January/February 2006

False Morels

By Walt Sturgeon

Springtime morel hunting results in occasional encounters with false morels in the genus Gyromitra and Verpa. None of these are considered choice edibles and at least one species is sometimes fatal. None have the honey comb like cap of a true morel. All the Gyromitra species should not be eaten.

There are 2 species of Verpa (thimble caps). The common one in Ohio is Verpa conica (smooth thimble cap). It grows under various hardwood trees in the spring. The cap may be a bit wrinkled. It is considered edible but is not popular. Rare in most of Ohio but common in parts of Michigan is the wrinkled thimble cap, Verpa bohemica. It occurs under mixed hardwoods and can be very small or as large as the common morel. It sometimes causes digestive upsets and problems with coordination. It is counted as a morel in the morel hunting contests in Michigan. It is sometimes mistaken for a half free morel which has a hollow stipe. The Verpa has a cottony pith inside the stipe.

There are four (possibly five) species of Gyromitra which can be expected in Ohio. Only two of these are somewhat common. All are usually fist sized or larger. All are wrinkled, convoluted and described as brain like. Often they have a saddle shaped fruiting surface. Rare is the autumn false morel, Gyromitra infula which usually fruits in September and October on well decayed wood. Extreme Northeastern Ohio would be the most likely place to find it. Also rare in Ohio (unknown as far as I know but reported from Pittsburgh Pa.) is the very large Gyromitra caroliniana. Sometimes called the red false morel or big red, it is a species of the south central states. One fruiting can weigh a couple pounds. Extreme southwestern Ohio might be the place to search for this.

The brown false morel. Gyromitra fastigiata (formerly Gyromitra brunnea) usually fruits in May in low hardwood areas. It has a rich medium to dark brown pileus and can be 4 inches across. The white stipe contrasts with dark cap.

The bull nose false morel, Gyromitra korfii is yellow brown to brown and in my experience is our most common species. Macroscopically it is very similar to Gyromitra gigas which is more common in the west and in the mountains. It usually begins to fruit in April, often at the same time as the black morels.

The most controversial false morel is rare in Ohio but very common in parts of Michigan. This is Gyromitra esculenta. It usually fruits near conifer trees. It is referred to as beef steak morel in some areas and is consumed after special preparation. There have also been confirmed fatalities. Some of the toxin is removed by boiling multiple times in water and discarding the water. Reportedly cooks have been poisoned simply from breathing the steam. One of its toxins is monomethylhydrazine which has been used in rocket fuel. It is available canned and dried from Finland and probably other countries as well. I will not even consider eating this species. Neither should you. I have never found it in Ohio but it does occur here.

Time to Renew

OMS Dues are Due for 2006

new year is upon us, and this means your OMS membership is up for renewal. OMS dues are $10 per year, or $125 for a lifetime membership. The cutoff date for dues payment is March 31, 2006. You will be removed from the OMS Mushroom Log mailing list after the March/April issue is mailed out if payment is not received by then.

NAMA renewals are also due now. NAMA dues for OMS members are $32. To qualify for this discounted rate, you must be verified as an OMS member. You can either mail your dues directly to NAMA with the letter you received from them, or you may send a separate check,

made out to NAMA, to Dick Doyle for forwarding to NAMA.

Articles for the next newsletter

Deadline –Mar. 30

David Miller

352 W. College St.

Oberlin, OH 44074

David.H.Miller@oberlin.edu

Remembering Wayne Ellett

By Dick Grimm with Shirley Hyatt

Wayne Ellett died on January 6, 2006, at age 89. Wayne was a charter member of the Ohio Mushroom Society as well as of NAMA.

For those of you who never met Wayne, here is an excerpt from the Columbus Dispatch: Wayne “received a BA from Kent State and MSc and Ph.D. from The Ohio State University where he taught Botany, Plant Pathology and Mycology. Trustees named the plant and diagnostic clinic as the C. Wayne Ellett Plant and Pest Diagnostic Clinic to reflect his contributions to the university and his expertise in plant disease diagnosis, and his establishment of the plants disease clinic. He was a consultant with the National Science Foundation in Washington, D.C. and with the Institute of Biology in India, for two summers each. He retired as Professor Emeritus in 1981. Wayne was a member and elder of Overbrook Presbyterian Church. He enjoyed photography--especially of mushrooms and tree flowers--hiking in state parks, stamp collecting, birding and working in his yard. He served in the Pacific while in the United States Navy during WW II…Contributions may be made in Wayne's memory to Overbrook Presbyterian Church, 4131 North High St., Columbus, Oh. 43214 or to the Leukemia & Lymphoma Society, 2225 City Gate Drive, Columbus, Oh. 43219…”

I remember Wayne as a soft spoken man with a love for the fleshy fungi. We spent some time together hunting mushrooms mostly in central Ohio. Wayne loved taking photographs of his mycological discoveries. He told me one time: "One can't, as a photographer, ever walk by an Amanita muscaria or Mycena laeanna without taking a picture.”... and he never did, it seemed.

