Photo by
Steve Nelsen.
Volume 15, Number 1
March, 1998
CONTENTS
1) MESSAGE FROM THE PRESIDENT by Bill Blank
2) UPCOMING WMS EVENTS
3) NATURAL HISTORY WORKSHOPS
4) JANUARY MEETING by John Steinke
5) FEBRUARY MEETING by Peter Vachuska
6) MYCOBRIEFS by Colleen Vachuska
7) PAUL BUNYAN AND THE 25 FOOT MORELS by Peter Vachuska
8) BOOK REVIEW: Mushrooms of Northeastern North America
by Bessette, Bessette, and Fischer, reviewed by Steve Nelsen
9) SPRING MUSHROOM HUNTING by Colleen Vachuska
10) THE OTHER DALDINIA IN WISCONSIN by Steve Nelsen
11) RECIPE: ONE-DISH CHICKEN RICE BAKE by Joanne Pasek
PLEASE! Not another word about El Nino. Not since the Beatles' song “Number Nine” has there been such a repetitious clammer surrounding a group of letters. Its meaning is somewhat unknown, and it is very hard to pronounce correctly when using it in a conversation. Kinda similar to the latinized mushroom names we use frequently in our Society. They are hard to pronounce correctly, difficult to decipher, and their meaning doesn't always apply to the mushroom (although most of the time it does). A guide is useful.
Not that I'm complaining about the weather; it's been great. A January thaw after a snowy December and now it's spring in February. There is no telling what effect this will have on the upcoming season except maybe more bugs to contend with, especially Lyme ticks. It's as if we're in a predicament over what type of weather will suit us. (to paraphrase former President Bush) Warm sunny mid 50's winter days ... Good! but not for mushrooms and farmers ... Cold snowpacked days ... Bad! but great for plants and mushrooms, maybe for farmers and snow enthusiasts, too. Kinda similar to the way our Society works. We can enjoy the lectures, the forays, and the communication of mushrooming knowledge throughout the year. It requires some effort, time and shuffling of priorities. Sometimes it's a burden, especially when we've overpicked and have a long walk back to the car and then are faced with a late night of cleaning and preserving our find. If you have this problem during the upcoming morel season, please call me. I'll be happy to give assistance. Involvement, communication and fun await us.
March 24: Slide-Lecture by Janice Stiefel, photographer, naturalist and writer, on “Mushrooms, Mosses, Liverworts, Lichens, and Ferns” at Mitchell Park Pavilion
April 16: Mushroom Dinner at Heaven City Restaurant
May 16: Annual Morel Foray in North Kettle Moraine
June 28: Annual Picnic and Business Meeting at Falk Park
The University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee Field Station in Saukville is offering a series of natural history workshops this spring, summer, and fall. The following courses are being offered.
University of Wisconsin - Milwaukee Field Station
3095 Blue Goose Road
Saukville, WI 53080
Contact person: Jim Reinartz
email: jimr@csd.uwm.edu
Phone: (414) 675-6844 Fax: (414) 675-0337
“Mother Nature” was the biggest participant in this year's WMS wine and cheese social. A very fast moving snow storm dumped snow, more then I care to drive in, between me and the Mitchell Park Pavilion.
The meeting was scheduled for 7:00 P.M., but, due to the continuous arrival of members, did not officially start until almost 8:00 P.M.. To calm some nerves and to satisfy our social needs, refreshments were sampled during this time. My final head count was 22 very determined members.
Only four members participated in this year's slide show: David Fisher, Charles Fonaas, Ray Llanas and myself, John Steinke. This was our first year with giving away a membership for the best set of five slides, a $15 value won by Ray. I would like to thank all of the above members for sharing their very nice slides and congratulate Ray on his fine work. Fred Kluhsman was our next winner. He was one of nine entries in the “Winter Quiz” and was lucky enough to have his name pulled that night. He was not at the meeting that night, but in a phone conversation he expressed interest in a fieldguide by A. H. Smith. When we locate a copy, it will be delivered to him. If anyone has future Quiz ideas, please send them in.
I need to thank all the people involved with the slide show set up and those working with and providing the food and drink. I think I can name them but decline to, in fear of omitting someone; you know who you are. THANKS. You make WMS work.
