Leader for Today’s Ramble: Bill Sheehan
Authors of today’s report: Don Hunter, Linda Chafin, Bill Sheehan
The photos that appear in this report were taken by Don Hunter unless otherwise credited. Photos may be enlarged by clicking them with a mouse or tapping on your screen. Not all of Don’s photos from today’s ramble made it into the Ramble Report, so be sure to check out his Facebook album at this link.
Nature Ramble rainy day policy: We show up at 9:00am, rain or shine. If it’s raining, we will meet and socialize in the conservatory (bring your own coffee); if there is a break in the rain, we’ll go outside and do a little rambling.
Today’s emphasis: Fungi along the White Trail Spur, Orange Trail Spur, and in the floodplain between the Orange Trail Spur and the Middle Oconee River
Number of Ramblers today: 22
Announcements:
The Great Southeast Pollinator Census is coming soon – August 23-24! Click here for information on how to participate (as little as 15 minutes! it’s up to you) and how to tell one kind of insect from another. It’s a lot of fun and a worthy piece of citizen science.
“Saving The Chattahoochee.” Screening of this film will take place on Tuesday, August 20th, at 5:30p.m. at UGA’s Special Collections Library. The film documents how one of the first female riverkeepers in the country, Sally Bethea, teamed up with Atlanta mayor Shirley Franklin, the first Black woman to be mayor of a major southern city, to change the course of the river’s future. The story of the Chattahoochee is part of a bigger picture about the efforts to protect our rivers and streams.
Interesting essay! “A Surprising Mutually Beneficial Relationship Between White-tailed Deer & Bats,” from the website Naturally Curious with Mary Holland.
Show-and-Tell: Roger Collins passed around his phone with a photograph of a Luna Moth caterpillar climbing up one of the White Oak trees on his land.
Today’s Reading: Bill read from Entangled Life: How Fungi Make Our World, Change Our Minds, and Shape Our Futures, by Merlin Sheldrake (2020). Sheldrake is a British mycologist and writer known for his work on mycorrhiza.
“FUNGI ARE EVERYWHERE but they are easy to miss. They are inside you and around you. They sustain you and all that you depend on. … They are eating rock, making soil, digesting pollutants, nourishing and killing plants, surviving in space, inducing visions, producing food, making medicines, manipulating animal behavior, and influencing the composition of the Earth’s atmosphere.Many of the most dramatic events on Earth have been — and continue to be — a result of fungal activity. Plants only made it out of the water around five hundred million years ago because of their collaboration with fungi, which served as their root systems for tens of million years until plants could evolve their own. Today, more than ninety percent of plants depend on mycorrhizal fungi, which can link trees in shared networks sometimes referred to as the “wood wide web.” This ancient association gave rise to all recognizable life on land, the future of which depends on the continued ability of plants and fungi to form healthy relationships. Tens to hundreds of species can exist in the leaves and stems of a single plant. These fungi weave themselves through the gaps between plant cells in an intimate brocade and help to defend plants against disease. No plant grown under natural conditions has been found without these fungi; they are as much a part of planthood as leaves or roots. Fungi provide a key to understanding the planet on which we live, and the ways that we think, feel, and behave. Yet they live their lives largely hidden from view, and over ninety percent of their species remain undocumented. The more we learn about fungi, the less makes sense without them.”
Today’s Route: From the Children’s Garden arbor, we made our way through the “fallen chestnut” to the Forest Play Area, then down the White Trail Spur to the Orange Trail Spur. We took a left on the Orange Trail Spur and quickly spread out into the floodplain before returning.
Today’s Observations
Bill began by putting in a good word for the Mushroom Club of Georgia and describing the typical foray kit he uses when collecting for learning purposes, not for foraging for edibles. The kit includes a basket, a robust knife for collection, a hand lens, craft boxes of various sizes for protection of small, collected specimens, and wax-coated sandwich bags for collecting larger specimens. Since collection and observation involves getting close to the ground, insect repellents are also a part of his kit.
Bill presented two regionally important field guides for identifying fungi encountered in the field. He also mentioned the importance of making spore prints when you return home in making a final determination of some species. Spore prints are made by placing the cap, lower surface down, on a surface and covering with a bowl. Since many spores are white, Bill recommends using aluminum foil as a spore print sheet since both light and dark spores will show up. A higher level of identification that has developed in the last couple of decades is the use of DNA analysis, which has revolutionized the taxonomy of fungi. Bill started a national citizen science group, FunDIS (Fungal Diversity Survey) for getting samples analyzed and sequenced.
On our way out of the Children’s Garden, we stopped in amazement at the number of pollinators visiting the flowers in a bed of Hoary Mountain Mint. Top row: A narrow-waisted wasp (left) and Common Eastern Bumblebee (right). Bottom row: Double-banded Scoliid Wasp (left) and Great Black Digger Wasp (right).
