ARTICLES by Dianna Smith | FUNGIKINGDOM.net | Dianna Smith

MOREL NAMES

Thu, 27 Mar 2014 10:04:09 -0400

WHAT SHOULD I CALL THESE MORELS? By Dianna Smith

There are at least twenty or so different species of morels in North America. Prior to 2012, we tended to call them by their common names or we used the well-known binomial names established by European mycologists. With DNA analysis, it has been shown that there are roughly four or five species of morels common to our region in the northeast and they are genetically different from the European versions. I will try to help you figure out what species we have and the current terminology we should consider using for what we find. Of course, calling them by their common names won’t offend the mushrooms themselves. Our various morel species are addressed below in the order in which they tend to appear in the spring.

Morchella angusticeps

Formerly known as Morchella elata, the Black Morel or Morchella angusticeps (Peck) has a conical or sub-conical cap and exhibits dark vertically arranged ridges and paler pits. The cap barely overhangs the granular stalk to which it is attached. Morchella angusticeps is typically the first of the four or five main eastern morels to appear in the spring. Like all morels, and unlike the brown to reddish brown gyromitras, which have a ‘stuffed interior,’ Morchella angusticeps is hollow. It is found growing solitary or grouped under several different species of hardwood and conifer trees, including tulip poplars, pines, oaks, etc.

100+ SPRING MUSHROOMS

Sat, 15 Feb 2014 11:59:22 -0500

Morchella angusticeps (Morchella elata)1836

Megacollybia rodmani (Tricholomopsis platyphylla)1000187

Coprinellus micaceus2163

Trametes gibbosa 2048

I am frequently asked to produce a list of mushrooms that can be found in the spring in our area of the northeast. The following checklist as compiled from the COMA spring (April through May) walk collections from 2003 to 2013. It is important to note that a few fungi listed are left over from the previous year, particularly soft annual and hard perennial polypores and crusts, as well as old puffballs. Also, there are undoubtedly a host of other fungi (especially ascomycetes and crusts) that we saw, but weren’t able to identify.

(Photos of these fungi can be found here at FUNGIKINGDOM.NET under the title FUNGI PHOTOS).

ASCOMYCETES

Aleuria aurantia, Aracnopeziza auralea, Calocypha fulgens, Chlorociboria aeruginascens, Chlorosplenium chlora, Daldinia concentrica, Dasyscyphus virgineus, Diatrype stigma, Gyromitra korfii, Helvella queletii, Hypocrea sp., Hypoxylon fragiforme, Hypoxylon cf multiforme, Hypoxylon sp., Kretzschmaria deusta, Mitrula elegans, Mitrula lunatospora, Mitrula paludosa, Mollisa cinerea, Morchella americana, Morchella angusticeps, Morchella diminutuva, Morchella semlibra, Peziza badioconfusa, Peziza repanda, Sarcoscypha occidentalis, Xylaria hypoxylon, Xylaria polymorpha

DIGITAL MUSHROOM ID APPS

Sat, 15 Feb 2014 09:39:23 -0500

The Best Digital Mushroom Applications

Is there an ideal mushroom identification app?

(first published in Mushroom the Journal, Winter-Spring issue 2011 and updated March, 2014)

by DIANNA SMITH

As you are no doubt well aware, over the past few years, many hundreds of millions of smart electronic gadgets have been sold throughout the planet. We are attracted to what they enable us to do, saving us valuable energy and time. It is amazing that interaction with a hand-held device permits us to accomplish so many things – anywhere we happen to be. I am talking about the ability to take pictures and video, do internet research, read books and newspapers, receive and send e-mail messages, take GPS coordinates, learn languages, write notes or articles, create or listen to music, watch TV, store and display our fungi photos, and so much more. Some of them can even be used as a phone!

The functional possibilities are astounding: users can download an infinite variety of programs called applications – or “apps” for short – for free or a minimal fee. With well over a half-million apps currently available for Android and Apple devices, it is encouraging that several of these are actually mushroom identification programs. With varying degrees of success, they all take advantage of the features of the touch screen technology of today’s modern devices. At prices from absolutely free to a high of under $10, these mushroom applications can be purchased for considerably less than the price of any good field guide on the market today. But are they all equally useful (or worth the considerable investment in a hand-held device)? My aim is to help guide you through the maze of mushroom applications and their features and suggest which programs are worth buying and which are a waste of your device’s disk space. I will also provide any potential programmers among us with the features that I feel belong in the ideal mushroom application.

COPRINOID MUSHROOMS

Thu, 13 Feb 2014 12:37:19 -0500

Coprinus comatus0767

Coprinellus micaceus (Coprinus micaceus)2163

Coprinopsis atramentaria (Coprinus atramentarius)7759

Parasola plicatilis3677

The Coprinoid Mushrooms

By Dianna Smith

When I first started learning the deliquescing mushrooms about twelve years ago, I was pleased that I could recognize several of them as belonging within the dark-spored genus Coprinus in the now defunct family, Coprinaceae. Since they had gills which dissolved from the outer edge upward into an inky liquid to release their spores, it was natural to think of them as related. In fact, the genus was rather large with well over a hundred saprobic members. Little did I know that it had already shrunk in size to just a few mushrooms that all resemble Coprinus comatus morphologically. All the other blackening mushrooms were split up into two overarching families, the Agaricaceae and the newly created Psathyrellaceae. Within these two groups, they were assigned to at least four recognized genera, Coprinus, Coprinopsis, Coprinellus, and Parasola. Auto-digestion seems to have evolved several times independently. Let's see if we can sort through some of the more common ones and place them into their respective genera based on characteristics visible to the eye.