John Steinke gave us a taste of fungal diversity - Steinke style during our February meeting. John has been collecting, studying and photographing fungi for many years and has an eye for the unusual. We were treated to a sampling of his unusual viewpoints.
John sliced up the fungi in many ways -- examining edibility, color, shape, form of growth and habitat or substrate, as well as investigating some interesting types of spore dispersal and the interplay of insects and certain types of fungi.
The slide presentation tended to start with the more common mushrooms but became more bizarre as the night went on. John started by examining some of the typical edible and poisonous mushrooms that we find -- Boletus edulis, Morchella, and Amanita. He showed a number of slides demonstrating the diversity of shapes and colours of fungi, as well as speaking about the groupings that fungi can be found in.
It seemed that a large part of the show was devoted to habitat and substrate. John had many slides of fungi on fungi, on wood, on moss and on soil. One of John's specialties is Cordyceps. We got Cordyceps on Elaphomyces (deer truffles) and several on insect pupae. (He later showed slides of the insects getting even.) Sand is a common substrate for many of Steinke's favorite fungi. We saw Pilobilus and heard of its beneficial effects in bringing back shrubs and trees by its promiscuous mycorrhizal behavior. John had a beautiful collection of photos of Scleroderma geaster clawing its way out of the sand trying to elevate its spore mass. This led to a minicourse on Geastrum -- expounding which are common and which are rare and how to know them. Also somewhere in all of these bizarre Gasteromycetes was the little Disciseda. With its upside down growth and its use of animals to disperse its spores, it is a very interesting little fellow.
John ended the show with fungi so strange that they are no longer considered fungi -- the slime molds. He told us several stories of his encounters with them.
John speaks of many of his fungi with love and admiration. His show was like that of an explorer coming back after years of living among the molds, regaling us with tales and pictures of his adventures -- somehow you know he's going to return to them.
Those exploding chocolate-covered Easter eggs: There are occasional reports of chocolate-covered candies cracking enough to make their filling ooze out. Previously, these so-called “explosions” have been blamed on the carbon dioxide exhaled by the yeast Zygosaccharomyces rouxii. Now, researchers have discovered that an entire family of molds, Chrysosporium, can cause this phenomena. These molds are similar to yeast in that they feed on sugars which they convert to carbon dioxide and alcohol. They grow well in conditions such as those found in Easter egg or other chocolates containing liquid fondant. They would be most likely to grow on the inside of the chocolate, but in damp conditions might grow on the outside as well, producing a white haze on the surface which could be mistaken for recrystallized cocoa or sugar. Nonetheless, the molds are considered safe to eat. (New Scientist 1/10/98)
Fungi promote diversity: The vast majority of plants on earth receive benefit from an association with arbuscular mycorrhizal (AM) fungi. These fungi live within the roots of the plants where they enhance nutrient absorption and provide other advantages to the individual plants. It now appears though that these AM fungi may also provide advantages to the plant community as a whole. James Bever of the University of Chicago believes that the fungi may help promote plant diversity. He has done studies on plant-fungal dynamics in an old field in Durham, North Carolina, which supports a large number of both plant species and AM fungal species. Bever grew four perennial plants, that naturally occurred in the field, individually for 5 months in soil that had been inoculated with the entire mycorrhizal fungal community. As would be expected, many of the fungal species grew better in association with some hosts than others. In fact, nine of the 16 most common fungal species sporulated better on one of the plants than on any of the others.
Then Bever did transplantation experiments to test whether each plant grew best in its own soil or soil that another plant had grown in. In eight of 11 cases, a plant type grew better in soil from another plant. Though there are a number of possible explanations for this, in at least one case, this change was due to the accumulation of an AM fungus. This suggests that a plant may sometimes grow better in association with a fungus for which it is not the best host, i.e., the plant does better with a particular fungus, but the fungus would do better somewhere else. This phenomena would encourage diversity in the following way. Suppose there are two fungi X and Y and two plants A and B. Suppose also that fungus X grew best under plant A which in turn grew best in association with fungus Y which in turn grew best under plant B which finally grew best in association with X. With all this circularity, both fungi X and Y and both plants A and B would survive. (Bioscience, January 1998)
In northern forests tall tales of the exploits of Paul Bunyan abound, but seldom do they tell the tale of Paul Bunyan and the 25 foot morels.
