, it's the source for the anticancer drug Irofulven (6-hydroxymethylacylfulvene), which can be used in fighting solid tumors. Unlike Dacrymyces, you don't have to be a mushroom geek to appreciate the jack-o-lantern!
		A cluster of juvenile Omphalotus olearius; they look like an entirely different species than the mature specimens.
		Paxillus atrotomentosus, AKA velvet paxillus, is lethally poisonous. David Arora reports in Mushrooms Demystified that some people cook and eat this mushroom with no ill effect, but I've never met one and I would bet that they've misidentified the mushroom and eaten something entirely different. As far as I've been told by every mycologist I've so far met, all members of this small genus are potentially deadly or will at least make death seem like a viable alternative to the days of sever sickness they can induce. Paxillus toxins are known to induce anaphylactic shock, severe and irreversible kidney damage, and the breakdown of red blood cells and even of the blood vessels themselves. It's a bit like a steaming hot bowl of ebola virus with death occurring up to four days after ingestion of the fungus. Yummy.
		This is also Paxillus atrotomentosus, but an immature specimen that still shows the thickened stipe and characteristic involute edge of the cap. It hasn't yet adopted the polypore-like stature often seen in mature specimens. The only edible mushroom with which I can see this being confused is a pine spike (Chroogomphus), and I've tried eating those and didn't think much of them. It's certainly not worth the risk of ingesting Paxillus so, as they say, don't try this at home, kids!
		Here is the only worthwhile edible I found today, Russula cyanoxantha... which doesn't really exist as a species but is a lumping together of a number of species or subspecies with similar characteristics. It was the only one I found, so I didn't bother bringing it home with me. The photo of the pileus doesn't do it justice; it looks pink, but the mushroom was much more violet in color. The camera's flash changed it. You'll just have to trust me on this one.
		I'm utterly stumped on this one; I can't even start to identify it coherently as I couldn't get a spore print out of it. The pileus is distinctly viscid (slimy), but the stipe is not. It was growing next to an old stump but appears to have been mycorrhizal insofar as the stipe was mainly underground, extending into the soil a good four inches in all. As you can see, the lamellae appear to have been initially pallid but to develop sordid red to brown edges and attach adnately to the stipe. Again, if anyone cane even start me off with a good place to start identifying this one, please let me know.

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