We coordinated this trip to also happen when NYMS was doing a walk in a local park: Clove Lakes. It also happens that my grandma’s house is nearby and we could easily spend a couple days there with full mushroom baskets and even fuller bellies. For two days of collecting, there is quite a lot to be covered.

The myco-journey begins even before the majestical ferry crossing to Staten Island. I recommend taking it during a summer sunset, sometimes local groups will play music on the boat balconies (there’s probably a more appropriate word for that). I take the opportunity to bike whenever I can, even if it is traversing the entire height of Manhattan. Right before Chelsea piers, I skidded to a stop upon seeing these massive white mushrooms poking out of the grass. It was a group of very large white gilled mushrooms, with free gills that don’t touch the stem, and a massive partial veil. Many often confuse these for edible parasols, or possibly even Amanitas, but this mushroom has one of the most unique spore print colors: green (the gills are white before turning green). The more mature mushrooms begin to show the spore color on the gills. Nicknamed the Vomiter (Chlorophyllum molbidites), it is quite poisonous, but not lethal. As someone who doesn’t live around many lawns, where this is often found, I was so happy to snap a couple photos.

Once the Clove lakes walk started we began to find a slew of great edible mushrooms, Maitake, Jellies, Honey Mushrooms, but as you may now guess, my interest lies in the mushrooms we don’t know. We found a tiny purple Cortinarius “sp-IN54” (confirmed by DNA sequencing) featured first in the article about purple mushrooms. We saw one of the largest Marasmius’, M. nigrodiscus which is always weird because they are normally a very thin and small genus. Marasmius is named for the Greek word for withering, marasmos, because of their rehydratable nature, and additionally they have some of the wiriest stems in the mushroom kingdom. The durability of the stem was still a feature for this large Marasmius, which was so cool to see.

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This last fungus is not quite rare, but it intrigues me. Botryobasidium almost has an entire family to itself (Botryobasidiaceae), and is related closely to the delicatessen Hedgehog and Chantrelles… who would have guessed? If you run your finger across a fungus like this and you are covered in brown spores, you have likely found it! As it goes with the smaller and less visually appealing fungi, often they make up for it under a microscope. This fungus has by far the most conspicuous decoration on the hyphae which I have not seen the same on any other mushrooms. Getting them to species is not as easy, but I hope to continue to study them more closely and perhaps find a reliable way to tell them apart, besides DNA.

The above Orange Mock Oyster was one of dozens of mushrooms that the club brought to the picnic tables after the walk, so that we could all admire the fancy colours and debate what the more confusing species could be. NYMS actually posts all of their fungal walk lists online and you can see every single species found for yourself! It was a lovely day to spend with a lovely group of people, but the real mushroom hunt was yet to begin.

We woke up Sunday morning on a mission:

To dive mushroom knife first into the unique landscape known as, The Pine Barrens.

My first exposure to the Pine Barrens was when I lived in Philadelphia at seventeen years old and went on a camping trip with some friends and walked wide-eyed past a group happily picking boletes that were larger than my own head. I suddenly wished I was with the gentle older folk learning about mushrooms instead of the angsty teenage group led by a pyromaniac who insisted on testing what was and wasn’t flammable on every item in his car. Spoiler alert, everything is flammable if you try hard enough. Regardless, this left a lasting impression of the mycological possibilities of the pine barrens.

Some of those possibilities include rarities from the FUNDIS Northeast Rare Fungi Challenge such as Entoloma indigoferum or the strange Rhopalogaster transversarius, a mushroom in between a truffle and a gilled mushroom.

Now we didn’t find either of these awesome mushrooms on this trip, but we found some others that were definitely writing home about. But the main question right now is:

Why are the Pine Barrens so unique?

It is a 800,000 acre piece of land dominated by pitch and pygmy pines make it the largest surviving Atlantic pine ecosystem left! The pitch and pygmy pines also are fire dependent, relying on lightning strikes, controlled burns, or in this day and age, cigarettes flicked out of cars. The acidic sandy soil makes it unsuitable for farming, and has halted the sprawling urban and industrial development that you see in neighboring Jersey areas. Because of its size and ecology, it acts as a sanctuary for: “34 species of mammals, 36 species of fish, 24 amphibians, 30 reptiles, 144 birds (either year-round or migratory residents), and more than 10,000 invertebrate species (mostly insects, worms and other arthropods). Of the animals, 36 species are currently deemed threatened or endangered” (source). It also hosts rare plants, and even insect eating plants! Notice the lack of fungi mentioned. That’s where mushroom crazed enthusiasts like ourselves come into play. Here is what we found!

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At this time in my mushroom journey, I was paying heavy attention to the smells of fungi, as they can be extremely variable, not only in the range of a species, but the smell can shift in the mushroom’s maturity, or completely disappear. Not to mention that as humans we all have different perceptions of smell, and what smells like a flower to one, can smell like horrible grease to another. This may seem like a useless venture, but if you can map your smells to others, and realize when you can smell something others can’t, it can be a super power! One example is that I can almost never detect a ‘burnt rubber’ smell known from a certain very slimy waxcap, but I can almost always detect a latexy smell from a group of Russulas that often differ in cap color, which allows me to identify them more readily!

Now I am nearing the email length limit, but I have a few more highlights from the pine barrens and closing remarks to show off. Hope fully those on email will be able to read this before it gets truncated. If not let me know!