It was during the winter of the blue snow, when on account of being left out all winter, that Paul's great ox Babe turned blue. That winter was extremely long and cold from the middle of September through the middle of April. The crew of loggers worked all winter and Babe was left to do the work of a hundred of his lesser kind. This built up a huge appetite in the great beast and he was left to forage over the ground where the trees were cut down from previous years and there was much regrowth. One hundred square miles of scant woody pasture to call his own. Babe's favorite food that winter would be the young saplings of apple, black cherry, aspen and elm. When the snow got deep and the hunger growled loud in Babe's belly, trees as thick as your thigh would be crushed between Babe's gigantic jaws. By the time the April rains came, 100 square miles of saplings were consumed and replaced by the remains such as an ox of Babe's proportions might leave after such a feast.
That spring and summer were very damp and the pasture that was Babe's the past winter looked from a distance as if it was still snowcovered. For upon it a great mold had grown consuming the dung, soil and wood remains left by the great -- now blue -- beast. The mold itself was not foul, but quite pleasant smelling. Even a few of the Bunyan crew returned to taste it with no ill effects; on the contrary, it was quite nice. With a dry fall and the business of logging starting again, though, it was soon forgotten.
It wasn't until the middle of May the next year that a couple of hunters from Paul's crew found it. Stepping through the great white pines into the clearing they came across a scene from one of those fairy tales that only a child could believe. In the great blue ox's pasture from a winter before was a new growth of forest fungi as tall as a man. Indeed, one couldn't see the forest for the fungi, for these were only the shrimps interspersed around the larger fruitings -- 10, 20 even 25 feet in height. Giant Morels! Well, it took no time at all to chop down a few of the lesser specimens to take back. (For they knew that if they returned with naught, they would be accused of creating tales as tall as the kind they found themselves in.) When they got back, a group quickly formed, gawking with wonder at the 8 foot fungal fruits. But when Paul Bunyan finally saw them, he dropped all he was doing and immediately started shouting orders to his crew. “Hook up the wagons! Sharpen the Saws and axes! We've got work to do!” He knew that, unlike the great pine, the morel's lifespan was rather short and the harvesting was at hand. The crews were out and harvested a million cords of morels over the next fortnight. The crop was lain out in the sun to dry. They dried so many morels that they had to build 10 sheds just to protect them from the rain and damp. All that year and the next winter they enjoyed the dried morels. Morels and venison, morels and bear, morels and ... they never tired of them. A herd of 500 Jerseys were employed just to provide the butter and cream to cook them in.
Coming back to Babe's pasture of now two years past they again that spring found the giant morels. Though of a somewhat diminished stature than that first year for the tallest was scarcely over 20 feet in height. Each year it went on like this and Paul made it a tradition to take two weeks off each May to have his crew harvest the delicious bounty of morels. It was a great many years that the giant morels met with the axe, though never in size were they as large as the first.
It must be said that even today one occasionally hears of the 'shroomer coming upon a six foot morel with no means to cut it down or take it home. Indeed, this must be one of the descendants of the giants from the year after the blue snow.
A. E. Bessette, A. R. Bessette, and D. W. Fischer, Mushrooms of Northeastern North America, Syracuse University Press: Syracuse, NY, 1997 (ca. $45).
