Awesome Ascomata - Observation of the Week, 3/16/22

Our Observation of the Day is this Angelina rufescens fungus, seen in the United States by @huafang!

“I grew up in countryside in Taiwan,” says Huafang Su. “Memories of my childhood revolve around climbing trees, running in bamboo forest, catching all kind of insects and other small animals, etc. Nature was always there for me to explore.”

Now a grandmother and living in the state of Michigan, Huafang has slowly been reintroducing herself to nature. 

I spent time learning about birds, frogs, butterflies, wildflowers, and trees, but I was not particularly passionate about them until I met fungi. Maybe because fungi are ephemeral, maybe because they are unpredictable, or maybe because they are difficult to study, fungi get my attention. Mushroomers constantly find species that are new to science, new to one’s area, or new to oneself. I especially like to find new-to-me species. I enjoy the quiet and suspenseful hunt in the woods. I love the delight of serendipity again and again. I don’t have any training in science, however I’ll keep on learning so I can understand more about fungi. Fungi will be a life-long learning for me.

And back in 2020 one of those “new-to-me” species was Angelina rufescens, which is when Huafang saw her first one. 

It was nothing special at the first glance until I zoomed in to take photos of it. Its elongated ascomata [fruiting bodies] were so distinctive with the split-open look and adorned with light-color margin. With so many fungi being unknown, it’s very common to come across a fungus that cannot be easily identified in the available field guides. However, some fungi are easy to identify if we manage to find out the information about them. Angelina rufescens is one of them. It’s the only species in the genus, it produces distinctive ascomata that regrow on the same wood annually and on its dead ascomata of previous fruiting.

She’s since seen it two more times, including the one photographed above, which she saw in November of last year.

A member of the Michigan Mushroom Hunters Club (MMHC), Huafang (above) has been heading their FunDis project since 2017. “We learned the value of citizen science through participating in the project,” she says,

[and] we now collect the specimens, document the specimens with photos, voucher the specimens, sequence some of the specimens if fund is available, and deposit the collections to the University of Michigan Herbarium (UMICH). iNaturalist, in this regard, is one of the best platforms for citizen scientists of every experience level to document their finds and communicate with other enthusiastic citizen scientists.

Mycology is a field to which citizen scientists can make significant contributions. Many mushrooms still await classification. I will keep on doing the part I enjoy the most – walking in the woods and documenting the fungi I find.

- Angelina rufescens is a member of Class Leotiomycetes, which are quite beautiful and different from the standard “mushroom” we usually think of when we think of fungi. Check out the most-faved ones on iNat!

- There have, of course, been several Observations of the Week about fungus observations, including a Clavaria by @thiago_mouzinho and this zygote fungus growing on a millipede by @hazelsnail!

Posted on March 16, 2022 09:49 PM by tiwane