4. Fun guys!

Fungi 

I'll start with a series of found fungi on the University Site,

I'm no expert, but that isn't that much of a problem, that's what identification books are for, There are ident' book for just about everything, Birds, Beetles, Trees, Fungi, even Trains.

For the most part I have used a combination of Roger Phillips' 'Mushrooms' 

and Michael Jordan's 'The Encyclopaedia of Fungi of Britain and Europe'.

 

Geastrum triplex or possibly G' rufescens

Geastrum triplex or possibly G' rufescens, Star fungus 75mm across

It's quite difficult to ident' these unless you are an expert, as I said before I'm not. There were about twenty of these star fungi, in various states of maturity, some young ones still in their egg like form, through to the mature ones whose rays had turned brown curled completely beneath the spore sac and puffed out spores readily if the wind blew or any animal brushed past them.

Chlorociboria aeruginascens

Green wood cap, very small, the central clump is 55mm across and 20mm deep. The clump on the left is about 18mm across and 10mm deep

Meripilus giganteus

Giant polypore I think this of one of the biggest annual fungi in the UK

600mm across...

...but much bigger, in size and weight, is this perennial

Bracket fungus Ganoderma applanatum the Artist's pallet fungus

the biggest left-hand piece is 700- 800mm across. I covered this in my very first blog so I won't bore you with another explanation.

From the very large to the very, very small this may be Mycena ascendens which as far as I know has no common name, poor thing. Some of these were barely 1 mm across, the largest one was only 4 mm across and 7 mm tall, the smallest were only 1mm across and only 3mm tall. I could find very little written about this delicate and magical little fungi.

"Chicken o' the Woods" or "the Sulphur Polypore" are the common names and the latin is Laetiporus sulphureus.  CoTW as foragers abbreviate it, is really good eating when young, this one was passed its best, and they get a little sour as they mature. I find it delicious to eat, but it doesn't agree with everyone's gut, including mine.

There is a huge amount of rubbish written about CotW, that some folk are allergic to it. It is true some people can get the squits after eating it, but that isn't an allergy.  Just as some people can drink 5 pints of real ale no problem others gets a runny tummy, that too is not an allergic reaction, a true allergy is somewhat more of a serious thing and can kill you. 

Part of the reason many people complain it upsets them is the size of this fungus, you can harvest a couple of kilos easily from a fair sized one, and many foragers consequently gorge on it, eat a kilo of French onions soup and that might give you the squits too. My advice is, if you do fry it in garlic and butter, don't gorge on it just because you have lots of it, and don't cut off more than you can eat.

Daldinia concentrica Cramp balls or King Alfred's cakes

Often seen on ash trees on dead bark (it's a saprophyte), when cracked open the inside is made of dark grey and black concentric rings much like tree rings, it is excellent tinder for fire lighting. Our hunter gatherer ancestors would have known this fungus very well, kept it dry in a hide bag and brought it out after a long rainy day to quickly get a fire started. The King Alfred's cakes name refers to the story of the king who burnt an old woman's cakes, the Cramp balls name is a bit gruesome and is said to refer to the swellings or 'Buboes' in a man's groin when dying from the bubonic plague, yuk.

Sulphur Tuft Hypholoma fasciculare easily identified by the bright yellow flesh when the cap and stem are split open, had I taken this photo a few weeks earlier the caps would have been bright yellow but these were near the end of their fruiting cycle and were about to go brown and decay into a soggy mush. This fungi is also saprophytic, meaning it lives of dead wood, it is not a parasite

Jordan, M (1995) Encyclopaedia of fungi of Britain and Europe. Newton abbot. David and Charles.

Phillips, R. (1988) Mushrooms and other fungi of Great Britain and Europe. London. Macmillan.

3. Latin Names. Why oh Why?

What's the point of Latin (or Greek mostly)?

dead man's fingers fungus Xylaria polymorpha  

  

A dead man's fingers (plastic, from a joke shop).                                

            

                                                                             

'Dead man's fingers' and 'A dead man's fingers' sound the same. Yet the fungi 'dead man's fingers' on the left has a Latin name. Important to be able to distinguish between the two.

Just to help you get you're head round Latin names, many of my blog posts use Latin names. There is a very good reason for that, and it's not to be big or clever or exclude regular plebians like me.

I used to think that scientists used Latin names to impress people. Actually that's not entirely truthful... I was much more chippy about it than that, I used to be convinced using Latin names was a conspiracy by the educated to exclude the non-educated, kinda like a secret coded language scientists would use to exclude dummies like me.

"Why can't we just call a bat, a bat?" I would say "What a bunch of stuck up geeks, with their fancy pants Latin names" I said that too.

