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RE: The Amateur Mycologist - Series II
This is the best of the day I have read so far. I am so happy that you are back among us. I am so happy that I don't know from where to start. Maybe to say that I am looking forward to read more about your trip to Chile. Are those mushrooms (fungi, I know ;) ) really so colorful?!
And in the meantime, welcome back!!! :)
Thanks @lemouth, great to be back!
All of the species pictured here are fungi, except for the glossy yellow blobs, which are the fresh fruiting bodies, or sporangia, of a plasmodial slime mold or myxomycete, likely in the genus Leocarpus.
And all of these photos have been almost entirely unretouched - meaning all of the mushrooms pictured here really were just as vibrantly colored as they appear in these photos, if not more so in person. The sheer diversity was astounding to me.
The funny thing is that our host would often take the greatest interest in a seemingly benign and uninteresting species that, although unremarkable to me visually in some cases, were nonetheless extraordinarily rare in Chile.
So we would all be freaking out over many of the most colorful species while Giuliana would be more interested in some plain looking brown Hydnoid toothed fungus that I felt like I saw all the time in NYC but which was all but unheard of in Chile.
Your message somehow shares the local atmosphere. I cannot even imagine how this was when you were there in person :)
Why would you expect to see the same species in NYC and Chile? Different regions yield different species, don't they? :)
Sometimes, but not exsclusively. The slime molds for instance are famously cosmopolitan, appearing all over the world. The Amanita muscarias occur over much of the world, including New York. A variety of the mushrooms we foubd have macrocharacteristically similar or identical Northern or Eastern species, and no doubt some are genetically the same as well.
The cmbination of spores traveling great distances naturally with species introduction through human travel and direct interference means finding similar gobal species is not uncommon.
Oh? Is this a general statement? I could imagine the species having a common ground but then local peculiarities. No?
Oh totally - they are constantly reproducing with each other, and as genetic testing becomes more common place many mushrooms previously thought to be the same species have been revealed to technically be a series of genetically distinct but closely related species instead.
Plus, even if the species are genetically identical, there can be a ton of differences in the chemistry of the mushroom itself dependent on where it grows. For instance, G.esculenta contains deadly toxins when it grows in some environments and yet appears not to contain those same chemicals when grown in other environments.
Even the A.muscarias - the red, white dotted mushrooms at the top of this post - are alleged to have very different effects on people who ingest it depending on where they are grown - with anecdotal stories of North American A.muscaria potentially having a very different mycotoxin than the same species grown in Siberia. I don't think anyone much cares to test this at the moment, but it's entirely plausible that comparing A.muscaria from Siberia and North and South America might show three genetically distinguishable mushrooms, or, three genetically identical mushrooms with very different mycotoxin profiles.
There's lots of examples of this sort of thing that I might be able to wrangle into a post on its own - but as a general statement, yes: between the ability of the spores to travel great distances and direct human interference in ecosystems, you can find a great many identical or near identical fungal species all over the world.
Thanks a lot for the explanations. I agree you should write full posts on that (in due time of course) in the future. This is very interesting, even for a physicist like me ;)