I HAVE RIDDEN THE MOON WORM

Interesting weekend, yes indeed. I now have a small couch and coffee table in my room, making it even easier to hide there. More importantly though, I been naturalizin’. Sunday morning found me speeding across the Richmond Bridge headed for China Camp State Park, where, earlier in the week, some coworkers and I had been reconnitering the landscape, and observed a wide array of cool fungi. So Sunday I returned with a camera to begin a new obsession.

Some kind of coral fungus (Ramaria largentii, I suspect)

The problem with fungi is that a) I know nothing about them, and b) my guide is incomplete and has, I suspect, an Eastern bias. Not to worry, though, I have a Californian authority in the mail.

Possibly yellow waxycap (Hygrocybe flavescens)

Mysterious little shelf mushroom. That might be mold or something growing all over it, not sure….

I found most of these mushrooms along the sides of small hills covered in oak and bay. Most of them, like the previous two, were very small. This one wasn’t:

Nestcap (Phyllotopsis nidulans)

This big clump of nestcap was growing all over an old stump. I saw it from the trail below. The flash of orange in the corner of my eye screamed “Chanterelle!” in my mind, so I dashed up with a hungry gleam, but chanterelles they ain’t. Real purdy, though.

Undoubtedly, the award for most beautiful goes to this one, which Maggi spotted during the week and which was probably my primary motivation for returning with my digital soul-thief:

Hericium sp.

Really, just stunning in person. Like icicles, just like all the descriptions say, or a waterfall. It’s probably H. ramosum, since it was definitely growing on a dead hardwood (oak or bay), and it certainly has spines all along the branches, not just at the tips. However, it wasn’t as loosely branched as this photo, and actually looked a little more like this photo of H. abietis. Awesome fungus, either way.

And tasty! The mushrooms in this genus are all edible, and fairly unmistakable, so I bagged a small chunk of this one and fried it up a few hours ago. As I have yet to begin hearing colors or leave this world entirely, I think I can declare the mission a success. It troubled me greatly to actually remove even a portion of this thing from the field. “Take only pictures” is a pretty deeply-incgrained policy for me, especially when when dealing with something this visually arresting. I didn’t want to rob others of the opportunity to appreciate it, so I only took a bit. I can see this becoming a hurdle along the path toward true shroom sleuthdom.

Then it was off across Marin to Duxbury Reef for an exceptionally low tide, where I met up with what may very well be my new lab next year. This was my first time out in the tide-pools with people who bandy about words like “rhinophore” and “Dendronotidae” without pausing for definitions (I haven’t joined their ranks yet, so that’s a nudibranch’s sensory antennae-like structure and a family of nudibranchs, respectively). Everyone I met was really cool, and they all knew the reef biota backwards and forwards. Very cool. For once I was too busy occupying myself with humans to take too many pictures, but here are two:

Diaulula nobilis

Weird unidentified eggs (you’d think I would have asked one of the many incredibly knowledgeable CalAcademy staffers I was with, but no. Alas)

All in all an excellent day, with a bunch of new and interesting creatures, some of them human, even!