I feel pretty confident that the little bracket fungus I collected yesterday is a species of Hydnochaete. Which species, I'm still working on. I did find a monograph of the genus published in the early part of the last century, but haven't managed to wade through it yet. Did take some photos of a cross section that shows the spines with the microscope set up at the high school. Another photo shows the internal hyphae much better than this photo, but the spines were kind of intriguing. Someday I might start cutting thin enough sections again to get a clear view of both the spines and the hyphal context.
There was a produce size bag from Eve Grutter waiting for me at UAS when I returned this afternoon containing two interesting mushrooms. One was immense. My first impression was of a large Russula, until I took it out of the bag. The decurrent gills and heavy veil were good clues that this wasn't anything I've seen before.
The cap is 12 cm in diameter and from the top of the cap to the bottom of the included stem was 23cm long. The diameter of the stem is 8cm.
Reading the wonderfully detailed accompanying note, I learned that the stem was continuing on much deeper in the soil. Used Arora's key and settled on Catathelasma imperiale. This is apparently a rather small individual for this genus. The top of the cap is a light golden brown and superficially areolate. It was slightly viscid when collected, but was dry when it came into my hands. The spores are very elongate and amyloid (the reaction isn't as good in regular iodine as it should be in Melzers).
The mushroom was growing near a large sitka spruce on the Mosquito Cove trail. A great find. I definately need to get back into the woods.
On the muskeg project: ran the gels from the purified DNA and new primers. Zip! So started the nested primers with the purified DNA today.
Transferred a few of the dark septate cultures to new corn meal agar plates as they still had unwanted fungi. Also managed to start my first alcohol fire since High School. At least this one was a bit smaller. Might have to store the alcohol in a glass petri dish. It is alot easier to smother a fire with a glass lid. A plastic one just melts. No surprise there.
4 golden eyes, one glaucous winged gull on the way to town on Monday. Couldn't hardly see this morning.
Did briefly stop at the lake on Monday afternoon. Found scaup, ring necked ducks, coots, a widgeon as well as the begging multitude.
No comments:
Post a Comment