From: karen@athena.cs.uga.edu (Karen Snetselaar)
Newsgroups: rec.gardens
Subject: Fall fungi: Naturalist alert
Date: 14 Sep 92 23:01:04 GMT
Article-I.D.: athena.1992Sep14.230104.16967
Distribution: rec.gardens
Organization: University of Georgia, Athens

There's always a good reason to go out to the woods.  In spring it's the
profusion of wildflowers and pastel trees filled with returning birds
(I'm talking about temperate woodlands, the only ones I know).  In 
winter I go for the stark tree skeletons and distant views.  And everyone
goes to (or through) the woods for autumn leaf color.  But late summer-
early fall, before the leaves change and drop, is the best time for
finding fungi.   Makes sense, I guess--the business end of the fungus,
the mycelium, has been busy down in the ground, munching on last years
fallen leaves and other dead things all summer, so it's as big as it's
gonna get.  Now's the time to send up something with spores that will
spread on the wind to colonize new worlds.  Better do it quickly before
the new blanket of leaves covers everything up.

Yesterday I went to some little woods, here in town.  My mission was to
collect slime molds for the mycology teaching collection.  No, not the
gross dog-vomit slime mold of rec.gardens fame.  There are dozens of
different slime molds that make tiny (under 1 cm usually), beautiful
spore-producing structures.  Some are on stalks and look like miniature
mushrooms.  Some have shiny metallic coverings that burst open to reveal
masses of intricately sculptured threads and ornamented spores.  They
come in all colors.  These slime molds are often found on rotten logs,
really rotten, the kind of wood you can easily push your knife in up to
the hilt.  So I was slicing up bits of wood, peering at them thru a 
hand lens, carefully folding the good bits up in waxed paper and tucking
them away in my basket. Not moving anywhere very fast.  And of course I
started looking around at other things, small things; the mushrooms and
boletes and puffballs were too big for my eyes yesterday.

There are lots of cup fungi on the ground in the fall.  Some of them look
more like saucers than cups, like the Crimson Cups.  The red ones around
here are usually <1" in diameter, attached to twigs in twos and threes.
Whenever I see one of these I start looking around carefully, and then
usually find many more (the same thing happens to me with salamanders).
A particular species of Crimson Cup will prefer a certain size and kind
of stick; the ones I found yesterday liked 1/4" hickory.  And there were
tiny stalked yellow and white cups on some leaf petioles and midribs.
There are bigger (1-3") cup fungi out now too, but they're not
conspicuous because they come in shades of tan and brown.  The thing to
do with these is sneak up on them slowly with the macro lens on the
camera, or pick them up very carefully, get a few inches away, and 
blow gently for a couple seconds, like blowing out a candle.  Then wait...
one...two seconds...watch the spores puff out like a wisp of smoke.  
See, the inside of that cup is lined with microscopic cylinders, maybe
tens or hundreds of thousands, each one containing 8 spores under pressure,
and there's a lid on top of each little cylinder, and when a breeze blows
over the cup, a few thousand of the lids dry out a little, maybe shrink,
anyway they pop off and the spores shoot out.

So I was amusing myself in this fashion, and then I saw the bright orange
thing sticking up out of the ground, about an inch tall, wider at the top,
like a tiny baseball bat.  At first I thought it was a coral fungus, some
of them are orange and solitary, but then I got close enough to see the
darker orange bumps on the top of the thing and I knew it had to be a 
species of _Cordyceps_.  I don't believe _Cordyceps_ have common names.
They're related to the ergot fungi (_Claviceps_spp) the most famous of
which contaminates rye with a vasoconstrictive toxin and also is the source 
of LSD.  But _Cordyceps_ doesn't grow on grain.  I had to know...so, I
carefully dug down into the clay around it with my knife, slowly excavating
the mummified insect, I think a beetle larva this time, that had been
colonized and killed by the mycelium, and from which the garish orange
club-like structure arose.

I'm never sure exactly why I like fungi so much, but I know part of the
attraction is the secrets, beautiful or bizarre, that often lurk just
below the surface or just beyond the resolving power of my eyes.  I like
to know these secrets.

Karen
Newsgroups: rec.gardens