What I can immediately say about this seemingly random group of fungi, is that these are not all fungi you see anywhere often. Sure, singularly they can exist in other pine dominated habitats, but to have such an abundance of these mushrooms is thanks to the pristine quality of the pine barrens. It is so large that even ATV riding pyromaniac teenagers can’t stop the biodiversity!

Unfortunately this is the only trip report I will be able to do on the pine barrens as of right now, as the several years of drought have kept the already arid climate from producing many fungi. I am crossing my fingers that the snow melt and a bit of good luck will get us a great flush of fungi from the Pine Barrens that we will be able to show off!

Have you been in a pine barren before?

Popular Edibles and Medicinals

Everyone loves foraging, and with the departing of the snow we start to see some of our favorites!

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Common and Fun Finds

These are the fungi you are bound to see, and that are cool to find (at least I think so).

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Keep an eye out for these…

We have many mushrooms to expect, but how about something that is more rare?

Those are our May mushrooms! Next digest in the first week of June. Till then we will explore some more species, trip reports, and whatever my heart and time management skills decide!

Till then.

I have certain species that I have over sequenced. They aren’t rare (unlike the lovely finds here), they may or may not be cryptic (several identical species hiding under one name), the only fact connecting them is I have not been able to correctly identify them time and time again. And that bothers me! If I am seeing a species for the first time, or in a new part of the world where everything is different, I get it. But these common species, popping up all over like weeds, taunting me, is too much.

This leads me to the target of today’s deciphering: Entoloma strictius, the Straight Stalked Entoloma. So far I have sent seven separate collections to be DNA sequenced. Oof. Entolomas are one of the confusing groups fussed about above. But as always, there are exceptions. There are likely over two thousand species (s.l.) worldwide, and all of them share one of the most distinct spore features in the mushroom kingdom: angles. Most mushroom and slime mold spores are at the end of the day, some sort of oval-like shape. Sure, there can be circular ones with spikes, or longer more ellipsoid ones, but overall they are roundish. For the more initiated, yes I am ignoring the diversity of spore morphology in Ascomycota, that’s a whole different beast. You may be wondering why I ever thought Entoloma strictius was a confusing species to begin with. Well, with all this evidence I collected, I am wondering that too. Thankfully it boils down to some quite simple distinguishing features, embarrassingly enough.

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These angular spores allow for immediate genus identification under the microscope, but we don’t need to rush to the microscope to recognize Entolomas. They are also one of the few gilled mushrooms with a mycological pink spore print. The main other one being Pluteus, which has free gills that do not attach to their stem while Entoloma gills do, making for an obvious difference –if you know where to look. Entolomas are mostly saprobic (decomposers) and usually have a twisted spindly stem that becomes quite recognizable when pointed out. As always there are outliers and mushrooms that just refuse to conform to the categories we try to stuff them into, but our trusted Entoloma strictius is not one of those species.

Traditionally –and I use traditional in the sense of pre extensive genetic work, E. strictius is a brownish mushroom, often with a strongly umbo’ed (central bump) cap, twisted stem, and is quite tall and slender, proportionally. They are small to medium sized. In this little deep dive we will be focusing primarily on the mushrooms found in the Northeastern United States, as doing any more than that would be too big of a bite to chew, and at the end of the day, this is for funsies.

Now, my words are not replacing a thorough genetic academic paper, but rather an educated guess. Besides, who knows when one of those papers will come out. I have spent so much time looking at all sorts of different DNA sequences on iNaturalist that I made a program just to collect all names under a certain taxonomic group. Since E. strictius is in subgenus Nolanea section Holoconiota, I looked at all currently sequenced names in that section. As confusing as Entolomas can be at the species level, to get them to section or subgenus level they are somewhat manageable to identify, which is always a lovely treat.

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Currently we see eight DNA confirmed species in section Holoconiota from our Northeastern area, strongest distinctions to E. strictius noted:

Entoloma “sp-IN29” - Smaller, daintier species with a scaly cap

Entoloma “sp-IN76” - Smaller, daintier species without the conspicuous twisting stem

Entoloma “strictius-IN02” - !? Seemingly identical, except for darker cap colour and springtime growth

Entoloma cornicolor - Smaller, daintier species without the conspicuous twisting stem. Also with smaller spore length than E. strictius.

Entoloma cuspidiferum - Smaller, daintier species almost always growing from hardwood (could be buried)

Entoloma strictius - Our culprit

Entoloma vernum - !? Seemingly identical, except for darker cap colour and springtime growth

Entoloma “sp-TN01” - Smaller, daintier species with a scaly cap and possibly smaller spores

If these names seem strange and new to you, don’t worry. They are just placeholder names that we use when no name for them exists. Entoloma “sp-IN29” is the twenty ninth Entoloma to be found by DNA sequencing in Indiana, and Entoloma “strictius-IN02” is the second Entoloma that is very similar to E. strictius to be found in Indiana. Why so much representation from Indiana? Because the largest sequencing lab in North America, Mycota Labs, was based there (they are in Michigan now). Go check them out!