In spite of minimal rain the last few weeks, the Forest Play Area was rich in fungi.
Ganooderma lobatum
(no common name) grows on decaying logs. Each year, it produces a new cap below the previous year’s, creating a stack of strikingly colored caps. Similar to another species in this genus, the white lower surface of this fungus (below) can be drawn on.
Two fleshy mushrooms in the genus Pluteus were growing on a partially buried log.
Several color variations of Turkey Tail fungi were seen in the Forest Play area, this beauty with gray, brown, and tan bands with a smooth creamy white edge. Turkey Tail is a bracket or shelf fungus that is globally common. They are called “polypores,” as the lower surface (below) is covered with tiny pores that are the external openings of tubes from which spores are released.
Another Turkey Tail, less colorful, but hairy!
Elizabeth spotted several tall, stacked fungal brackets high up in a Red Maple tree. Don was able to shoot several of these stacks with the short telephoto aspect of his macro lens, enabling him to get enough photos to identify these fungi. He’s tentatively calling them Marshmallow Polypores. There are such things as toothed mushrooms but this species is actually a poroid fungus – the “teeth” on the lower surface are the result of the pores breaking down.
No fungi ramble is complete without a look at Dog Vomit slime-mold, which isn’t any kind of mold at all – it’s not even a fungus! Although placed in the protista kingdom, slime-molds check a lot of fungi boxes, both scientific and non: they reproduce by spores; they make a living by digesting dead plant material; and they have multiple, non-binary “mating types” rather than the egg-sperm mating system of plants and animals. On a casual walk through the woods, we notice that they are colorful, and live in damp places on decaying plant material. Plus, they are called “molds”! Isn’t this enough to qualify as a fungus? Well, no. On a cellular level, they have an important difference: Slime Mold cell walls are made of cellulose while those of fungi are made of chitin (like insect exoskeletons). And, amazingly, Slime Molds have behavior, at least when they are in the streaming phase between the amoeba and and final fruiting body stage. They have pseudopods (“false feet”) that allow them to move across a surface and, utterly without a brain or a nervous system, they can navigate to a food source and remember how they got there. Even through mazes! Slime molds can separate then fuse back together then share knowledge between the formerly separated parts. No mere fungus can do this!
Bill discovered this bright yellow Slime Mold on Wednesday while scouting for today’s ramble and photographed it (left). Only a day later, the color had dulled and the outer layer appeared to be breaking down, exposing the black interior.
Bill dissected the Slime Mold on Thursday, further revealing its black interior where spores are produced.
False Turkey Tail fungi resemble Turkey Tail fungi when viewed from above; they can be distinguished based on their color and the texture of their lower surfaces. False Turkey Tail has a smooth, leathery or plastic-y lower surface that is gray or yellow. Turkey Tail has a white lower surface that feels rough due to the many pores that open onto the surface. This False Turkey Tail is probably a Silky Parchment fungus.
This unidentified crust fungus (above and left) was growing on a rotting log. Its entire surface is covered with pores.
Jan found this small white Amanita mushroom, with a thin veil ring or collar near the top of the stem just below the gills and with the typical Amanita bulbous base. It had begun to desiccate and the cap was drawn up, exposing the gills.
Fungi grow on almost every conceivable substrate, including the living bodies of insects. In this photo, a Carpenter Ant has been parasitized by a “zombie ant” fungus. A fungal spore invaded and spread throughout the ant’s body. Once the fungus reached the ant’s head, the ant climbed a nearby Beech tree, attached itself to an exposed twig, then died. Soon after, a stalk-like reproductive organ called a stroma emerged from the ant’s head and began releasing spores that will then infect other ants on the ground below.
Bill collected a small, yellow Bolete fungus and pointed out that Boletes have flat, solid but spongy surfaces on the underside of the cap with tiny tubes or pores from which spores are released. Compare this spore surface with the gilled spore surface found on many mushrooms, such as the Amanita above.
After turning onto the Orange Trail Spur, we spotted some Gilled Polypore fungi growing on a downed limb. The upper surface (left) looks a lot like a Turkey Tail fungus, but the lower surface (right) has gills. This is unusual for a polypore fungus, illustrating, as Don said, that “it just goes to show that there are few ‘rules’ without exceptions in mycology.”
A Veiled Oyster mushroom, growing out of a crevice in a decaying log, was teeming with small flies. Unlike its choice edible cousin, the Oyster Mushroom, this species is not edible.
Every summer I think (hope) there are fewer Joro Spiders than the year before, but then comes August and they are everywhere once again. Don captured this one sitting on one of the strong, gold-colored anchor silks (left) of its web and then again on the twig the anchor silk was attached to (right).
