UW Farm area 5/8

Location: UW Farm and near the Chemistry Building on UW campus
Weather: sunny, breezy
Time: Aprox 2:00

Today I learned about the different types of mushrooms that are decomposers. These decomposers are also called saprothops and they break down dead organic material including wood chips, dead trees and logs. Wood is made up of lignan, cellulose, hemill, and pectin. The lignan protects the other compounds. In order for mushrooms to use the compounds that the lignan protects they have to find a way the get through the lignan. Soft rot and brown rot mushrooms cannot actually strip the lignan off of wood, so they go around it. The soft rot and brown rot mushrooms we saw included agrocybe praecox, pleurotus pulmonarius, agaricus bisporus, and caprinus iagopus. We saw one white rot mushroom called trametes velisicolor that was attached to a log on the UW farm near the permacultural area. Its common name is the turkey mushroom because it looks similar to a turkey tail. This mushroom is fuzzy on top and is used in Asia for anti cancer medicine. The turkey mushroom also has white spores.
I saw agaricus bisporus near the compost bins on the farm. Its common name is the button mushroom. Under the right conditions with lots of extra nutrients these mushrooms can be grown to be either portabellos or cremini mushrooms which are edible. This mushroom has pink spores. I also saw agrocybe praecox near the chemistry library. A defining feature of this mushroom is its cracked caps and dark brown spore color. We saw a variety of ages of this mushroom. One way to tell if the mushroom is young is that it will have veil tissue, which it will have before it becomes mature and starts producing spores. The spores come out of gills on the underside of mushroom, the young ones will have veil tissue instead of these gills. An easy way to figure out what spore color a mushroom has is to find one growing over another and the top of the buried mushroom will have a spore print of the other on the cap of it. This is how we figured out the spore color of agrocybe praecox. Besides mushrooms I also found a centipede underneath a log in the permaculture area. The critter was pretty small, not nearly the size they get on Maui!

Species List:
Centipede
oyster mushroom (pleurotus pulmonarius)
button mushroom (agaricus bisporus)
inky caps (caprinus iagopus)
turkey mushroom (trametes velisicolor)
agrocybe praecox

Posted on May 11, 2012 01:24 AM by lmcthe01