Now for the decryption. If you noticed above, I didn’t give much weight to the colors of the mushrooms, even though colors are important. Colors can be quite variable with age, weather, and even just specimen to specimen. It doesn’t help that all of the Entolomas we are looking at are some version of brown. E. strictius specifically can have a more leathery tan to an almost pinkish tan cap colour. When dried it often turns almost white and varies in shininess. For the species notes above, I also tried using similar language for distinctions to drive in this point: Smaller species without twisting stipes or with scales on the cap, cannot be E. strictius. Conversely, similar sized species with possibly a darker cap growing during the spring months, are very likely not E. strictius. There are zero DNA records of E. strictius growing before June, save one March observation from Florida, which is a different climate altogether. Entoloma vernum had two observations in the normal summer season, which shows that it isn’t fully restricted to spring, just very unlikely to be seen in the summer. There are some questions as to Entoloma “strictius-IN02” being the American version of the European E. vernum, but that makes me wonder what all the E. vernum sequences in the US are? Another mushroom puzzle for another day.

While we examined similar species in the same section as our target specimen, that doesn’t mean that everything else looks different. Here are a few notable mentions:

Entoloma cetratum - Typically has the honey colored cap. If cap color not as such, the larger spores with more angles will separate from E. strictius

Entoloma sp. ‘luteofuscum-NB01’ - Hard to tell apart macroscopically when it is presenting like E. strictius. A surefire separation are the longer spores which are usually 10-14ish microns long while E. strictius is in the 8-12 range

Entoloma sp. ‘NB02’ - Often with a zonate cap and more yellow tones

Entoloma “sp-NB01” - A very rare species so far, the cap is a dark brown, and the cap changes colors while losing moisture (hygrophanous).

All of the above point to extra features to look out for when thinking about whether your specimen is a E. strictius or not:

• Circular zones on the cap. E. strictius will never have zones, only radial lines if anything.

• E. strictius will never have scales or obvious texture on the cap.

• E. strictius really almost always stays in the tan-white-lightbrown range of colors for the cap. As soon as there are yellow or dark browns, be skeptical. The cap can be very white or dark tan from sun or rain damage.

Now, indulge me in my favorite part. I wanted to run a phylogenetic tree that supported that the Holoconiotas were all different species, just so I’ll be able to sleep well at night knowing I wrote as correctly as I could. All you need to know to understand this tree, is:

1. That the colored sections are our species in the Northeast, and non colored are from other regions.

2. The branching of the trees shows those that are most closely related or not, and the numbers written on the branches show how strongly the algorithm believes this assortment to be, with 100 being the best score.

For those that may want to know the phylogenetic details (Please skip this paragraph if you don’t), the FASTA (DNA Text Format) was generated by my iNat FASTA puller, then cleaned in Ugene (Sequence Examiner Software) and sent into a preliminary MrBayes (An Algorithm) run on NGphylogeny.fr at the standard metrics except I switched to two runs instead of one. Sect. Nolanea used for outgroup (couldn’t find types). Trimmed excess and added missing sequences before rerunning for final result at 400k generations and 2 runs.

The tree did hint at Entoloma “sp-IN29” and Entoloma “sp-TN01” possibly not being in section Holoconiota, so I removed them for a cleaner and more sensible look. I will leave them in the identification above, for the sake of documentation and transparency. :) I also wonder if the closeness of E. vernum and E. strictius-IN02 versus the original E. strictius point to their divergence in growth season. Mushroom food for thought.

In conclusion, if you see a brownish, twisting stem, umbonate (centrally bumped) cap with gills slowly turning pink and that are fully attached to the stem in the summer, you have likely found Entoloma strictius!

This one was a lot, thanks for reading!

Hope to see everyone at the next one!

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What is a Script Lichen?

Lichens are fungi that work with algae and / or cyanobacteria to photosynthesize and they come in a wide variety of forms, from normal cap and gill mushrooms to tiny matchsticks living on top of other mushrooms. The most common forms have apothecia, fungal (usually circular) fruiting bodies on top of a foliose growth. Script lichens are lichens that have designed their fungal portions (lirellae) to look like elongated coffee beans on top of their crustose and tightly adhered main fruiting body. They come in all sorts of styles, and have amazing spores (if you can find one!).

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Where do we find script lichen?

There are almost no species on rock. Instead pay attention to tree bark both living and dead. I even find them on palms in Florida. Once you find one, you will undoubtedly find more! Just remember that lichens take a long time to grow and removing them is damaging, unlike other fungi. While many of these photos are from the tropics, you can find script lichen worldwide! Anywhere where there isn’t too much pollution killing them off.

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Anyways, this is a short one today. I took a bit of a break from the mushroom work, as it has been almost ten months of daily posting, studying, and teaching about fungi often adding up to 12+ hour days. I wanted to relax a bit :). We are starting up again, better than ever. I have something very special planned for this mushroom season, stay tuned!

About two years after my first specimen was sent to Mycota labs for DNA sequencing, I began to consistently encounter a pleasant surprise: fungi that had not been found before. They ranged from large charismatic species that made me wonder, “How could this possibly be new to DNA studies?”, to microscopic ascomycetes that made me feel the exact opposite. So I began to do what any data driven mushroom enthusiast would do: I started keeping track of them in a little Google Sheet. At the time of this writing in early February, there are 128 unique species sitting in that document, 43 of which have been designated new provisional names, meaning they were new to our databases. A provisional name is assigned to a mushroom species when it is distinct enough from all other mushrooms genetically. The caveat is, is that this doesn’t necessarily mean that they are a new species to science, just to our DNA databases. Because the matter of fact is that science existed way before fungal sequencing, and we can’t always connect today’s data to an old specimen, which may or may not exist due to insect damage, human error, or just good old father time. You could say we are living in a grey area of sorts, with the old scientific world slowly being merged with this data driven modern genetic world. I like to think of it as the golden age for fungal discovery, where endless opportunities lie untouched.