We came across a large mushroom growing on a dead log with gills that have distinctively saw-toothed edges suggesting that it’s Lentinellus micheneri, a species lacking a common name.
Myrna spotted this Thin-walled Maze Polypore, its lower surface a maze of long, narrow pores. Common in eastern North America, Europe, and Asia, this species infects injured hardwood trees, especially willows.
An Inchworm, a caterpillar of the geometrid moth family, hanging from an almost invisible silk thread – it is probably a Dot-lined Angle Moth caterpillar.
Dale wrote about inch worms in the July 8, 2021 Ramble Report:
“Inchworms are almost never seen on their host plants because their shape and coloration make them look like part of the leaves they are eating or just another twig on a branch. They get their name, inchworm, from the way they walk: the rear end is brought up to the head end, making an inverted “U” shape. The claspers on the hind end then grasp the surface, and the head end releases its attachment and extends forward in a straight line. It looks like the caterpillar is measuring the surface its crawling on, hence the “inchworm” common name…
…In addition to resembling twigs and leaves, inchworms have another defense against being eaten: they drop off the tree they are dining on when danger threatens. Put yourself in the place of a tasty inchworm when a bird lands on your branch. If you jump you can fall out of danger. But when you hit the ground, you’ll be faced with another problem – where is your food? How will you find your way back to that tasty leaf you were munching? You could wander for hours and never even find your tree trunk. A safety line is the solution. Like most caterpillars, inchworms can produce silk from silk glands in their head. When danger threatens, they start releasing a silken safety line from these glands. The inchworm glues one end of the silk to the leaf or twig and then jumps off. The weight of the caterpillar pulls the silk out of the gland as the caterpillar falls. It happens fast enough to fool a bird! Not only has the caterpillar escaped its predator, it has a way to return home – climb up the silken thread. I have watched inchworms climbing their safety lines and can tell you that it involves winding the thread up into a wad held by their thoracic legs, but I can’t provide any more details. Perhaps Ramblers with more acute vision can find the answer.”
Fresh and older Split Gill Mushrooms (left) growing with Carbon Ball fungus and (right) its beautiful lower surface showing the divided gills radiating from the stalk.
As we were walking around in the floodplain, Don spotted a mossy log with several flushes of thin-stalked, white mushrooms called Bladder Stalks. Gill-like folds radiating from the stalk and across the pore surface (right) are quite beautiful. There were examples of all stages of growth and, based on the number of broken stalks, they appear to be somewhat fragile.
Carbon Balls, aka Cramp Balls and Coal Fungus, grow on dead and dying hardwood trees. The fruiting body (the “balls”) is built up in concentric layers that are laid down annually, seen below on a specimen Bill dissected. A number of insects and small animals may live inside the fruiting body. The black variety of Carbon Balls has been used as tinder and burns slowly. The brown variety shown here is too heavy and dense to burn well.
Crowded Parchment fungus upper surface (left) and lower pore surface (right)
An orange crust fungus, Ceriporia spissa, is covered with tiny pores (right).
Sheet-weaver Spider on the orange crust fungus
SUMMARY OF OBSERVED SPECIES
Luna Moth Actias luna
Hoary Mountainmint Pycnanthemum incanum
Narrow-waisted wasp (no common name) Sphex flavovestitus
Common Eastern Bumble Bee Bombus impatiens
Double-banded Scoliid Wasp Scolia bicincta
Great Black Digger Wasp Sphex pensylcanicus
Ganoderma fungi (no common name) Ganoderma lobatum
Pluteus (no species ID) Pluteus sp.
Turkey Tails Trametes c.f. versicolor
Marshmallow Polypore (tentative) Irpiciporus mollis, synonym Spongipellis pachyodon
Dog Vomit Slime Fuligo septica
False Turkey Tail fungus Stereum lobatum
Silky Parchment Fungus Stereum striatum
Unidentified white poroid crust (no species ID) Family Polyporaceae
Amanita (no species ID) Amanita sp.
Zombie ant fungus Ophiocordyceps kimflemingiae
Carpenter Ant Camponotus sp.
American Beech Fagus grandifolia
Unidentified bolete Boletaceae family
Gilled Polypore Trametes betulina
Veiled Oyster Pleurotus levis
Joro Spider Trichonephila clavata
Lentinellus micheneri (no common name) Lentinellus micheneri
Thin-walled Maze Polypore Daedaleopsis confragosa
Dot-lined Angle Moth (caterpillar/inchworm) Psamatodes abydata
Common Splitgill fungi Schizophyllum commune
Bladder Stalks fungi Physalacria inflata
Carbon Balls Daldinia childiae
Crowded Parchment Fungus Stereum complicatum
Orange Poroid Crust (no common name) Ceriporia spissa
Sheet-weaver spider (no common name) Bathyphantes sp.