WILDLIFE OF THE WEEK
Honey Mushrooms
Every Fall, I am pleasantly surprised by the start of mushroom season. Taking a stroll through a local forest this week, I noticed a profusion of tan-brown mushrooms throughout the woods. It had been a dry several weeks, but these seemed healthy and impressively abundant; I saw them in huge densities for over a mile. These were a type of honey mushrooms, an amazing wood-eating fungus that is both a recycler of dead trees and a major threat to living ones. Indeed, I found the mushrooms growing thickly around dead stumps, and even around the roots of some sorry-looking young oaks, whose poor showing during spring leaf-out had until then been a mystery to me. Another species of honey mushroom may include the largest living thing on Earth: one fungus in Oregon, estimated to be around 6,000 years old, weighs several hundred tons and covers nearly 2500 acres, about 4 times larger than the city of Boston!
A large patch of ringless honey mushrooms (Desarmillaria caespitosa) I came across during a walk in North Georgia
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Gulo in Nature is long overdue for a post highlighting the awesome world of spiders. These fantastic invertebrates are hugely diverse, found all over the world, and have a lot more going on than you might think. For example, did you know that young spiders use electricity to fly? Check out this new post for a closer look at these fascinating animals and their natural history.
NATURALIST WORD OF THE WEEK
Thallus (n.) - A simple extended structure of an alga, fungus, moss, or lichen, typically making up a part of its main body. For example, a “branch “ or “leaf” of a liverwort or moss.
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