How exactly did I define what counted as a rare species? I made it quite simple: If there were five or less specimens recorded on iNaturalist, I popped it on over to my tracker. This strategy also implies that my ever growing list will also be ever shrinking, as more people find and document more fungi, but that is exactly how I envision it to be. Most of my observations are from the places I frequent the most, New York, Pennsylvania, and Florida (when I go to visit my grandmother Svetlana, or ба́бушка). Today I want to showcase three intriguing examples from Massachusetts or adjoining states!

Our first candidate comes from the 2024 NEMF Foray at Cape Cod which I was able to attend thanks to the Homola scholarship along with two other recipients! This is a member of the notorious family Cortinariaceae (Webcaps), which recently underwent a large taxonomic remodeling that gave us a glimmer of hope at understanding its never ending complexity. Emphasis on ‘glimmer’. While there are some colorful and/or distinct webcaps, this little guy falls more so under the category of a LBM (“Little Brown Mushroom”). It still manages to present some interesting trends, such as only being found on Cape Cod and the Southern Coastal Portion of New Brunswick. This immediately makes me wonder if this mushroom could be a coastal species. Additionally, it has always been found under some sort of conifer, leading another early hypothesis to be that it has a coniferous host.

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The Cape Cod area yielded two other rare Cortinarius collections, but for the sake of diversity I will move on to greener pastures, or in this case, redder.

These extremely recognizable ascomycetes can be told apart by their distinct reddish-orange colour and their conspicuous ‘eyelashes’ on the cup margins. They have been appropriately termed as the Eyelash Cups (Scutellinia sp.), and for most, that is where the story ends. Some of us, with a penchant for suffering, have decided to look deeper and try to distinguish the species of these beautiful moisture loving organisms. I have used my trusty species finder code to help collect the provisional and non provisional DNA sequenced names, and there are thirty-nine Scutellinia species in only the Northeastern United States so far… To say we have our work cut out for us is an understatement, and you can bet most of them look exactly like the above photograph. So how can we progress our understanding of so many species that look the same to the naked eye?

Microscopy.

You could spend a lifetime learning ascomycete microscopy, but when it comes to these eyelash cups, they are relatively user friendly. This is mostly due to their large size and that in turn makes them more fun to work with! At least in my opinion. All of a sudden these indiscernible orangish cups have many discernable features to examine: hair length, septation, rooting, spore ornamentation, spore size, ascus size, paraphyses and more! Simply adding microscopy work to the DNA verified observations will allow us to be able to differentiate these fungi, and you will likely be a part of a scientific paper one day! I don’t know about you, but that only adds to my motivation to go outside and find fungi!

Our final subject makes up for its small size with beautifully textured cap, and gummy-bear like spore shape. It has only been found three times so far, restricted to the old Appalachian mountains from North Carolina to Vermont. Say hello to Inocybe multicoronata!

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A disclaimer for this Inocybe and any other mushroom to exist, is that we can only deduce from what we know. If we suddenly see the first example of Cortinarius growing all over inland Eastern America, then it cannot be a coastal species. Or if this I. multicoronata shows up on the west coast, it is no longer an Appalachian species. At the same time making these hypotheses help us try to understand the fungi we find, and allow us to have better information on how to find them again.

As for identifying these beautiful little mushrooms, I can only state to be watchful for the white scales on the dark brown caps, the heavily frosted (pruinose) stems and overall small, slender stature. Bonus points if you find it in the Appalachian Mountains! The reason I don’t bring more information to this species is due to how complex and confusing they can be, such as needing microscopy just to get to the genus Inocybe confidently. It is an incredibly fun activity to do, or frustrating depending on how you approach it. I highly recommend slowing down and examining the hidden little mushrooms more closely.

These were only three specimens in a world of thousands, and I hope I convinced or inspired a few of you to take those careful iNaturalist pictures and send your finds to DNA sequencing (easily done these days!), and maybe even put them under a microscope!

Thank you for reading, and thank you to David Babik for supporting us!

What is a Death Cap?

Death caps are the species Amanita phalloides, part of a complex genus that has both choice edible and lethal mushrooms. They are also a European species, introduced into the Americas likely through tree transplanting and the usual effects of globalization. That doesn’t mean that we don’t have our own toxic species. In fact, there are entire sections of Amanita with deadly mushrooms and with a little practice you can start to tell them apart. Here in the Northeast we have the Destroying Angel (Amanita bisporigera), the West has its counterpart (Amanita ocreata) and there are even shaggy Roanokenses that could send you to the hospital.

So do these tall, mycorrhizal (symbiotic with trees), and deadly yet beautiful species look like edible Amanitas? Yes. In fact they look most similar to species in the section Ceasarae, a group of Amanitas that also have a skirt on the stem, similar stature, and an egg-like sack at the base of the stem. Considering rain, age, and how random environmental happenings can change the look of fleshy mushrooms, you begin to see how these two mushrooms are being confused.

