Fungi

Lat: 47.65520606989774, Lon: -122.30810444799601
Day, 2012
5/8/12
1:30-3:30

Today we learned all about fungi and went on a little tour to see the species around campus. One of the things we learned about in the lecture part was rot. There’s soft rot, brown rot, and white rot. We focused a lot on white rot because it is infamous for stripping away the lignin to get to the carbon in trees and completely breaking down the wood in the process. Consequently, it there’s no white rot around, the trees will be immense.

The first thing we saw on the tour was actually white rot. This crab apple tree had a huge hole looking thing in it that was caused by white rot. The wood of the tree is being completely decimated so the tree will die and have to be removed in the future.

We also saw a lot of mushrooms. We saw oyster mushroom which can apparently grow on almost anything. Turkey tail was also seen on a downed log by the greenhouse. This is a white rot fungus that is very efficient and doesn’t like conifers. This explains why it was found on a downed log that looks deciduous. An interesting thing about turkey tail is that it only grows parallel to the ground. I thought that was very interesting because if this white rot mushroom finds its way to a living tree it will grow parallel to the ground. But if the fungus kills the tree and it falls, the tree will be on the ground so new turkey tail will grow perpendicular to the older turkey tail.

Species List:
Turkey Tail
Artist bracket
Oyster mushroom
Inky caps
White rot

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