Taxon of the Day! (13 April 2010)

Contumyces rosella - Contu's Rosy Hymenochaete

If that common name sounds awkward, it's all my fault. I made it up thirty seconds ago. As far as fungi go, unless you are one of the deadly, gourmet, or extremely unusual varieties, you almost certainly don't have a common name. 

What's special about these little mushrooms? Well, first of all, I do mean LITTLE: the caps on the smallest specimens here are about 5 mm across, the largest about 10 mm. Second of all, they aren't closely related to most of the other fungi that they do look like, and they don't look like most of the fungi that they are related to. Here is a sampling of other members of the Order Hymenochaetales, to which Contumyces belongs:

Tom Volk's Hymenochaete Diagram.

Furthermore, this species is "bryophilous" which means that the occurrence of this species is tightly linked to bryophytes (moss, in this case). Whether the interaction is parasitic, mutualistic (or something stranger and more complicated) remains to be seen.

This fungus wasn't thought to be particularly common in California until one of the core members of MushroomObserver (Darvin DeShazer) started posting photos of this species from his yard. Then, it seems, people started finding it all over (because we started looking for IT, and we started looking in APPROPRIATE PLACES). This goes to show how important and useful "citizen-science" initiatives like MushroomObserver can be (check it out).

Taxon of the Week! (March 17 2010)

Entoloma "bloxamii"

This large, beautiful Entoloma is a common fall and early-winter denizen of redwood habitats in and around UCSC. You can easily learn to recognize this species by noticing:

1. The dry, grey-blue, sky blue or dark midnight blue cap. The depressions on the cap often have a frosty appearance.
2. Pale whitish or light blue-gray, ATTACHED gills that yield a PINK SPORE PRINT
3. The thick, fleshy, white stipe that is often tinged blue.
4. GROWTH ON GROUND.

For those of you who were at Oscar's house on my birthday last year, we ate some of these, simply sauteed. Not cause for much excitement, but notable for being one of the few edible Entoloma locally.

This species was originally described from Europe, where it grows in a radically different habitat. I would be surprised if molecular and further microscopic comparison didn't support the separation of these two species. Hence, the quotes around the species epithet...

UCSC Mushroom Tri-fold Field Guide

For a couple months, Chris Lay (the Admiral, uh, I mean, Curator... of the UCSC Museum of Natural History Collections), and I have been working on creating one of those fold-out map-style field guides for mushrooms of the UCSC Campus.

I'm tickled pink to report that we are very close to finalizing our first attempt at a product in this format.

20 species, each with a (hopefully not too small) color photo, and a terse (but hopefully astonishingly useful) blurb of text.

If you know me, you can imagine how hard it was to narrow the list to 20 species. And it was. But I feel good about the species that made the final cut, and hopefully we'll be able to build a larger version in the coming months.

Special credit to Noah Siegel for contributing a number of beautiful (and taxonomically useful) photos (including the cover shot) to the project.

Pending consultation with the UCSC bookstore and copyrights office, we hope to sell this thing at Bay Tree, at the 2010-2011 Fungus Fair, and around town at whatever bookstore will host us.