Wayne was always active, especially with the MetroParks, heading up mushroom walks and giving talks about the fleshy fungi. He was a charter member of our society and quite active in the early stages of OMS.

Wayne and his wife Mary attended some of the NAMA forays along with Phyllis and me. I recall the one in North Carolina mostly because when we crossed the border into South Carolina only a few miles away, the police gathered all of the hunters up and planned to take us to jail under suspicion of practicing illicit drug trafficking. Wayne was instrumental in convincing them that the hunt was legitimate.

Wayne, along with 5 other men, mostly mycologists, met in a Boy Scout Camp between Marion and Columbus and initiated the North American Mycological Association (NAMA) which, of course, exists to this present time and has reached a membership well over a thousand both here in the States and abroad.

Shirley adds: Wayne was Terry's and my first step into mushrooming and the OMS. We'd gone to a winter presentation by Wayne at a local garden club--just something we'd seen advertised in the newspaper--and the presentation was wonderful. The breadth of his knowledge was expansive and full of the wonder of mushrooms--their varied colors, shapes, sizes, surprising locations; the works. It was he who gave us the OMS club information, and from there we moved on to greater mushrooming involvement.

Doubtless there are many others whose interest in mushrooms was first sparked by Wayne’s enthusiasm and outreach. Wayne was an irrepressible photographer (he gave most of his slides to OSU) and a generous teacher. We are thankful for having known him.

Our sympathy goes out to his wife, Mary, in a special way.

Dick Grimm Banquet

The banquet was held at the Buckeye Lake Yacht Club on the very balmy evening of November 12, 2005. In addition to the usual abundant socializing (which offered me the opportunity to better integrate faces with names), the highlight of the evening was Biology Professor from Miami University Nicholas Money’s talk on a variety of topics dealing with the various, (usually) ill-effects of fungi on human affairs. Much of this material is covered in gory detail in Nik’s excellent book, Carpet Monsters and Killer Spores, Oxford University Press, 2004.

Finding the spot where a mold has established itself in a home is a difficult task, made much easier by the use of dogs (whose sense of smell we can only guess at) and Nik spoke glowingly of Jim Moss’

dog, Hunter.

One of the more fascinating fungi described was a dry rot fungus, Meruliporia incrassata. Usually dry rot requires leaky downspouts, gutters or water pipes to provide the moisture it thrives on. However, in the Santa Barbara area, Its root-like rhizomorphs can import water from the soil into the timbers of a newly built home and bring about its near total destruction before anyone is even aware of the threat which it poses. The fungus originally grew on the stumps and roots of orchard trees which had been bulldozed to make way for housing developments.

An Article from The Mushroom Expert

The following is provided with the kind permission of Michael Kuo.

Kuo, M. (2003, September). Mushroom taxonomy: The big picture. Retrieved from the MushroomExpert.Com Web site: http://www.mushroomexpert.com/taxonomy.html An even more extensive and lavishly illustrated article on a similar topic by Michael Kuo, from MushroomExpert.com, is The Evolution of a Great Big Headache: “Understanding” Mushroom Taxonomy and Phylogeny.

Mushroom Taxonomy: The Big Picture

by Michael Kuo

I frequently receive e-mails from frantic biology students who have been asked to discover the kingdom, phylum, class, order, family, genus, and species of a certain mushroom. Here, with the student's typo included, is the most entertaining example I've received so far:

“Recently in my biology class we were asked to chose an orgasm. I chose the Armillariella ostoyae. My professor wants us to find the kingdom, phylum, class, order, family, genus, species, and or variety. I know the kingdom, genus and species. I have had difficulty finding the phylum, class, order and family. Do you know of any good sites that can help me with my research. Thank you very much.”

