The Urban Pantheist

Here again I'm testing the camera's macro ability--these are lichens and mosses growing on the surface of a storm drain. I'll have to assume here that the mosses started it, and then the lichen fungi found the moss covered metal to be close enough to earth to colonize. My field guide doesn't have a section on lichens growing on steel. These are probably Cladonia sp., but again I'd love input from the real experts.


This crustose lichen on smooth tree bark is probably something in Lecidela, Lecidea, or Porpidea.

My attention was called to the ceiling of a gift shop, where it was reported that a mushroom was growing.


Close up I could see that it was gilled--and beautiful in its way.


My guess is that it is Pleurotus species--the group of fungi that produce oyster mushrooms. These fungi are "weedy," meaning that they can colonize a variety of substrates, and do so aggressively, often before other organisms can. I posted these photos on mushroom identification facebook groups, and no one contradicted my identification (except one person who suggested a polypore--clearly false) but there was a lively discussion of what weird man-made objects people have found oyster mushrooms on.

Here's a creature I've seen much more of since I moved to the suburbs. These delicate little Parasola mushrooms frequently appear on the margins of freshly-fertilized and still-wet lawns. This one has popped up in a garden bed generously fertilized by our chickens.

On my way back from a secret tavern (don't ask, it's a secret) I came across the first agarics of the year! "Agaric" is an informal term for gilled mushrooms that have a cap and stem. These mica caps (Coprinellus micaceus) are emerging from one of those little squares of dirt given to a tree in the sidewalk. They are feeding on the dead tissue of the stressed tree's roots.

While attending a presentation on our beehives (see next post) I noticed this yellow jacket nest. Well, the first thing I noticed was yellow jacket workers flying into an old desk that was being stored outside for no good reason I could think of. I carefully slid a panel back and took the above picture. Yup, yellow jackets. Their round paper nests are pretty distinctive, and they love to build them in man made cavities, like in wall voids, ramshackle wooden sheds, and old desks that are stored outside for no good reason.

Whenever I see a new object like a utility box or playground equipment appear in my areas of stewardship, I examine it for openings which wasps will exploit to make nests within. (Also if they have gaps on the ground that lead to cavities that will encourage mice to enter, or open structures up high that house sparrows will use as platforms for nests.) This is a pretty small nest, with only one comb of paper cells. As the summer goes on, the wasps will add layers of combs, each cell serving as a nursing compartment for a new worker. Mature yellow jacket nests will have several thousand workers or more.

Yellow jackets are troublesome wasps because they like to nest near humans, ferociously defend their nests by stinging, and can sting multiple times each. They are attracted to human garbage--meat early in the season and then liquid sugar later in the season. Without humans they would feed their larvae insects and meat scavenged from carcasses, while the adults would make do with flower nectar and the juices of fallen fruit. In nature, they are pollinators, insect controllers, and cleaners of refuse. However, humans have obliged yellow jackets with a bounty of carrion (hamburgers, hot dogs, and chicken fingers) and liquid sugar (soda, ice cream, and ketchup) exactly during the summer and autumn months when the wasps are looking for it. We have turned them from beneficial insects into pests (or monsters).

Yellow jacket venom (as well as the venom from other social wasps) is similar enough to the venom of honeybees that those who are allergic to one group have a 30-50 percent chance of being allergic to the other. Yellow jackets are more dangerous because each worker can sting multiple times, and they are far more likely to sting than any kind of bee, and most other wasps.


The queen is on the left, a bit bigger than a honeybee. A worker is on the right, much smaller than a honeybee.

I just read this on the Northeast Mushrooms yahoo group and it's too colorful and too spot-on for urban wildlife not to share.



An old name from an old man: Rodman's mushroom, now known as Agaricus bitorquis,is now in season. Move over Morchella. When Morchella begins to fade away sponge hunters hang up their basket; big mistake! One of the easiest mushrooms to hunt is Agaricus bitorquis = A. rodmani.

This shroom is an urban dwelling mushroom mostly because of its habitat. It dwells in hard pack soil. It's a good one for geezers(like me) to hunt because one can do it from your car. you will need a driver whilst you ride shot gun. Seek the old section of town where the silver maple (or whatever) has lifted the side walks and there is little grass growing in the baren areas between the curb and the sidewalk. Look for squatty, white capped mushrooms many barely making it above the surface of the ground.

The stem is sturdy and robust and the annulus is double jointed with half swinging upwards and the other half bending downwards like the rim for a tire. The cap is white, very hard,and supports rose-pink gills on the underside; not "panty-pink" as in A.campestris the pasture mushroom. Lousy clay soil is good ,too, as in old tennis courts, clay- cinder parking lots and alley ways,and deserted ball diamonds. Any area where the ground resembles this criteria is good. Don't run over a dog or cat or rear end a car. Drive slowly ignoring that half-wit behind you blowing his horn. Hunt one side of the street at a time for safety's sake. Season expires around the end of May. This is a delicious mushroom big time. Good luck! -Dick

You know, I said a little while ago that I should make a special website or other media project that collects all the mushrooms commonly found in human-impacted and human created ecosystems. Something like http://urbanmushrooms.com/ which, as it turns out, already exists. It's not perfect (found some obsolete synonyms in use there) but it is exactly what I was thinking of doing. Not that I can't do the same thing in my own style, but I thought you should know it's there.


