Six Forest Mushroom Encounters

Hi, I'm David Geyser. I teach micology at Penn State. PPEM 425 if you're interested. And I'm uh squatting next to a rotting log here in the forest. Um, and uh being a micologist, I'm interested in the fungi that you find here. Um and this rotting log is a an important uh community of fungi. Um now there are the obvious things that you can see here these mushrooms. Um this is something that's called uh crpidotus uh that is uh playing a role here uh in terms of breaking down the wood. Um but there are have to be many fungi. I can see another fungus here. This is um something in the family xylary acce that's uh contributing to this as well. And if we were to look at virtually any part of this rotting log, we would find evidence of fungi if not the fungal fruing bodies like we see here. So, the fungal fruing bodies, and I've got one to show you here that uh so this one's probably pretty old, but you can see underneath these gills, and these gills are covered with the cells that produce the spores for the fungus. So, it's a reproductive structure. It's sort of like fruit on a tree. Um, and uh you can see that there quite uh a few of these growing here. Uh now, it's this is a very important role that these fungi play. And you can see these fungi are turning what was wood into this stuff, which is basically paper. Um, it's it's decaying away the the ligman in the wood, which is the substance that makes wood hard. And they're really the only organisms that can do this in the world. So we can uh and it might take a while, probably several years. Um but slowly but surely um this entire log which is pro may have been here already for a while for several years uh to uh decay completely away. Here's another interesting fungus in the forest. Um this is a species of lactoluis. You may have seen this around producing these very large fruing bodies. These are fleshy and again you can see the gills underneath that from which the spores are produced. And this fungus, you can maybe see it a little bit. We'll show give you a closeup. Uh has a milk that a latex that comes out when you break the gills. So now I'm sitting in the leaf litter and uh we can see these yellow spindle fruing bodies of a fungus called clavulinopsis fuse formis and in this case these uh spindleshaped fruing bodies and that you can see they're fleshy uh soft and pliable easily broken but these are covered with those cells that produce the spores. Uh and that's how this fungus which is uh you can see fruing bodies sort of all around me and it's a very common fungus in our forests locally coming out of the leaf litter uh just like you see here and then I can also see it just this is what happens when you sit down in the leaf litter is you'll see something else sometimes and here's a different kind of fungus producing a clubshaped fruing body doing the same thing it's producing its spores um on this black fruing body. This is called the velvety black earth tongue because when they're dry they have sort of a velvety appearance to them uh when you look at them up close. Um it's also producing its spores but mostly just from the sort of flat tip of this this sort of spatula shaped uh structure. Here we have another exciting fungus. Uh these are what we call hedgehogs. Um, now these look like fairly typical mushrooms that have a stock and a cap, but if you remember, I showed you gills for the previous two that are like this. They're also fleshy. They're soft. Instead of having gills, these have teeth. So, the cells that produce the spores are lining these in each of these individual teeth. And uh that's how this thing reproduces is by producing these uh you can see several of them here growing in almost like a little circle. Um, and uh I also have here and I you might not want to pick this up yourself. I'm a micologist. It doesn't bother me so much. Uh, but this is one of these fruing bodies that's being consumed by another fungus. This is going to be something called hypomices that this is specifically what that fungus does is it attacks uh it may be specific to the hedgehog mushroom even. uh it attacks the mushroom and then consumes it, returning the nutrients that went into producing the mushrooms back into the forest soil. Thanks for watching this short video on forest fungi. Uh I've shown you just a few things uh that one can find in a very small area in one forest um and one morning. Uh there are hundreds of other things. Uh if you're interested in fungi, uh check out what we have to offer at Penn State at the website