The above two photos are the most typical representations possible of their respective species, the differences may seem obvious. But imagine rain sloughs off the giant wart patch of the Coccora, and the volvas at the base of the stems begin to degrade, and the colors begin to fade. All of a sudden, you have two very similar looking mushrooms! To separate the two, we need to examine closely, specifically for aspects that you may not pay attention to at first glance. Death caps will never have warts on their cap, nor a lined cap margin. The egg-volva at the base of the Caesars is also much wider and roomier versus the (usually) stem-hugging volva of the Death Caps. These are not the only differences, but we could spend years in the details of Amanita identification (and some people do!).

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But wait, we are looking in the wrong place!

What if I told you that these are likely not the mistaken culprits for most of these poisonings? An online source says that the signs posted up and down the Central Californian coast are not only in English, but in Thai and Laotian as well, hinting at the missing piece that articles are evading. These are a cultural and continental identification mistake, not just random poisonings! So now we are left with the question, what delicious mushroom do Southeast Asians have at home that looks like a Death Cap? I looked at species first by Amanita sections: they do not have any form of Death Caps! Lucky fellows! So there are no possible ways to mistake them. They do in fact have several Caesar mushrooms, but most have the characteristic orange to red colors, and are edible! With a bit more digging, I think I found the culprit: The Paddy Straw Mushroom (Volvariella volvacea).

The story of the poisonings is beginning to clear up. We have a population of immigrants that are seeing what they believe is a delicious edible with no dangerous lookalikes, but with a change of continents comes a change of fungal diversity. The amatoxins in Amanita are especially cruel as after the initial food poisoning-like symptoms, the body feels fine for several hours, before the organ failure sets in. This false sense of health only increases the gravity of situations where getting to the hospital as quickly as possible is vital. Not to mention that many Amanitas taste sweet and yummy, even the ones that kill you (yes this has been verified).

For the sake of science, how would we tell apart the Death Cap with the Paddy straw mushroom, assuming they grew right next to each other (which they do not)? California does in fact have mushrooms in the same genus as the Paddy Straw, but not Volvariella volvacea itself and not common edibles (as far as I am aware). The biggest obvious identification difference would be the spore color. Amanitas have white spores, while the Volvariellas have pink! This could be seen through a spore print, or even be seen on the mature gills, where the Death Cap gills would stay white and the Paddy Straw gills would slowly become more and more pinkish. The other striking difference is that Volvariellas don’t have a skirt dangling on the stem! With these two features alone you can begin to separate the two.

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Media response to mushrooms and foraging

Many mycophiles have been quite upset about the blanket statements towards mycology to just stop foraging and to not pick any mushrooms at all. I was in California this past January, and the news had everyone on edge. My Mom and I were being warned about touching and picking mushrooms so avidly we were stunned. We had never been surrounded by so much fear of fungi especially in an otherwise rather mycophilic part of the world like the Golden State. Laughably we also happened to be picking for science (rather than eating) looking at fungi that were maybe a centimeter in size maximum when these statements were made to us. I looked at the speck in my hands and then back at the warning-givers thinking “Really?”. All in all I understand the concern that the public has and that people were trying to help us stay safe. I do also wish that rather than a fear or refusal of a beautiful kingdom of nature that we learned how to safely navigate mushrooms. We don’t stop driving just because of extremely high rates of car accidents (~39,000 US deaths per year), or eating our favourite foods (~3000 US food poisoning deaths per year). All those large scary numbers in comparison to an average of 3-5 mushroom deaths per year in the US. We do our best to stay safe and prevent as much as we can. A little bit of education goes such a long way. That being said, how to reach the immigrants that are likely not reading English foraging books or awesome Substack articles? ‘The Southeast Asian problem’ has been termed and documented many times over the years such as in Mushrooms of the Redwood Coast, this article from the UK, and by David Fischer. Now we need ideas on how to effectively spread this information to the people who need it most. What do you think?

In two days we depart on the Colombia Mycotour with for two weeks of intensive fungal documentation and exploration. Stay tuned for all the craziness we will see down there!

Our first purpleton is barely displaying any pigment externally, in fact if you walked past this mushroom, you would not think it had any interesting coloration to it at all, if you even noticed it hiding amongst the leaves. It is only when cut open that we see the lower half of the stem have this beautiful violet color to it. Akin to a mycological easter egg, this Cortinarius, confirmed by DNA sequencing, has only been found ten times on iNaturalist, and so far is restricted to the Northeast. Finding it in one of the biggest cities in the world makes it that much more interesting, if you count Staten Island as NYC… >:)

The next flavor of purple is a much more recognizable one, the Blewit! For once in mushroom history, it makes more sense to call a species by its common name instead of its scientific name because science just cannot decide what genus this edible is in. I checked out the mycological names database (which just got a pretty UI overhaul!) and there are thirty-four names that the blewit has been called since being invited to join taxonomic ranks in 1790! This is also a mushroom that is not consistently purple, it can often fade or simply be, brown. A trait that seems to repeat itself across these purple pigments.

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I have to say, that the Trichaptums can be even more brightly pigmented than this, and I know I have seen it with my own two eyes, but it doesn’t seem like I’ve taken a photo with my own two phones (I have one for me, and one for mushrooms). I could have used someone else’s grandiose photo, but I will concede and stick with the mushrooms I have found and captured myself. I say Trichaptums because T. biforme, the hardwood lover, isn’t the only one to display these purple tones, in fact most of the genus is exuding purple royalty.

