Mushroom Madness

Chicken of the Woods similar to the one that we found.

During the mushroom foray that my group did, we walked around a trail that went past the cemetery. We found four mushrooms, but they were few and far between. I found this to be odd, since the conditions were great. It had rained nonstop for the past two days and wasn't too hot or cold. We found a chicken-of-the-woods mushroom.Chicken-of-the-woods are large, round and orange live shelf-like mushrooms that grow in clusters on dead trees. We also found another shelf-like mushroom growing on a tree. This one was white and soft. It had gills on the underside which, when touched, turned bright yellow. We believed it to be Cantharellus subalbidus (shown below), however it did not have a white spore print.

Cantharellus subalbidus commonly called the white chanterelle.

Something I found interesting about fungi is how useful they are. Fungi are decompose things, which helps clean the environment of dead and dying matter. The penicillin antibiotics are made from penicillin fungi. This is a huge benefit because penicillin can be used to treat pneumonia, scarlet fever, rheumatic fever, inflammatory heart disease and a multitude of other ailments. Mushrooms in particular are edible fungi. Some other examples of fungi are molds and single-celled yeasts. All fungi heterotrophic and have cell walls made of chitin.

When you are foraging for mushrooms and pick one, you aren't hurting the mushroom at all. In actuality, what you've picked is the mushroom's fruiting body, where it stores reproductive cells. The actual mushroom is called mycelium, which is a collection of long strands of hyphae, which are underground. Mushrooms are commonly found in forests. They grow on mosses, grasses, trees and decaying logs. They will often sprout 1-3 days after a good rain. An important note when collecting mushrooms is to make sure that you get the entire mushroom. This means you should bring along a shovel or trowel. That way, you not only collect the fruiting body, but the mycelia as well. Also, bring a basket so that when you walk through the woods, spores from your mushroom(s) will fall to the ground and grow new mushrooms.

Example of a Chicken of the Woods spore print.

When classifying mushrooms, it is important to note the color of the mushroom's spores. You'd do this by taking a spore print. Spore prints are conducted by cutting of a mushroom's stem, placing it gills/pores down on a piece of brown paper and putting a cup over it. In time, the spores will fall and you'll be able to see and identify them. Also, when conducting a mushroom foray, you can collect your spores in a paper bag so that they'll fall straight into the bag. The white shelf-like mushroom that we collected had brown spores and the chicken of the wood had a white spore print (see left). Spore prints are vital in making sure that you are correctly classifying your specimen.

When classifying mushrooms, you use a biological key(online key that we used). They can be found in a multitude of books and online keys. A helpful tip for when using a key of any kind is to read carefully. Make sure that you're not skimming, but reading every word carefully. Otherwise, you may mistake and edible mushroom for a poisonous one. My group had issues with being able to stick to the tedious process. There are hundreds of thousands of mushroom species and identifying them often takes a long time. It is very easy to misread a word or skip a step and classify your mushroom completely wrong.

Some take-away lessons I've learned from this experience are a) always have someone double check your work, fresh eyes can really make a difference and b) mushrooms have a lot more than meets the eye (literally). Don't pass up the opportunity to go on a mushroom foray simply because it doesn't sound like fun. I wasn't looking forward to it, but the experience ended up being very interesting. So, with that said, best wishes and happy mushroom hunting!