WMS 2020: First Virtual Foray!'s Journal

Hello everyone, reminder that the WMS meeting for February is tomorrow at 6:30 PM. At that time we will start with some identifications off iNaturalist to pass the time & wait until everyone has arrived for the 7 PM presentation: "Community Science, Social Mycology, & WMS"

Also, if you have not seen it already, the 2021 project is up here: https://www.inaturalist.org/projects/2021-wms-virtual-foray

I encourage you to go ahead and join it now, who knows when you will see your first fungus (including lichens!) to upload for 2021?

Link to the WMS 2021 foray project: https://www.inaturalist.org/projects/2021-wms-virtual-foray

You can join this project just as you did the 2020 one, and just as before any fungi (including lichen) you observe during the 2021 year will be automatically collected and shown there.

Our lovely 2020 project will remain up, of course. Whenever you add fungi observations that were taken in 2020, no matter when you put it up, it will go into that project. I, for one, have even more for 2020 yet to upload than I have up at all right now. And as in any science, the process of identification continues forever!

If you have any slime mold observations, want to try identifying slime molds, or like me just like to look at slime molds, please head over to our other new project, WMS slime molds & friends, located here: https://www.inaturalist.org/projects/slime-molds-friends-by-wms-project-members

Same with the "All Fungi Ever by WMS Members" project (https://www.inaturalist.org/projects/all-fungi-by-wisconsin-mycological-society-wms-members), if you have joined any of our "virtual forays", I will add you to these additional projects and your finds will appear in them.

But you can still join these auxiliary projects if you want to, which will put a quick link to them in your "Community" tab and will also show you highlights from them as updates on your home page.

Alternatively, you can check the "umbrella group" page, https://www.inaturalist.org/projects/all-wms-projects for All WMS Projects currently ongoing. There we will also be able to compare different years' forays! The 2021 project will only begin showing up in the umbrella group once we have our first 2021 observation. Impossible, for now... but soon :)

I am looking forward to seeing our first fungus of the New Year!

Thank you to all our observers, identifiers, and anyone who has come to our pages just to appreciate the photography. I can't speak for any of you, but this project has really helped me learn about fungi, particularly what can be seen in and around Wisconsin, and how best to document a fungus for identification.

Mariah

As you will have perhaps heard from a few different messages and emails by now, but, just to say it again here: there is an upcoming Wisconsin Mycological Society meeting on Zoom this Thursday, 10/15, starting at 6:30 PM.

The presentation by Dr. Tom Volk, professor at UW- La Crosse, will be about folk lore and mycology, and starts at 7. It is titled, “What Old Wives and Old Husbands Have To Tell Us About Mushrooms”.

The 30 minutes prior will be about welcoming people and showing your iNaturalist finds! These can be ones already identified, or ones we will work to identify as a group. The mysteries and identification hunts were a really fun part of September's meeting, so we hope to have a few of those. If we have a lot to look at, and interest, we can definitely return to identifications and iNat discussion after the presentation.

You can send in your suggested observations to either of us, using the message feature on iNat. This is available only logging in on desktop version of the site, not on the mobile app! You could also put a link to an observation in a comment to this post, or send us messages to our emails, which should be available in emails you have gotten from WMS in the past.

The Zoom number to join is not being posted publicly, but you should get it through message or email. As ever, please let us know about any concerns, or barriers to accessing the meeting you may have.

Hope to see you there!

Mariah & Leah,
iNat project admins
(mkremedios & leahaudrezora)

I just sent this list out to everyone in messages, and only then realized it would make a good first Journal post for our project! So, once again, here is a list made from my notes (with a few corrections now from Rose) of what we looked at & talked about at our first virtual meeting:

• Jacki's mystery maybe-bolete she's been seeing a lot of recently: https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/59611475
  UPDATE: it is no longer a mystery to Jacki; She used resources on mushroomobserver.org as well as other pictures online and now thinks it is Polyporus radicatus! The edibility is reported as choice by some, tough by others. So now Jacki is doing a myco-culinary experiment to find out! There are only 135 currently reported at all on iNat with only 14 observed as of yet in Wisconsin. Many of those other WI P. radicatus were, by the way, spotted by our fellow project-member Howard (Howard64). It is really interesting to see our project members already noticeably improving this site's data for our regions.
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• Rose's cordyceps species that was growing out of a deer truffle: https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/59923308
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• Jeremy's very beautiful cup fungi with water standing in it: https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/59290124
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• Rose's hemlock varnish shelf with that orientation difference showing gravitropism: https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/59923196
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• Howard's thin walled maze polypore showing a similar effect: https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/58611655
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• Howard's ghost pipes, which are a plant, not a fungus, but which were spotted as we scrolled down the page, and it turns out ghost pipes have many fungal associations, particularly Russula species https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/59383747 As Rose let me know in a message, ghost pipes are "parasites on fungus! More specifically, they are a mycoheterotroph. It is the Russula that have the mycorrhizal relationship with trees, then the ghost plants use the Russula (and Lactarius in some places) as their hosts. This is also why ghost plants are impossible to cultivate."
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• Rose's bog bells, or Bog Galerina, are little-researched & observed in part because fewer people venture into the thick of bogs, and in part simply being rare: https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/59922177 They are assumed to be very poisonous, but that is only due to their relative, Galerina marginata's notorious deadly nature. Nobody (to our knowledge) has ever eaten a Bog Galerina to find out, or done a much-less-risky work up in the lab.
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• Jacki's not-a-puffball that was actually a really cool stinkhorn 'egg' with a squishy middle documented nicely here: https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/59684553
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• Kari's Orange Mycena that Leah recently researched to identify and learned how to use the map feature on that species' information page to narrow down and look at just how many have been observed in Wisconsin specifically: https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/59845211
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• And Leah's dead man's fingers that lacks the white dusting seen in many specimens because she saw hers in its earlier sexual stage, that Rose helped her identify: https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/58571127 But because Rose was joining the meeting with her phone and looking at such a small screen, she's now having second thoughts. She now thinks that it might be something under Tolypocladium instead. If you like, head on over to weigh-in with comments or ID suggestions of your own.
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With this list, unlike the one I sent you all in messages, I should be able to make edits to reflect any I may have missed or errors I may have made writing this up! Some corrections have already been made, and if you see anything else that should be different, you can send me a message or comment here.

The meeting was a lot of fun and I especially enjoyed the parts where we were collaborating on getting some of these IDs done or just appreciating a specimen for its points of scientific interest or for how nicely it was photographed. I learned a lot more than was even listed here, and a meeting summary should go out to the full WMS email list sometime tomorrow with those points & highlights of other topics discussed.

Thank you to everyone participating, both in the meeting and by joining & contributing to this project!