Now this is a species I bet you have never seen before! Not only has this sequenced name only been found three times on iNaturalist, but it’s only been found sixteen times in Northeastern North America, and once in California. Most of the observations come from Australia / New Zealand, which is definitely a different species. Oh, and one more thing, this is about a centimeter tall. Can you believe I took the above photo with only an old iPhone and a hand lens?

Russulas are a frustrating group to try and decipher, and I have been trying to do exactly that, through the lens of their cap color. Did you know that Russula cap color is extremely variable? A single mushroom can vary from green to purple and from pink to red. So my project is far-fetched, but I still hold on to the dream of figuring them out, and maybe I’ll be able to write about them here one day. Here is a secret I have uncovered so far: keep a nose out for the “latex glove” smelling Russulas, I believe that it will be a unique identifying feature one day.

There are several Laccarias that exhibit the color purple, but my favorite part? It is mostly only displayed on the gills. So unless you pick that otherwise drab looking mushroom up, you will never know of the beauty underneath! Laccarias are some of the first mycorrhizals to pop up in the summer, and they torture us throughout the rest of the season with their confusing identification definitely earning their name of ‘The Deceivers’. The purple ones though, are easy to identify thankfully. Besides L. ochropurpurea (sturdy and white on the exterior), I can think of L. amethystina (dantier and more purple to brownish on exterior), and L. amethysteo-occidentalis (west coast).

Puerto Rico was a stunning array of tiny colorful fungi, but I’ll leave that for the upcoming trip report. If you haven’t heard of the genus Callistosporium before, I don’t blame you. It flies under the radar as a Mycena-like mushroom, also with a white spore print, but it is in a completely different family: Callistosporiaceae. Yesterday I tried getting a grasp on what actually makes it different from Mycenas besides genetics. I couldn’t figure it out. Do you know? Maybe I’ll have to do a deep dive on these one day.

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We began with a rare Cortinarius, hiding its beautiful purple interior, and we now finish with a common Cortinarius, one of the flashiest mushrooms around, especially when showing off its stunning yellow spotted cap as seen on the older rightmost specimen. These galaxy-like dots are not always present, but they are always captivating. Once again we see the royal color fading with age, becoming its own different color, beautiful in its own way. I’m sure there is a life lesson in there somewhere, but I’m just here to show off some purple mushrooms.

Which mushrooms did I miss?

Thanks for reading,

Matthew

The Rarities

Today we will look at the rest of the data, including some of the most intriguing aspects of DNA sequencing: finding fungi that have never been found before. This is what makes mushrooms one of the most exciting natural organisms. Kingdom fungi remains largely unexplored in comparison to the other non microscopic kingdoms, leaving fields of open space for someone like me, or you, to go and discover their own mushrooms new to science! I can’t imagine how such a beautiful piece of nature got so overlooked, but I am grateful to be able to enjoy it now.

Before those rarities, we close up on the most common finds of our trip. The above chart shows the most observed mushrooms at the top. I clearly didn’t observe more than two species for most mushrooms. Gyroporus cyanescens seemed to be beautiful enough to get one more observation than all the rest! The color and speed at which it turns this beautiful blue are so intriguing. It is also edible, similar to its perhaps better known sibling the Chestnut Bolete (Gyroporus castaneus/borealis).

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What really piques my interest, is the stuff that is not often found. The rarities. The mushrooms that fly under the radar, either because of their small size, rare fruiting patterns, or just cryptic nature. I must note, that I am writing this field report two and a half years after actually going on this trip, as a backlog of sorts, and I am astonished that there is still a specimen with only one observation on all of iNaturalist, provisional name or not (provisional names are the ones with quotes, when DNA doesn’t find a match to anything in the databases). I ran the DNA through the Mycomap database just to make sure it wasn’t an error, and sure enough, no one else has found and sequenced this little Inocybe! Boy do I wish I took better photos!

Member of the fiber caps (including Inocybe) can often be identified by their smaller stature, textured cap with fibers of some sort, and brown spore print. If you were to look even closer at the spores, say under a microscope, you would see a large diversity of shapes, ranging from stars to gummy bears to normal ovals. Ramaria species on the other hand, are large corals, so you would think that they would have their species sorted. Nope. Often I struggle to place corals in a genus even, but they are fantastic for smelling as I have smelled delicious fruits and spices from them.

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I categorized the rare fungi into buckets of ‘Less than 5’, ‘Between 5-10’, and ‘Between 10-30’ total iNaturalist observations because:

1. I feel like there are tiers of rarity, differing levels of which the community has found fungi and:

2. I have been keeping my own record of rare fungi found less than five times and I wanted to expand! We see above that all four of the species have quotes around them, meaning they are provisional names generated and supported by DNA sequencing. Cortinarius “sp-NB13” and Phlegmacium “argutum-NB01” are both in the complex family of Cortinariaceae preferring (so far) a more northerly climate.

Something I really like to do and hope to get better at is the noticing of nature that only happens when you spend countless hours examining one species. You notice it prefers a certain kind of tree, or it always has a particular smell, nameless but identifiable. Perhaps a certain insect is always feeding on a certain species. This always makes me wish it was easier to throw a mushroom into a chemistry lab and figure out what compounds compose it and why, but alas, maybe that is for a later stage of mycological life.

