Earlier this summer I spent a morning poking around the spruce forest at Big Lagoon in Humboldt Co. with Kyle Sipes and Maria Morrow. I’d gotten tangled up documenting some interesting Russula (which overwhelmingly dominated the biomass of fruiting macrofungi on this date) when Maria casually pointed out some greenish-black blobs erupting from the bark of a fallen conifer trunk.
A curious greenish and gooey asco has appeared!
Camarops tubulina – 2 Aug 2020 – Big Lagoon, Humboldt Co., CA, United States
I gotta admit these are the kind of fungi that have long been in my blind spot: Small, amorphous, sombre-colored ascos. But, having at some point resolved to do better about this kind of omission, I took a few photos. Thankfully, Maria collected the specimen and a few days later managed to get an excellent cross-section through the bark, revealing deeply-immersed perithecia with long ‘necks’ protruding to the surface of the wood. Maria also got nice microscopic photos (below). Note that the ellipsoid spores are regular in size, olive-dark in color and most importantly, are obviously 1-septate.
Spores of C. tubulina. © Maria Morrow, 2020
At this point I was feeling embarrassed – Maria had gone a few extra miles to provide so much information, and I had no real idea where to go with it. My experience is mostly with agarics and boletes, so I wasn’t sure what literature to start with. I knew brute force searching through iNat and MushroomObserver wouldn’t likely work for something this inconspicuous/esoteric. But since I wanted to actually learn something from this encounter, I ruled out simply tossing it to the luminaries of various asco-centric FB groups. So I decided to consult my newly-acquired Fungi of Temperate Europe (FoTE).
For those who haven’t heard me rave about these books yet, I’ll summarize my reasons for excitement: In addition to being very cheap considering the generous and beautiful photography, these volumes are more comprehensive in their coverage of macrofungi than any prior resource of similar geographic scale. But even more importantly, they use a different approach to identification from any other resource I’ve seen. The authors introduced a new format – diagrammatic ‘keying wheels’ (example below).
Keying wheel for hard-textured, stromatic, pyrenomycetous fungi from Fungi of Temperate Europe Vol. 2
Navigating the FoTE Genera Wheels is a three-step process.
1. First, determine which part of the two-volume set you should be consulting: Gilled mushrooms and boletes (Vol. 1), or rather something covered in Volume 2: Ascomycetes and “aphyllophoralean” macrofungi (roughly = not gilled mushrooms or boletes; a slightly archaic but usefully-imprecise term).
2. Once you’ve decided, navigate within the volume by loosely image-matching and reading the sidebar text explaining the criteria for each wheel. Especially scan the “outer rim” of the genera wheels to find one that looks promising.
3. When you’ve found a wheel you want to work on, navigate the pie slices: The inner parts indicate the first features to look for, followed by secondary features further out on each slice (as a subset of the group defined by features closer to the center), and so on until you get to the rim/crust of the pie.
4. Once you’ve reached a candidate group on the outer rim, check against the photos and descriptions of the species on the pages indicated.
I should note that there’s nestedness both within the Wheels and between the Wheels themselves – those at the beginning of the book send you to subset-wheels later in the book. This recapitulates the system of dichotomous keys, but the wheel shape allows for more information and multiple options to be presented side by side, making for a kind of hybrid synoptic/dichotomous feel.
For the greenish-black mystery species at hand, I couldn’t believe how well the approach worked.First off, this was obviously a Volume 2 species. From the first set of Wheels in the book, the one on page 823 gets us to the ‘Pyrenomycete’ ascos on p. 1510.
In turn, this Wheel takes us to the stromatic pyrenomycetes (those in which the pimply-looking perithecia are embedded in continuous tissue – the stroma)… leading us to the Wheel for “StromPyroms” on 1546, which is our final wheel.
Starting at the center of this Wheel, Maria’s microscopy pays off: The illustration of 1-septate ellipsoid spores near the center leads to a matching substrate description further outwards, and then takes us to promising-looking thumbnail photos out at the rim: We’ve gotten straight to Camarops. Given my inexperience with this group of fungi, that was astonishingly easy! The most difficult step was still relatively simple: Making a basic crush mount of tissue to see the spores with a microscope.
Finally, comparing against the accounts for Camarops species starting on p. 1579, we turn up C. tubulina which matches really well, even down to the genera of host wood mentioned.
Of course, first records shouldn’t be accepted lackadaisically – my followup (searching primary literature on ResearchGate, looking for herbarium records on MyCoPortal) suggests that this is indeed a strong candidate for the first record of the species for California, and western North America overall, and should be prioritized for sequencing (transcontinental distribution? A very similar-looking sister species?). Either way, congrats to Maria!
Although Americans might balk at the idea of buying a reference explicitly meant for Europe, the simplicity and efficacy of the Wheel-key approach in combination with superb coverage of genera (most of which are shared across the two continents) renders these books essential for anyone seriously interested in identifying macrofungi in the US. Fans of polypores, crusts, and smaller ascos in particular: if you’ve felt starved for up-to-date and user-friendly resources, these should be your next books.
Best of all, if you don’t want to spring for the books just yet, you can download the Wheels to Genera for free. I know. It’s seems to good to be true!