FunDiS April 2023 Newsletter
Earth Day is Saturday April 22nd and all week FunDiS has been celebrating! To promote Earth Week, FunDiS is partnering with WholeSun Wellness for a Fundraiser to directly support fungal conservation efforts in North America!!
WholeSun Wellness creates organic whole mushroom fruiting body and pure mycelium extracts and is dedicated to bringing higher standards to the medicinal mushroom industry. WholeSun exceeds every typical practice of sourcing, growing, harvesting, extraction, potency, testing, and certifications in the products they offer.
The FunDiS + WholeSun partnership is great because it directly benefits both organizations, which see fungi as critical in environmental health and human wellness. Right now, you can save an extra 15% OFF their entire website wholesunwellness.com through 4/23 and 10% of the proceeds will go to FunDiS so we can protect fungi and their habitats across North America.
FunDiS Sequencing Update:
What an eventful end-of-winter we had in California! The conveyor belt of tropical moisture continued to bring precipitation to central and southern CA, extending our mushroom season well into spring and bringing the promise of summer snowmelt adventures with a record snowpack. Vast tapestries of spring wildflowers carpet California’s landscape in mesmerizing colors and just next door, mushrooms are appearing in the chaparral. A defining feature of CA flora, the chaparral is home to plants like chamise, scrub oak, coyote bush, and coastal sage. Not quite dry enough to be desert but not wet enough to support forests, this ecosystem is not the first place one would consider looking for mushrooms. These late-season rains have presented a rare opportunity for us at the CA FunDiS project to collect fungi that may have never been collected before in these usually-parched places. Specimens collected there are making their way via dehydrator, tweezer, tube and truck to our sequencing partner in Canada, the Canadian Centre for DNA Barcoding (CCDB).
To complement the glorious bounty of spring flowers and mushrooms, our first batch of sequence data from CCDB has arrived from the specimens that we sent over in February. In order to parse through the results, we have brought together a team of Sequence Validators. These brave folks will wander deep into uncharted territory trying to attach names to some of the more obscure finds that have made their way to us. Already we have added a few sequences to our project on iNaturalist and they are really interesting! Most of them are from The Cedars, a large chunk of nearly-barren serpentine rock deep in rural Sonoma County. Serpentine is California’s state rock which bears our state gemstone, Benitoite. Serpentine is extremely toxic to most plants, however there are many unique and often-rare species of plants that have adapted to grow in it. The predominant tree species at The Cedars is Sargent’s Cypress which can thrive in the otherwise harsh conditions. The most interesting find that has been sequenced so far is a potential Stypella, a toothed crust fungus that is related to the Cat’s Tongue (Pseudohydnum gelatinosum). This was collected by our very own Collections Lead growing on some well-rotted wood. You can keep an eye on our sequences by checking out our project on iNaturalist here.
Looking forward, we are experimenting with a new sequencing technique that we cannot wait to talk about. Already it has yielded some good data including a sequence of the rare Schenella pityophila. We will discuss our adoption of this technology in our next newsletter.
Harte Singer
FunDiS Sequencing Lead
Volunteer Spotlight: Tiffany Theden, Graphic Designer
We are so proud to announce that FunDiS graphic design wizard and volunteer Tiffany Theden won the NAMA T-shirt design contest and will be attending the NAMA Annual Foray, Appalachia NAMA 2023 from August 14-17th in Hendersonville, North Carolina. There are still a few tickets left to this event as of this writing, you must be a NAMA member to register. Check out Tiffany’s beautiful art on her winning logo design here:
West Coast Challenge Update:
The California rains have abated, leaving behind a crop of observations of Hygrocybe flavifolia and Pachycudonia spathularia. Thank you, observers! One recent find by Taye Bright was successfully sequenced and identified as H. fenestrata nom. prov, contributing to the body of knowledge on the range, habitat, and phylogeny of coastal North American Hygrophoraceae.
Six species still have not been found yet of the 20 species in this challenge. They are:
Dendrocollybia pycnoramella
Volvariella surrecta
Cortinarius sierraensis
Hygrophorus nemoreus var. raphaneus
Hypocreopsis lichenoides
Phellinus artemisiae
Keep your eyes peeled for these rare six!
West Coast Challenge Collection Story:
Dean (betweenthelyons) writes:
I knew from searching during college [at UC Santa Cruz] that this location has been a hotspot for CHEG diversity (CHEG = Clavariaceae, Hygrocybe, Entolomataceae, Geoglossaceae). I was in town at the right moment and went for a little walk to see what was fruiting. Not five minutes into my walk I found two fruit bodies by a familiar redwood woodland stream. The next day me and two friends went for a walk in a different area of the county and found another fruiting! What a year :)
Other highlights:
Jack Johnson is the new president of Northwest Mushroomers Association
We always welcome new volunteers to join our monthly meetings, please contact westcoast_rare@fundis.org for the zoom link if you are interested in attending!!
Christin Swearingen
West Coast Rare Fungi Challenge Coordinator
Social Media Post: Interesting New Resupinatus
FunDiS Sequencing Lead Harte Singer recently obtained DNA sequence data for an extremely interesting black Resupinatus species (iNat ID: 145988514). This Resupinatus was among the first collections that have been sequenced as a consequence of grant funding from the State of California and the California Institute for Biodiversity.
Greg Thorn, a mycologist who is currently studying Resupinatus, has noted in the comments on Harte's iNaturalist record that this is an undescribed species. Greg Thorn is affiliated with the University of Western Ontario in the Department of Biology and is known for doing high quality taxonomic research, including a groundbreaking paper on North American species of Gymnopilus (available here).
The Resupinatus sequence obtained by Harte marks only the fifth time that a sequence for this species appears in the literature; it has been recorded three times from the state of Washington and once from Oregon. This very mysterious species has been assigned the code name "Resupinatus PNW01" by Danny Miller, making it easy to concatenate the records.
One of the most useful things DNA barcoding allows is tethering records of the same fungal species together. Although Harte's observation is not accompanied by microscopy, we do know about the microscopic features of this species due to the previous work of Leah Bendlin, who studied the microscopy of this taxon in 2021 on her Oregon collection (iNat ID: 69279236).
Resupinatus is a genus which is as enigmatic as it is beautiful - DNA barcode data in iNaturalist shows there are at least 5 species in California - none of which have been identified at a species level. In fact, no Resupinatus species have ever been described from California, so it's possible that all 5 are new to science.
Photos are courtesy of Harte Singer.