Lactarius “camphoratus-IN03” is an ode to the cryptic nature mushrooms can have, in this case, many species hiding within the common Candy Cap name. It has the unmistakable sweet smell, and you can see where I took a bite out of the cap to deduce that it had no bitter taste! Always spit out mushrooms you taste!

Now there are eight total observations of the above, but five of them are from me… from the same spot (across three years). So really it’s maybe about four unique observations. And what makes this one particularly interesting, is that NYMS ascomycete expert Ethan Crenson said that I could likely connect this provisional name to a real mushroom name with microscopy. I won’t go too in depth with all the taxonomy, but in short, this would be an amazing (but tiny) step forward in science to do. My first attempt failed, as my specimen was immature, and my second yielded some spores! I plan to continue examining all five of my collections!

In total 154 fungal observations were made over the course of four days, 78 were vouchered, 8 had microscopy, and 38 were sequenced. The first thought that pops into my mind is: ‘I need to do more microscopy’. As I think this, there is a bucket behind me with several hundred specimens waiting to go under the microscope. So maybe I should get to that…

This trip felt like our first real outing for fungi. It set the tone for all future mycological trips to come. We collected every new specimen we saw like frenzied animals after a long cold winter (or dry summer), and saw the world through a new lens. Admittedly the most lasting memories from this trip were the times we left the festival: running to the swimming hole, a football field’s worth of chanterelles, and of course, the chicken that kept on (not) giving. To give the amazing festival some credit, that’s likely because much of the time at the event was a busy blur of lectures, volunteering, and socializing, which was wonderful in its own right. Unfortunately the New Moon Mycological Summit seems to have disbanded for the foreseeable future, this trip report being the last event they held.

But it is by far from our last event! I will continue to backlog these trips, hopefully catching up soon to our recent Florida, California, Canada, and Puerto Rico trips from 2025. In the meantime I also want to do some deep dives into a select list of fungi!

See you soon and thank you for reading!

Matthew

From New Moon to the White Mountains

At the New Moon Mycology Summit there were classes ranging from Dreamweaving to Tincture Making and Phylogenetic Biology. My volunteer hours limited the amount of lectures I could attend, but one stood out to me: The Truffled Vole Theory by William Padilla-Brown. My exposure to truffles is close to non-existent, so hearing about all of the diversity and possibility hidden under the soil surface was exciting. I know that there are plenty of fungi in the soil, but I thought of them as mycelium or microscopic, not fully grasping that one of the world's delicacies was in that same soil. He brought up a topic I was familiar with, secotioid fungi: mushrooms that have begun to trade off their gill bearing structures for the more primitive truffle form. They are transitional mushrooms, often looking like strange stalked puffballs but not quite. I won’t speak on them more, as I don’t feel qualified to do so, yet.

There was no way I was going to leave without a canoe trip and swim in the lake, so my mom and I set out and found a little dock in the middle that I could jump off of. The trip felt complete.

We left the festival excited for the white mountains, it was a little treat to ourselves! As amazing as it is to be mushroom collecting, socializing, and learning every waking hour, it’s also exhausting. We were ready to climb a scenic mountain and clear our heads with almost four thousand feet of elevation gain. Arriving at the base of Lafayette, we quickly realized that the fungi were having an even bigger field day than at the farm back in Vermont. We spent nearly three hours combing through the first mile or so of trail.

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Once we had our fill of mushrooms (if such a thing can really exist), we enjoyed our hobby B and speed hiked up the mountain, enjoying pushing our bodies to their limits after so much sedentary life in the car and festival. Our current record for the nine mile Lafayette loop is three and a half hours, snacks and breaks included. As always, the view and ridge walk is unparalleled, and being able to stop at a hut is wonderful and nostalgic from the time I thru-hiked the Appalachian Trail, plus they have cool little libraries and cookies.

While I am no expert, I am definitely enthusiastic about lichens, and I learned later that Rhizocarpon geographicum (Yellow Map Lichen) actually is used for dating glaciers. When the fruiting bodies are circular the diameter can be measured and along with knowing the growth rate, an estimate of previous rock exposure can be determined. Lichenometry is what this study is called.

After the hike it was safe to say we were worn out but satiated. Thankfully my mom drove (as usual) and I could switch between DJ’ing, identifying the mushrooms on iNaturalist, and just simply staring out the window and resting. Our trip was ending physically, but it was far from done mushroom wise. Specimens needed to be processed, put under the microscope, and sent to DNA sequencing…

Looking at the tree of life we can see (zoom in!) that agarics (Agaricales) take up most of the observations, over a third. That is to be expected, as cap and gilled fungi are the primary concept of mushrooms that we look for and find. A little under a fourth are Ascomycota, which seems to me like a nice proportion considering how overlooked they often are! Admittedly, as aesthetically pleasing as this tree is, it's a little difficult to grasp the details and splendor of these observations with how dense it is. So I made more charts! I also realize how image heavy this post has become, bear with me!

