Pine Tree Reserve October 5, 2022

Today, I walked for about 35 minutes in the Pine Tree Reserve, looking for places where I may find Fungi, either growing from the ground or from the tree bark. The temperature was around 59 degrees Fahrenheit with drizzling rain. At first, I really struggled to find any mushrooms or fungus around the area. I found many different kinds of flowers, however, noticed that most were the only ones, rather than a batch of them. This may be due to the coming winter as flowers begin to wither and leaves begin to fall. To add, I saw a squirrel, some fuzzy leaves, and tree moss. I found two fungi-looking species that appeared to be mushrooms. One was a single large mushroom and had some damage to the side of it. The other observation was two much smaller mushrooms which lacked that perfect round shape that many mushrooms have. It is interesting that after two laps around the reserve, I could only really spot these two species of fungi. While I was trying to identify these mushrooms based on appearance, there were a lot of different species that looked very similar. Therefore, when scientists first distinguished these species, they likely used the phylogenic species concept rather than the morphological species concept. For me, the best way to identify the mushrooms I found accurately, is to take DNA samples. However, based on solely the two mushrooms I found, I can reasonably assume that they are different species based on size and shape differences (which is deduced from morphological species concept).

Publicado el octubre 5, 2022 07:15 TARDE por lisabyskov