But then I became an arborist (a tree surgeon) and realised I really needed some Latin names.
"BUT WHY ?" I don't hear you cry... Well, because a bat is not just a bat and an oak is not just an oak!

I soon found out there are in fact about 600 oaks worldwide, and they all have different English names. Turkey Oak, Sessile Oak, American Oak and so on... 
So you would think that if I just memorised all the various oak's and their English common names, I'd be fine and dandy...Oh no...

Because over hundreds of years, Oaks have collected regional names too. A Holly Oak, Green Oak, Holm Oak, Evergreen Oak, are all the same bloody tree, A Plane Tree in Scotland and Plane Tree in England are completely different trees, true... in Scotland their Plane tree is our 'Sycamore' and in England our Plane tree is what the Scot's call a 'London Plane', you call it a Ladybird I call it a Bishy, I call it a Brock you call it a Badger, and as you move around the UK, somethings can have over half a dozen local names. 

This is before we even scratch the surface of all the Spanish names for Oaks, Planes, Beetles, Daisies etc and their regional Spanish or Catalan common names, and before we invite the French, Japanese, Americans and Mongolians et al with all their names for Oaks and Beetles.

This confusion applied to bats, flowers, toads, birds, jelly fish, bacteria, lice in hair and the  worms in your garden, or a worm in your gut.
Every living thing you can possibly imagine....has dialect names,  regional names, common national names, and they are all different.
Which became 'Thing Naming' mayhem, and it was a problem.

By the 1700s science was in a 'Thing Naming' mess, if an international group of academics turned up to a conference in Hamburg and were asked to bring an 'Ors' with them to examine, the cockney scientist would bring a horse, the Frenchman a flower and the Russian a frog or a bag of weevils (depending on if he was from Moscow or Omsk) and the Thai scientist might bring a Ox on a very big cart.

So a Swede called Carl Linnaeus introduced international Taxonomy in his brand new book in 1758 called Species Plantarum. 
It's been tinkered with a lot since then, but his basic principle remains, everything a has a big name or Genus name with a capital letter like Homo (man) in italics followed by a species name without a capital like sapiens. Then you could group lifeforms together and know they were related,  Homo neanderthalensis was our cousin. 

All real Oaks start with Quercus, all different groups (clades) of trees start with different Genus names, the Scottish Plane (or English Sycamore) starts with Acer, the London Plane tree starts with Platanus so the Scots and English landscape gardeners knew immediately they were talking about a different Plane Tree.

Latin names are awesome. Scientists, Gardeners, Ecologists, Bird Watchers, Pest Controllers, Farmers, Doctors and millions of others can talk across borders and languages about something and know for sure - by using Linnaeus' Taxonomy system - they are talking about the exact same life form. 

1 They are internationally recognised, from Outer Mongolia to Hevingham to New York NY.

2 They group related life together.

3 They're updated to make sure even if the grouping was wrong because of past mistakes, it gets fixed. A painfully slow process but they're getting there.

4 The Latin name often describes the species form or habit, big teeth, spikey leaves etc, meaning the name gives you clues to identifying the species.

5 There are higher names that become before Genus and species which link bigger groups together, family, order, class, phylum.

Most of the time just Genus and species are used, that's all you need because genus and species together are unique names, there are lots of rubra and lots of Quercus, but only one Quercus rubra. 


Point 4 above is quite neat.
In my second blog, I had a photo of a Pennant Wasp, a wasp with an ovipositor as long as its body, a lance like structure used for drilling into bee nests to lay eggs (it looks like a fierce stinger but it's just an egg laying rod) It's Latin name was Gasteruption jaculator. Gaster = stomach, ruption = to issue forth, and jaculator = javelin thrower. put it all together and it means I have a spear erupting from my guts out of my bum. which tells you a lot about how the wasp looks.

Phallus impudicus the stinkhorn fungus means Phallus = willy, impudicus = impudent or shameless, hence the 'cheeky willy', this is actually a Taxonomic joke, yup a science joke, admittedly not really funny until you see a photo of it. I'll say no more.

Phallus impudicus

The same 'Latin' (Greek mostly) names keep turning up, so after a while you get to recognise the taxonomic clues. The latin japonica or chinensis means it comes from Japan or China.
domestica means its domesticated as in Sus scrofa domestica = farm yard pig
familiaris means the same Canine familiaris = pet dog
dulcis means sweet Prunus dulcis = sweet almond
tremula means quivering, Populus tremula = trembling poplar or aspen (it's leaves have a flat stalk and wobble even in a light breeze, green on top and white/green beneath flashing alternate colours beside motorways as lorries drive passed.
sapiens means 'capable of discerning' Homo sapiens = Man discerning or discerning man
aquifolium means water wave leaf, aqui means water and folium means leaf, like Holly = Ilex aquifolium 

Other times you'll see a name like darwinii or hookerii, meaning usually that Charles Darwin or Mr Hooker discovered them. Naming things after family names can be troublesome  leading to a white stemmed bramble being unfortunately named Rubus cockburnianus after the Cockburn family, what were they thinking!