One of my favorite charts I made with my ‘Automatic Field Trip Report Generator’ program is this one, where I sort the most commonly found fungi by their order on the left, and their family on the right. It makes getting a grasp of what are the most prevalent groups of mushrooms I am finding so much easier! I know I often focus on collecting the most difficult groups of mushrooms —I leave the fungi I can easily identify for others to find or maybe make a funny video with them. This is reflected in the chart, where Cortinariaceae, Amanitas, Entolomas, and Waxy caps are the four most observed families in Agaricales. We can also see that boletes (my bolete identification game is weak) and Russulas are not far behind!

Once again I am nearing the Substack length limit. Part 3 will be dedicated to all the rare mushrooms uncovered by DNA sequencing and what they could entail for science!

Till then.

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Upon writing this I realized it was getting a bit long, even the biggest mushroom enthusiast needs bite sized pieces, so I will split it into parts (likely 1, 2 & 3).

First Taste of the North

My mom and I were two foray novices, on our way to Vermont for our second ever mushroom event. Our first event had been Mycofest, an absolutely lively, artsy, and substance supportive event where THC drinks were handed out like candy and ceremonies were a norm. It was a complete 180 from the mushroom world we were used to in New York City, where DNA sequencing and detailed microscopic work ruled. Definitely no awesome myco-rap battles and strange snuff by campfires anywhere. Also not many mushrooms unfortunately, as it was dry at Mycofest that August and mushroom hunting excursions were sparse. So on our way up to the New Moon Festival, we had no idea what we were in for. Luckily we were joined by three carpooling companions, Robert, a presenter on Cordyceps from Oaxaca, and Ebony + Anthony, a dynamic duo that educated us on topics ranging from grassroots community building to worldwide banana diversity.

Maybe this is just a self imagined fantasy, but as a family coming from a Northern climate, as soon as the white birch and balsam firs started speeding past our windows, it felt like returning to a long lost home. I took in as much of the scenery as possible before the sun set. Something that we didn’t realize, as we turned down West Wheelock Road late Wednesday night, is how much more remote this location was than Mycofest, and as two people always looking to escape the beautiful but weighted chaos of New York, we were excited. We picked a camp spot in the designated area below the water run off, and above the swamped out grass at the bottom, which ended up being a very wise decision during the stormy nights where many got soaked but we remained dry.

The next morning, as soon as the light began to creep out across the sky, we set out looking for mushrooms, before we began our day of volunteering and mingling. Vermont was blessed by a perfect timing of mushrooms, filled with summer boletes, ascomycetes, and corals abound.

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Wheelock farm was an absolutely beautiful space to live on for three days. There was a lake for canoeing and swimming, acres of wilderness, and several areas in which the festival could be amply spread out. We saw a few familiar faces, and many new ones! Volunteering at the registration table greatly helped with meeting new people, I always like that little social boost. I also volunteered at the kitchen –far less social, but I got some quality reset time with carrots and potatoes. My mom meanwhile was one of the volunteer coordinators, and had her arms full directing others and helping out with the big picture planning. Speaking of carrots and potatoes, the food at New Moon was very accommodating, no meat, no gluten, no dairy, no alliums, no nightshades. I was accommodated but also at the end of the day, often still hungry!

One of the latter days of the festival we went to a local co-op to get some extra calories and to rest from the busyness of the event. It was a beautiful little spot in town with picnic tables in the sun near a river. One of the items we bought to split was a cooked whole chicken, kind of like a rotisserie, but worse. As we cut into it we realized quite quickly that it was entirely raw on the inside. I was so exasperated and hungry I tried to keep eating the cooked outside but my mother had enough sense to go back inside and ask for a recooking of the chicken, to which they quickly agreed to. They came back profusely apologizing with a steaming recooked chicken, and we eagerly dug back into the meat portion of the meal. Only to get another few centimeters into a raw center. Writing back on this is quite funny, but I assure you, in the moment I was as frustrated as a meat, gluten, dairy, allium, nightshade depraved hungry boy could be. After another motherly request the manager of the co-op came and personally made sure the chicken was cooked, and refunded us. At this point the chicken looked more like a chopped up overcooked carcass than the rotisserie we had initially had hoped for, but we were hungry and ate it anyway.

Besides poultry fueled escapades, we also found time to go on a run. Well, I ran and my mom drove alongside to the local river for a little swim. It's not summer if you aren’t jumping in random bodies of water in the mountains. I can’t say the water was warm though.

As plentiful as the mushrooms were at the farm, many others had the same obvious idea of picking locally and we quickly began encountering the same species repeatedly. So we found a time window and set out to local parks to try and diversify, and diversify we did. We found Tolypocladium (deer truffle parasite) growing out of the ground like weeds, fields of thousands (not exaggerating) chanterelles, and all the little and confusing mushrooms perfect for science. There was also a singular porcini, which was the first one we had ever found. Unfortunately we did not pick anything comestible, as we were not sure of how we would process all the mushrooms nor did we want to raze the ground of its bounty. I’ll let the photos speak of the rest.

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We also ran into our first problem, and solution for mushroom collecting. We used to write little vouchers on cut up index cards to keep track of the large quantities of mushrooms that we collected and dehydrated. This was time consuming, difficult without easy access to the internet —which we almost never had, and just outright not very fun. A solution I devised was a voucher/label duo of code generators that anyone can use. You take a photo in the field, and then connect them later at home. I’ll probably talk about them more in depth separately, but you can check out the generators here.

I am nearing the Substack length limit, so in the next part we finish up with the festival and move towards the famous White Mountains of New Hampshire, where more than just hiking and views await us.

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