So, speaking of which, here is a mushroom found only indoors--at least in temperate zones. This is a tropical species, Leucocoprinus birnbaumii which has found its way into the highly fragmented yet consistent ecosystem of greenhouses and house plants. This fruiting appeared in one of the planters in the Tropical Forest exhibit at Franklin Park Zoo (in a place not visible to the public nor accessible by the animals, in the giant anteater exhibit). A zookeeper friend (perhaps one seen here earlier, pointing her lips at a beetle grub) brought it to my attention, as I am becoming known as "the mushroom guy" around work.

As luck would have it, I had seen photos of the mushroom online the week before--a gardener found it in his potted pepper plant and was posting it concerned that it would harm his peppers or transfers poisons to them. (By the way, the answer is no to both. Mushrooms coming from the soil near a plant are almost always beneficial or neutral to the plant--parasites usually grow directly from the visible plant tissue. Poisonous mushrooms don't imbue their neighbors with poisonous essence--if anything, they are more likely to remove poisons from the nearby soil.)

This fascinating adaptation to the great indoors is paralleled by many small tropical animal species as well as tropical microbes. There are studies being done as we speak comparing the indoor wildlife of households in different parts of the world. I look forward to seeing the results of these studies--what do we all share, what's unique to one place or another. This mushroom is one of only two mushrooms I am aware of that is primarily found indoors, at least through much of its range.


A freshly emerged Leucocoprinus button. Common names for this mushroom boil down to some combination of "yellow," "potted plant," and "parasol."

This mushroom is dainty and beautiful, and resembles mushrooms in the Coprinus group, most of which are edible. This species is not edible to humans, causing some gastric distress. Its edibility to anteaters is not known to be, but fortunately they were growing out of his reach.

This is almost certainly* Peziza domiciliana, a mushroom characterized by its habit of emerging in indoor habitats. Usually these are bathrooms, damp basements, and the like. This was one of several that I discovered when I opened my pesticide shed after a rainy weekend. The mycelium appears to be living on wet cardboard.

It goes by common names like "common indoor mushroom," "carpet mushroom," and the literal translation of the scientific name, "Domicile cup fungus." It's in the same broad group as morel mushrooms.



*The longer I do this, the less certain I am of my identifications!

Antlion. Family Myrmeleontidae.

Some of my first memories of interacting with the natural world involve antlion larvae. The soft-bodied but formidably mandibled creature lurking at the bottom of a slippery sandy pit, waiting for a hapless victim was a great reward to the imagination of a child interested in nature. I remember a distinct disappointment while watching Return of the Jedi, that the Sarlacc, clearly designed as an antlion writ large, did not have huge pinching jaws. (It was the beginning of a pattern of being disappointed by George Lucas decisions that has continued unabated to today, but that's another subject.)

Then the antlion was at the center of an epiphany I had (and wrote about here), which I can summarize for those who don't wish to read my ramblings from six years ago: Even the smallest human actions can alter the natural environment, and favor certain species over other. Shield a small area from the rain, in a rainforest (in my example), and you create a small sandy area, which attracts antlions. It's the basis of the study of urban ecology, and the reason why when I say "urban," I'm really thinking about any place where the hand of man has altered the landscape in any way to favor certain organisms over others.

In "The End of Nature," Bill McKibben points out that since human activity has affected the make up of the atmosphere of the Earth itself, that there is no place on the planet that can not be said to be free from human influence. That "nature," as defined as that which is apart from humans, does not exist any more, at least, not here. Of course, humans evolved on this planet as naturally as any organism, so defining nature that way is pretty self-centered and at odds with science. It is a useful construct, however, in as much as it helps us figure out how we are altering everything else on this little planet, which by the way is still the only place we or anything else we know of can live.

Antlions, under the rainshadows of eaves and ledges, dig their little traps and wait for ants and spiders and other little creatures not blessed with wings or the wherewithall to use them in a crisis, to blunder in. They then chop them up with their scary jaws, and secrete digestive juices onto them, and suck up the result. Antlion parents need to choose locations to lay their eggs wisely, but if the larva finds itself far from prey, it can survive up to three months without a meal. The adult antlion looks a bit like a damselfly but has distinctive clubbed antennae. In all my years of playing with bugs, I have only found two adult antlions. Here is the first.

For reasons that are arbitrary and hard to describe, I suspect the species of antlion whose larva I'm holding in the picture above is Myrmeleon immaculatus, but I can't say for sure.

Terrestrial algae growing on the front of a golf cart. I don't know even how to begin trying to identify this organism more specifically, but these people seem to be working on it. I suspect I'd need a microscope and a whole lot more book learnin'. Also, I think I have a crush on the phrase "aero-terrestrial algae." ("Part of the aero-plankton.")