Aside from recommending that the student might want to find a new professor, I replied that the taxonomical hierarchy for Armillaria ostoyae is:

Fungi: Basidiomycota: Basidiomycetes: Agaricales: Tricholomataceae: Armillariella: ostoyae

. . . in the traditional, and now probably outdated, system. Armillaria has been reconceived within the past few years, resulting in the elimination of Armillariella, and placing the genus in the Marasmiaceae rather than the Tricholomataceae; also, there is debate about whether or not the kingdom and phylum distinctions should be made at some other level in the hierarchy.

But uncertainty is not what professors want on homework assignments. The problem is that there is no "correct" answer to the professor's question. Or, better said, the answer to the question changes constantly, and has been changing ever since Linnaeus started using Latin names to arrange organisms.

Though it is a fact usually unobserved in introductory biology classes, taxonomy does not represent organisms. Rather, taxonomy represents how we perceive and organize organisms. This is a very important difference. It is the difference, for example, between what happened at the scene of the crime, and what the witness saw happen at the scene of the crime--and anyone who has ever watched a courtroom drama knows how different these two things can be.

In my field (I am an English teacher), the rules of grammar and punctuation are seen by most teachers as unchanging and universal. Students are "wrong" if they omit the apostrophe from don't, or write "Everyday someone gets their lunch." Yet there was a time--not that long ago, from a historical perspective--when dont was perfectly correct, and the time is coming (or is already here) when this use of everyday and their is correct. People of my mother's generation physically cringe when they hear "their" used like this. People of my generation notice a problem, but use it anyway as a substitute for the sexist "his." My students don't even notice. Within my lifetime, the language has changed, as a result of a change in our culture: we became more aware of sexism, and less comfortable using masculine pronouns as universal pronouns.

With grammar and punctuation, however, the rule makers usually lag far behind the general population. This is because the rule makers (the authors and publishers of dictionaries and grammar handbooks) are conservative by nature, and often see themselves as corrective agents, holding back the masses and saving them from their mistakes. But with taxonomy, things are reversed. It is the mycologists, in the case of mushrooms, who are constantly changing things, and the general population that lags behind. Thus, I must provide the biology student above with an answer I know to be incorrect, knowing that her professor is likely working from outdated information.

Once, mushroom taxonomy was an arrangement of mushrooms based on their physical appearance. This one had gills, so it belonged in a group with other gilled mushrooms, while another mushroom, this one with pores, belonged in a different group. For well over a hundred years, advances in mushroom taxonomy simply represented more careful attention to the physical features of the mushrooms--and, importantly, the fact that more and more mushrooms from around the world were being sent to scientists in northern Europe. These scientists began to discover that closer examination revealed other groupings. Some of the gilled mushrooms had white spore prints, for example, and gills that were attached to the stem. New families and genera were named; species were placed in the hierarchy accordingly.

Then, roughly a hundred years ago, scientists began looking at mushrooms with microscopes. Some mycologists had been doing so earlier, but the hegemony of microscope mycology didn't take hold until the 20th century. As a result, new groupings emerged. These mushrooms, for example, had ornamented spores, indicating that they formed a group separate from other mushrooms that looked more or less the same to the naked eye, but had smooth spores. As microscopes got better and better, more taxonomical changes were made.

It is important to recall that the mushrooms themselves did not change during this brief history; what changed was the way we examined them. New technologies and methods of analysis--like studies of chemical composition, mating studies, and (especially) DNA analysis--are in vogue these days, and they are resulting in radical changes in mushroom taxonomy. Groups that we once thought were related, based on physical appearance or microscopic features, are turning out to be unrelated. But it is likely--I would say it is a certainty--that future mycologists will decide something besides DNA is the definitive key to mushroom taxonomy, or that the technology we're now using to see DNA is grossly inadequate, providing an inaccurate portrait. I have already spent a painful hour on the phone listening to one self-righteous DNA mycologist complain that another DNA mycologist was using equipment and techniques so outdated as to be meaningless. (It probably goes without saying that good equipment, in this mycologist's estimation, is the kind that costs so much money that there are only a few labs on earth that possess the technology.)

The taxonomical mess I have been describing is further complicated by the fact that the whole system was set up by fundamentalist Christians who believed that God created a perfect and unchanging universe. I discuss this problem in detail in "The Evolution of a Great Big Headache," but for our purposes here, suffice it to say that the idea that species evolve over time was added to mushroom taxonomy as an afterthought. "These mushrooms have ornamented spores, so they must have evolved together." These days it is fairly easy to see the logical fallacy in this statement, but it was not that easy to see in the 1960's. I would be laughed out of the room, however, if I suggested today that the same logic problem might be involved with: "The nucleotide sequence at the 5' end of the nuclear large ribosomal subunit gene of these mushrooms is statistically the same, so they must have evolved together."