Printed on exceptionally thick paper in 7x10´´ format, MNNA is 1-1/2 inches thick at only 582 pages. The core of this book is its 642 excellent but mostly small (2-5/8x1-3/4´´) color photographs. Reference in either direction between location of the description and the picture is usually omitted. Coverage of “nearly 1500” species is attained through keys. I think of MNNA as a well illustrated version of Smith's How to Know gilled and (fleshy) non-gilled mushrooms, but which also incorporates woody and some lower fungi. Genus coverage is broader and more even in MNNA, but the extensive coverage Smith provided for genera in which he was interested is lacking. No information on classification either above the generic level (all gilled mushroom genera are listed in alphabetical order in one huge group, but the Ascomycetes included are separated into six such headings) or below it for large genera is included in MNNA. Almost no information on locality is given. Nomenclature is sometimes up-to-date, including the best coverage of Laccaria in any manual (from Mueller's monograph) and of Collybia, and such nuggets appear as Redhead transferring Omphalina ericetorum to Phytoconis, and Mycena (Omphalina) lilacina to Chromosera (as a Friesian species, cyanophylla), and the exceptionally pea-headed “requirement” that what has been called Hericium racemosum for a century now needs to be called Hericium coralloides, with H. coralloides becoming H. americana! This can only lead to total confusion. I appreciate the illustration of several seldom-covered taxa, including the pin-mould on Mycena haematopoda, Phleogena faginea, Podostroma alutaceum, Phaeocalicium polyporaceum, and some unusual Hypomyces and Nectriopsis species. No keys are provided for such large genera as Russula, Cortinarius, Hebeloma, Inocybe, and Entoloma and its segregates, although several species are included for the first two, and few species are included in the keys for several other large genera of dark spored mushrooms. In these days of political correctness, this may leave the authors open to charges of discrimination against mushrooms with “spores of color”.
I think MNNA is clearly the best single book available for use in our area, and I heartily recommend it. It does have an Eastern instead of a Great Lakes bias for species included, entirely ignoring such well marked Great Lakes species as Suillus sphaerosporus, Cortinarius atkinsonianus and aggregatus, and Paxillus vernalis, and only has Gyroporus purpurinus in a key.
For most mushroom hunters, the main, if not the only, reason for hunting mushrooms in the spring season is to find the ever edible and delightful morels. The morels seem to own spring, often well into June in some years. It is true that most mushrooms other than morels are found in the late summer and early fall, but there are a few that can be found in the spring and early summer, i.e., before late June. To give you some encouragement in your mushroom hunting, here is a brief survey of some mushrooms other than morels that one might find during this early part of the growing season.
The morels are members of the order of fungi called Pezizales, informally known as cup fungi and, like the morels, many members of this order appear in the spring. The scarlet cups, Sarcoscypha coccinea and Sarcoscypha occidentalis, are some of the first fungi to look for in the spring, as the former can sometimes be found when there is still snow on the ground. Both are bright red cups with white outer surfaces and occur on down wood in wet places. They differ in that coccinea is larger while occidentalis has more of a stalk and occurs later. Finding one of these in the spring can really make your day. I still remember a feeling I had many years ago when I saw one of these conspicuous red cup fungi in the woods on a March day. It was cold and there was quite a bit of snow around yet, but that tiny fungus seemed like such a big warm ray of spring.
There are several other easily identified Pezizales that appear in the spring. One of these is the dark urn-shaped Urnula craterium, which grows attached to buried oak. Another is Helvella acetabulum. Most Helvella species have charming saddle-shaped caps and somewhat fluted stalks. Helvella acetabulum, on the other hand, is a brown cup-shaped fungus with distinctive white ribbing on its undersurface. A number of cup fungi such as Peziza badio-confusa and other species of Peziza or Discina fruit in the late spring to early summer, so this is an excellent time to get to know this particular group of fungi better.
There is a group of fairly distinctive polypores with large angular pores that appear in the spring or early summer, sometimes as early as May. The largest of these is the robust, shelving, scaly, orangey Polyporus squamosus. This has to be one of my favorite mushrooms, not because it is particularly good to eat, but because it is often found when there is not much else around and is so easy to identify. Smaller species in this group of early polypores are the stalked Polyporus arcularis and the hexagonal-pored, nearly sessile Favolus alveolaris. All of these grow on hardwoods, especially elm, with the F. alveolaris said to be partial to shagbark hickory.
Jelly fungi are usually fun to find and their several orders include members that can have an early growing season. Some of these are the orange Dacrymyces palmatus, the warty black Exidia glandulosa, and Tremella mesenterica. Among the coral fungi ( Clavariaceae), most species appear later in the season, but the attractive Clavicorona pyxidata can be found in June.
One of the first fleshy, gilled mushrooms to appear in the spring woods is Tricholomopsis platyphylla. Its grayish fiber-streaked cap resembles that of a number of gray Tricholoma species or of Pluteus cervinus. However, T. platyphylla is larger and more distinctive and grows on wood rather than the ground as do most Tricholoma species. Also, though it grows on decaying wood like Pluteus, Tricholomopsis has attached rather than free gills and gives a white rather than pink spore print.
