280 days of Urbpandemonium #76

Sometimes a mushroom can only be identified to species if you know what kind of wood it's growing from. If these Reishi (or "Lingzhi"*) mushrooms are growing from a conifer, then they are Ganoderma tsugae.** If the dead log is from a hardwood tree, they are Ganoderma lucidum.** Either way they are part of a species complex of similar-looking glossy durable fungal fruiting bodies, valued in Asian traditional medicine for a very long time. There are many products available containing reishi mushrooms or their purported essence, including chocolate, tea, and coffee. There are kits to grow your own, or you can wild forage it--it's a pretty common group of wood-decaying mushrooms.



* ...Lingzhi is made up of the compounds ling 灵 "spirit, spiritual; soul; miraculous; sacred; divine; mysterious; efficacious; effective" (cf. Lingyan Temple) and zhi 芝 "(traditional) plant of longevity; fungus; seed; branch; mushroom; excrescence".

** [Reishi mushroom's} botanical names have Greek and Latin roots. The generic name Ganoderma derives from the Greek ganos γανος "brightness; sheen", hence "shining" and derma δερμα "skin". The specific epithet lucidum is Latin for "shining." Tsugae is derived from the Japanese word for "hemlock" (tsuga 栂).

280 days of Urbpandemonium #77

This hairy beast is just a baby. If it makes it to fully grown--and why wouldn't it, it has few predators and is well defended with prickly setae--it will metamorphose into a short blackish beetle with a tawny belt across its back. Both as an adult beetle and as an active larva, the larder beetle Dermestes lardarius* feeds on durable organic matter. This individual was found with many close relatives feeding on the mummy of long-dead mouse. Unlike the relative (Anthrenus verbasci) I covered earlier, larder beetles are almost always encountered indoors, the environment which provides shelter and food to them around the globe.


Aw look at the fuzzy little belly!

* "Skin eater in the larder"

280 days of Urbpandemonium #78

One thing I have learned time and time again as a pest control professional, is that you usually can't solve anything by throwing poison at it. This little fly (my stupid camera did a nice job for once--this fly is less than 2 mm long) lays her eggs in the bacterial slime coating the inside of a drain. The teeny maggots hatch, and feed safely within the mucusy goo. Attempts to exterminate them with bleach and other chemicals mostly deflect off the slime. The only way to interrupt the cycle is to do the hard work of scrubbing the slime out of the drain pipe with a sturdy brush. You can follow that up with maintenance treatments of a competing bacteria (several solutions are commercially available) that eat the slime-producing creatures that make the habitat for the fly. In this case, the fly is Clogmia albipunctata* usually referred to as the "filter fly," "drain fly," "bathroom fly," and so on. As pest issues go, they're pretty minor, but they have caused some fascinatingly hideous problems in rare cases: human urinary myiasis, nasal myiasis, and occupational asthma.

* You guys have been so good--what the hell does "Clogmia" mean? Is it because they live in drains, like clogs do? That can't be right. "albipunctata" means white-spotted. The family name Psychodidae uses the word "psycho" in the sense of "butterfly or moth," since these are also known as moth flies.