I offer these comments by way of introducing the table below, which represents how mycologists currently see taxonomical relationships between mushrooms. I have culled the information from Ainsworth & Bisby's 2001 Dictionary of the Fungi (see the notes below for a complete citation), and I have included only "mushroom" taxonomy--omitting the details on rusts, yeasts, lichens, molds, and so on. The editors of the Dictionary, of course, compiled information from peer-reviewed papers published in scientific journals; it should come as no surprise that editing such a compilation involves attempting to "standardize" things that have not yet become standards, resolving taxonomical conflicts that are often hotly debated, and so on. Yet Ainsworth & Bisby's Dictionary has become more or less the definitive standard for mushroom taxonomy; for better or worse, the biology student must consult this source to get the "best" current answer to a taxonomy question.

The Taxonomic Hierarchy of Kingdom Fungi

. . . based on Ainsworth & Bisby's 2001 Dictionary of the Fungi

See the notes at the bottom of the page for additional information and suggestions.

Phylum: Chytridiomycota (aquatic fungi . . . )
Phylum: Zygomycota (various saprobes, insect parasites, and others . . . )
Phylum: Ascomycota
	Class: Pneumocystidomycetes (parasitic in lungs of mammals . . . )
	Class: Saccharomycetes (yeasts . . . )
	Class: Schizosaccharomycetes (yeasts . . . )
	Class: Taphrinomycetes (galls, witches' brooms . . . )
	Class: Neolectomycetes
		Subclass: Neolectomycetidae
			Order: Neolectales
				Family: Neolectaceae
					Neolecta
	Class: Ascomycetes
		Subclass: Arthoniomycetidae (lichens . . .)
		Subclass: Chaetothyriomycetidae (black yeasts, other stuff . . . )
		Subclass: Dothideomycetidae (varied: saprobes, parasites (including Apiosporina morbosa), lichens, dung lovers . . . )
		Subclass: Erysiphomycetidae (powdery mildews . . . )
		Subclass: Eurotiomycetidae (includes Penicillium . . . )
		Subclass: Laboulbeniomycetidae (insect parasites and others . . . )
		Subclass: Lecanoromycetidae (lichens . . . )
		Subclass: Leotiomycetidae
			Order: Helotiales
				Family: Ascocorticiaceae
					Ascocorticium
				Family: Bulgariaceae
					Bulgaria
				Family: Cudoniaceae
					Cudonia (see C. circinans), Spathularia (see S. flavida), Spathulariopsis (see S. velutipes) . . .
				Family: Cyttariaceae
					Cyttaria
				Family: Dermateaceae
					(70 genera, 385 species . . .)
				Family: Geoglossaceae
					Geoglossum (see G. nigritum), Leucoglossum, Maasoglossum, Phaeoglossum, Thuemenidium, Trichoglossum
				Family: Heliotaceae
					101 genera, 623 species, including Bisporella (see B. citrina), Hymenoscyphus (see H. fructigenus), and Chlorociboria (see C. aeruginascens)
				Family: Hemiphacidiaceae
					5 genera, 12 species . . .
				Family: Hyaloscyphaceae
					58 genera, 541 species . . .
				Family: Leotiaceae
					Geocoryne, Leotia (see L. lubrica), Pezoloma
				Family: Loramycetaceae
					Loramyces
				Family: Phacidiaceae
					Ascocoma, Lophophacidium, Phacidium
				Family: Rustroemiaceae
					3 genera, 100 species . . .
				Family: Sclerotiniaceae
					27 genera, 104 species . . .
				Family: Vibrisseaceae
					3 genera, 14 species . . .
		Subclass: Meliolomycetidae (weird stuff on leaves and stems . . . )
		Subclass: Sordariomycetidae (Hypomyces, Xylaria (see X. polymorpha), and others . . . )
		Subclass: Spathulosporomycetidae
		Subclass: Pezizomycetidae
			Order: Pezizales
				Family: Ascobolaceae
					Ascobolus, Ascophanus, Cubonia, Saccobolus, Thecotheus
				Family: Ascodesmidaceae
					Ascodesmis, Eleutherascus
				Family: Carbomycetaceae
					Carbomyces
				Family: Discinaceae
					Gymnohydnotrya, Gyromitra, Pseudorhizina
				Family: Glaziellaceae
					Glaziella
				Family: Helvellaceae

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