So there you go, Latin names are logical, mostly, they stop confusion between Mongolian, French and East Anglian scientists, they describe the species form often, sometimes where it's from or who found it and sometimes they contain jokes.

   

 

2. jaculator

Fierce and terrifying? Not so much.

Below is the filthily named Gasteruption jaculator, the photo was taken on a burr on the huge oak just as you walk into Earlam Park from the Sports Hall gate entrance. It's not a great picture I'm afraid, so further down the page is a stock image taken professionaly. My phone insisted on focusing on the burr and not the insect. 

So what is this insect? It's a pennant wasp, and it looks quite fierce, so I'll allay your fears by first saying the big pointy thing - which is a long as the wasp itself - is not a stinger, the pennant it is in fact a non stinging wasp. 

The pointy thing is an ovipositor, an egg laying device. The next bit is rather ghoulish, the Pennant wasp, does not look after it's own young like some insects, it doesn't even make a nest and leave her grubs to hatch out alone like many other insects. Her strategy is to find another insect to do the work for her, such as a bee. Solitary bees do build a nest, in a hole or crack in a tree's bark, the bee places food in the nest, and lay eggs there, then she seals up the nest entrance with a waxy plug. Safe and sound to hatch out as grubs, eat the food she left and pupate into young bees (Thompson 2017)

The Pennant wasp searches for a solitary bee's nest and uses her lance-like ovipositor to poke through the sealing wax, and lay her eggs beside the bees eggs. the Wasp eggs hatch first, the eat the food the bee left and then eat the bees grubs too. When they mature they then chew their way out through the plug and emerge as fully grown wasps. 

I don't like to anthropomorphise this behaviour, but I will because it's fun. This is like my mum giving birth to me in another woman's house, and then walking away. Knowing full well I would eat everything in the other woman's larder and then gobble up her kids before walking out her from her house, healthy, full grown and very well fed! 

Below is a professional stock photo, better than mine. both pics' are of females, the males don't have ovipositors.

Now, the name explained. Gaster (stomach) ruption (to issue forth) jaculator (javelin thrower)
Hence the name means "I have a spear erupting out of my stomach" which isn't anatomically correct, but spot on for identification.  Quick and easy explanation about bonkers Latin names next blog.

Thompson, P. (2017) Game and wildlife conservation trust available at: https://www.gwct.org.uk/wildlife/species-of-the-month/2017/gasteruption-jaculator/ (accessed: 16/10/2019)

jon's blog 1

Jon's Blog

This Blog is a notebook of species identified exclusively on the University of East Anglia's campus and surrounding grounds.

To begin with, here is a large Common Beech Fagus sylvatica and my foot in the foreground for scale. The Bracket fungi around the butt of the beech tree is Ganoderma aplamatum The Artists Pallet Fungus (Jordan 1995)

Inside the Beech tree will be a cone of brown rot, soft and mushy, as this fungus slowly digests the lignum in the tree's core, the fruiting bodies we can see in this photograph are just that...just the fruiting part of the fungus, the part that produces spores. The Mycelium of the fungus, the part that consumes the tree is invisible from the outside, will be a latticework of fine threads which will digest the tree from the inside. 

The brackets we see in this photograph have annual growth rings and even if I kicked the bracket off the tree, it would not help the tree, because they'd just grow back next year, rather like pulling fruit from an apple tree won't kill the apple tree. 
We often think of fungi as being soft like the mushrooms we buy in shops. These are quite different, hard as wood and brittle. The brown stain under the large bracket on the left are millions of spores released by the fruiting body, to be windblown or carried by animal contact into a wound on another tree to begin infection again and continue the fungi's lifecycle. 

Ganoderma sp  are very common in both northern hemisphere and southern, pretty much wherever you can find trees in the world you'll find Ganoderma fungus, this is called a cosmopolitan distribution, the same description can be applied to orka, sparrows and fleas.

It's closely related to other woody bracket fungi which share a trait useful to humans. If it's dry you can light it, blow it out and it will smoulder. The best known for this trick is hoof fungus Fomes fomentarius or tinder fungus, if you were a hunter gatherer 7000 years ago, and you decided to move camp, you could place a lump of smouldering fungus in a leather or birch bag, travel in the pouring rain to a new site and have a fungal firelighter still smouldering in your bag hours later. 



Jordan, M. (1995) The encyclopaedia of fungi of Britain and Europe. Newton abbot: David and Charles.