Here is what we looked at & talked about at our first virtual WMS meeting on Zoom that was all about everyone collaborating on iNaturalist identifications together, along with celebrating some star finds:

• Jacki's mystery maybe-bolete she's been seeing a lot of recently. UPDATE: it is no longer a mystery to Jacki; She used resources on mushroomobserver.org as well as other pictures online and now thinks it is Polyporus radicatus!  The edibility is reported as choice by some, tough by others. So now Jacki is doing a myco-culinary experiment to find out. There are only 135 currently reported at all on iNat with only 14 observed as of yet in Wisconsin. Many of those other WI P. radicatus were, by the way, spotted by our fellow project-member Howard (Howard64). It is really interesting to see our project members already noticeably improving this site's data for our region.

 

• Rose's Tolypocladium longisegmentatum that was growing out of a deer truffle. The species T. longisegmentatum used to be considered a Cordyceps species not that long ago, and do have those habits.

 

• Jeremy's very beautiful cup fungi with water standing in it, now identified as genus Urnula

 

• Rose's hemlock varnish shelf with that orientation difference showing gravitropism. These shelf fungi changed their growing orientation in response to their log flipping. How did they know which way was up? Fungal capacity to sense & respond to gravity involves some really interesting, detailed, & likely varied biology on a cellular level

 

• Howard's thin walled maze polypore also showing gravitropism. This example is very pronounced.  

 

• Howard's ghost pipes, which are a plant, not a fungus, but which were spotted as we scrolled down the page, and it turns out ghost pipes have many fungal associations, particularly Russula species. As Rose let me know in a message, ghost pipes are, "parasites on fungus! More specifically, they are a mycoheterotroph. It is the Russula that have the mycorrhizal relationship with trees, then the ghost plants use the Russula (and Lactarius in some places) as their hosts. This is also why ghost plants are impossible to cultivate." 

 

• Rose's bog bells, or Bog Galerina, are little-researched & observed in part because fewer people venture into the thick of bogs, and in part simply being rare. They are assumed to be very poisonous, but that is only due to their relative, Galerina marginata's notorious deadly nature. Nobody (to our knowledge) has ever eaten a Bog Galerina to find out, or done a much-less-risky work up in the lab. 

 

• Jacki's not-a-puffball that was actually a really cool common stinkhorn 'witch's egg' with a squishy middle documented nicely.

 

• Kari's Orange Mycena that Leah recently researched to identify and learned how to use the map feature on that species' information page to narrow down and look at just how many have been observed in Wisconsin specifically.

 

• And Leah's dead man's fingers that lacks the white dusting seen in many specimens because she saw hers in its earlier sexual stage, that Rose helped her identify. But because Rose was joining the meeting by phone and looking at such a small screen, she's now having second thoughts. She now thinks that it may be something Tolypocladium instead.

If you like, head on over to these obervations to weigh-in with comments or ID suggestions of your own.
Even if something says "Research Grade" you are still free to disagree! Identifications on iNaturalist are never settled.

Whenever someone new joins our projects, I get no notification, nothing at all to say there is someone new among us. Instead, it usually all starts when I notice the "number of members" figure on one or more of our different projects has gone up by 1, or sometimes 2.

Other times I see a new fungi observation pop up in a project's gallery, click through to try and identify it, and realize its observer needs to be identified first, because I don't recognize the name!

At that point I get to greet the new arrival, link all the other projects too, and hope you are accessing the site by computer rather than always on mobile or else you may never see the welcome message!  Until now...

Though it gets edited just about every time I send it, here is that welcome message in its most general form:

Hello and welcome to WMS projects & the 2020 foray! Just as you would find at an in-person foray, there are fungi finders, identifiers, and admirers all with different interests and experience in fungi and lichens. By working together in our project, we can learn from each other and also get a sense of what people are finding this season. You can read in more detail about the 2020 project here: https://www.inaturalist.org/projects/wms-2020-first-virtual-foray?tab=about

And the new 2021 project is here: https://www.inaturalist.org/projects/2021-wms-virtual-foray

Anything you upload where the metadata on the photo (or the date you put in manually) is in 2020 will go in the 2020 project, anything 2021 will go in the 2021 project. This happens automatically once you have joined them for those two virtual foray projects.

Besides the virtual forays, we have:
https://www.inaturalist.org/projects/all-fungi-by-wisconsin-mycological-society-wms-members this collection showing every fungus or lichen observed by anyone who joins a WMS project. Unlike, for example, our 2020 foray, which will only showcase your 2020 finds,

And we also have a project for Slime Molds, blatantly ignoring the fact they are not molds, and not even fungi in favor of how beautiful and interesting they are to us: https://www.inaturalist.org/projects/slime-molds-friends-by-wms-project-members

I will have now already added you to those two to include any related observations you post, but you can also join the project and get its updates on your iNat dashboard, and have it included in that drop down "Community" tab to quickly reference all WMS project members' observations or what slime molds have been seen by WMS project members lately.

We also have an umbrella group you can check to compare all WMS projects and where you can look for anything new - https://www.inaturalist.org/projects/all-wms-projects

If you haven't already, I recommend going to "Account Settings" to set your email preferences. The default settings tend to generate a lot of emails, particularly if you join projects or follow people. Maybe you like lots of email notifications, or you signed up with an email just for iNaturalist, but if you're like me the flood of them is overwhelming. Happily, iNat allows for pretty specific filters on which emails you want (I left on notifications for messages, for example), and which you don't.

If you have any suggestions, questions, comments, ideas, resources recommendations, or anything, message me on here and I'll get back to you at least by the next day.

Feel free to email as well. That is where you can reach me if you would like an in-person fungi & iNaturalist tutorial on Zoom, at the level that best fits you. It can cover both app & site, beginner or advanced, fungi identification focused or more about the site. I can also send that information in a written format by email if that is preferred.

Thank you for joining the project, and happy fungi foraying!

Mariah Rogers / mkremedios / link to my email

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Hopefully that provides some small orientation to those of you who may be learning WMS has projects on iNaturalist right this moment, too. Please join us if it seems like fun to you! You are welcome, whether to post observations, identify other people's fungi, compliment a friend's photography or comment how someone's fungus observation looks exactly like a bagel (as they do, at times), or perhaps just to browse & learn.