Other gilled mushrooms that can occur in the woods as early as May include the tiny, wiry, white-capped Marasmius rotula and several kinds of Mycena such as the bleeding Mycena haematopsys. There are also several spring species of Entoloma that can fruit as early as April. Though not of much interest, the nondescript Collybia dryophila occurs throughout the growing season. This ubiquitous fungus is very high on my list of most frequently encountered species. It is often abundant in pine plantations. The edible oyster mushroom, Pleurotus ostreatus, can also occur in most seasons of the year.
Several lawn species or urban mushrooms occur in the spring. Though many of these, such as Coprinus micaceus and Coprinus atramentarius, can grow anytime from spring to fall, weather permitting, Agrocybe species primarily have an early growing season. These are brown-spored mushrooms generally smaller in stature than Agaricus species, but definitely more robust and handsome than LBM's. Look for them especially in grassy areas and in wood chips. Agrocybe pediades is one that we typically find on grass in our area. Other common lawn mushrooms which can occur in the spring are Panaeolus foenisecii, Psathyrella candolleana, and Marasmius oreades.
A number of lawn mushrooms seem to have have somewhat of a split growing season, preferring to fruit in the cool wet weather of late spring and then again in the late summer to early fall. According to the Audubon field guide, the shaggy mane, Coprinus comatus, has two growing seasons, one in the spring, May and June, and then one in the fall, September and October. This is consistent with my experience. I remember being somewhat puzzled and maybe a little disappointed when I first started finding these one September and then subsequently found them the next June in a different location. I think I felt this of mushroom was special like a morel and should have a more definite season. The meadow mushroom, Agaricus campestris, also fruits in the late spring to early summer and then later in the season after cool wet weather.
I have mentioned only some of the most commonly encountered mushrooms that can occur in the spring. There are many others that could be found, but they may be less common or less distinctive. Nonetheless, this list should give you some encouragement and something to look for and possibly find if the morels just aren't there. If you want to read more on the subject of spring mushrooms, you can consult the article “Morels (and More) in Michigan” by Walt Sturgeon, in Mushroom, the Journal of Wild Mushrooming, Spring 1986, pp. 10-13.
Photo by
Steve Nelsen.
Mushroom books that cover Ascomycetes in any detail at all have “cramp balls”, Daldinia concentrica (Bolton: Fries) Cesati and de Notaris; I have 21 books including it. It is the flattened round lumps on wood that start out reddish brown but become black (lasting months). It is easy to identify because cutting a section (which requires a knife -- they're hard) reveals the concentric layers of the Latin name. Adrienne found several reddish brown fungi on a stick in Walking Iron County Park (near Mazomanie in northwestern Dane Co.) on August 9th, and pointed them out to me because they were pretty, in contrast to most finds of Daldinia. I assumed it was young D. concentrica, but although the exterior was firm, the interior had soft greyish gelatinized material between black zones that were nearly perpendicular to the stem, and the larger ones (heads to 3 1.8 cm) had runny liquid in them. In contrast to D. concentrica, these fungi had distinct stems; the smaller ones were almost all stem. It was found immediately to be Daldinia vernicosa (Schw.)Ces. de Not. from the description in Graham, Mushrooms of the Great Lakes Region. It is much harder to find information on this species. The only picture I have is in Cetto, Il fungi dal Vero, Vol. 7, sp. 2982 (rather poor specimens), which is in Italian and not easily available here. Ellis and Ellis, Microfungi on Land Plants includes it, but botch the description so badly it is of no help. They incorrectly say it is specific to genus Ulex (which has 20 species in Europe including gorse and furze, but it only occurs in the US as escapees along the east coast), and fail to mention the gelatinized interior! The only other place I have a description is Breitenbach and Kranzlin, Fungi of Switzerland, Vol. 1 (in the notes for D. concentrica; vernicosa hasn't been seen in Luzerne). D. vernicosa also appears in the Kansas species list in Horn, Kay, and Abel, A Guide to Kansas Mushrooms. I have no idea how common it is in Wisconsin, but I am going to keep an eye out in the future for cramp balls with stems.
Bake at 375 ºF for 45 minutes or until chicken and rice are done.
Serves 4.
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