Fungi!

On this day, May 10, our class visited the greenhouse area and
Joe Ammirati later took my group around campus to show us what was out! We started out by studying Blumeria, or Powdery Mildew, on a cucumber leaf and a ornamental maple leaf. It shows up as white splotched on the surfaces. It is a good pathogen in that it keeps its host alive. The spores spread while it's warm-just in time for summer planting seasons. We also looked at Hollyhock rust which appear as orange spores underneath the leaf. Like mildew, this also has a parasitic relationship with the fungi. We also studied symbiotic relationships in fungi. We were shown a young conifer in a pot which had infected root which tended to bulge and young roots without it.
With Joe, we walked toward Denny Hall, one of the oldest building on campus, and found many mushrooms in the front lawn. We found parasols which look like elegant parasol umbrellas when mature. Next, we found a Panther Cap which is hallucinogenic in large amounts. These have a symbiotic relationship with Douglas firs, as they only grow near them. Next, we found an artist's conk in a hollow in a tree. It's a bracket mushroom whose bottom can be inscribed on. We wrote "conk" on the bottom of it and left it there for someone else to discover. Joe told us that the hyphae of fungi communicate with pheremones which sense compatibility; it's controllled by a chromosome that causes asexual reproduction. Finally, we found a peziza by a large fallen log next to the Computer Engineering building. It starts out purple when young and grows to be fleshy in both texture and color. The purple one was about 4 inches across while the larger one was one foot across.

Posted on June 5, 2012 03:15 AM by ajwick24