New finds in 2013. 4. Burnsite morels (Morchella sp.)

The past two years in Western Siberia were marked by numerous weather anomalies. At first there was a major dry spell, which began in late autumn of 2011 and spread all over Siberia in 2012: there was so little snow I could hike in the forest in late December wearing my summer shoes, and whatever snow did fall melted away by early March. It didn’t rain at all till late July, a big draught began, with scorched lawns,  piles of dead leaves under wilting trees, and dry sand where there had been creeks. Taiga was ablaze – there were so many wildfires in Yugra, Tomsk and Krasnoyarsk districts, that sky all over Siberia was yellow-gray from ash, and you could see spots on the Sun without smoked glass. The Yuganskiy nature reserve, with its old forests, suffered big losses from the wildfires – the reserve workers (both rangers and researchers), armed with little but shovels and spray packs, were dropped off in burning forest from a helicopter in (vain) attempt to stop the fires from spreading. But there’s not much half a dozen men can do with several hundred hectares of burning forest. The fires ceased only in August, when rains came.

In 2013, the picture was slightly different – the south of Western Siberia (Novosibirsk, Omsk and Altay districts) was literally drenched: there were ceaseless showers with just a few sunny days, and even actual small floods here and there, while in Yugra, in the middle of Western Siberia, the situation of the previous year repeated:  blazing sun, crunchy lichens, swarms of sun-loving gaflies over dry peatbogs… and wildfires.

 

The fires destroyed large areas of Scots pine (Pinus sylvestris) forest around Ugut, and sad as it was, it meant that we were up to a big mycologicaL event. Fungi play a crucial role in the carbon cycle, which is the never-ending exchange of carbon, the main element of life, between different layers of the living Earth. After a wildfire, this cycle is reset, and in the first few years following the fire a very peculiar group of species take the stage. Some feast on the enormous volumes of fresh coal (having special enzymes for the purpose other species lack), other, having lost their source of food – their mycorrhizal associates, – strive to produce as much offspring as possible from the surviving mycelia before the famine. The process is especially evident in early season, when scores of species appear simultaneously, including many ascomycetes. Burnsite morels are the flagship of the latter.

That’s why we were so curious to see what was going on on burnsites, both in Akademgorodok, where parts of our beautiful Pirogov pine forest had burned out, and around Ugut. Akademgorodok lies at ~55° N, and Ugut at ~60° N, which accounts for an aprroximately two-week phenological lag between them. I was visiting my hometown in June and returned to Ugut later that month. That doubled my chances to see the burnsite frenzy.

First, I went to check fresh burnsites in Pirogov forest in late May. I did find some young Geopyxis carbonaria, Peziza pseudoviolacea, Pholiota highlandensis and Psathyrella pennata on damaged areas (all classic carbotrophs), and quite a few very regular-looking black morels (Morchella cf. elata), but those grew in their regular favorite spots along forest roads, and these spots were barely damaged by fire.

I repeated my attempt two weeks later, and hit the jackpot. The most charred spots were dotted with dozens of young fruitbodies, and the differences between them and regular “elatas” were instantly apparent.

These morels from the second “wave” were more massive, with more numerous ridges and anastomoses, and often with more regular “cell” patterns; stipes of young fruitbodies had a distinct pinkish tinge, and they lacked the warm brown hue (nearly always present in regular “elatas”) until very late stages of development. Their sterile surfaces (“ridges”) had a peculiar silvery-frosty sheen due to the presence of numerous bulb-shaped cells on ridges, which could mean our species is related to the North American taxon Morchella capitata (I haven’t cut our specimens in half yet but the stipes of our collections also seem to be chambered). See the difference for yourself (luckily, I found one slowpoke elata in a shaded pit nearby, it’s on the left… (or at least I hope that it’s M. elata, not yet another cryptic species… 🙂

When I returned to Ugut, Elena and I decided to try our luck on the steep banks of the small river Ugutka which runs along the village. Here’s what we saw:

There were morels everywhere. Their similarity to my earlier find in Akademgrodok was obvious, and while I can’t say for sure it’s the same species, it’s apparently much closer to Akademgorodok burnsite morels than it is to M. elata. The fruiting was so massive that fruitbodies often grew in bundles, up to a dozen in one spot.

 they’re not really that fuzzy, it’s aspen seeds stuck to their surface

About an hour into studying the site, Elena found the second item on our wish list – a scrawny yet real “black foot morel” – Morchella cf. tomentosa! Officially this species is known only from North America, but we had found it with Nina Filippova in 2010, making Elena’s the second documented find of the (phenotypical) Blackfoot in Eurasia.

Here it is.

By the time we had… well… documented our finds, we couldn’t feel our arms from hauling basketfuls of specimens. But seriously, this, along with the discovery of Morchella cf. tomentosa near Khanty-Mansiysk in 2010, could be an important find, both mycologically and economically, considering the skyrocketing prices on dry morels worldwide, and the fact that Morels as such are virtually unknown to local collectors, who mostly rely on pine forest porcini (Boletus pinophilus). For these people, losses caused by the disappearance of “hunting grounds” after wildfires in pine forests could be at least partially alleviated by crops of these valuable species that follow.

If you’re interested in burnsite morels, you might find these two articles interesting:

Rebecca J. McLain et al. Commercial Morel Harvesters and Buyers in Western Montana: An Exploratory Study of the 2001 Harvesting Season.

Greene D.F. et al. (2010) Emergence of morel (Morchella) and pixie cup (Geopyxis carbonaria) ascocarps in response to the intensity of forest floor combustion during a wildfire.

a wealth of other morel links can be found on the Morchellaceae page @ mushroomexpert.com (Michael is the expert on morels!).

New finds in 2013. 3 – Inocybe sp. (sect. Rimosae)

I’ve already mentioned that Akademgorodok is home to all sorts of species of the genus Inocybe, which seem to enjoy human company: many of them show a marked preference for alleys, courtyards, old playgrounds, trails, or grow under small patches of trees between residential houses.

Many of these (sub)urban Inocybes belong to the section Rimosae, which is characterized by fibrillose-rimose (radially split) caps, smooth, amygdaloid to ellipsoid-ovoid spores, lack of thick-walled, crystal-bearing cystidia (metuloids) and dense rows of thin-walled, clavate (club-shaped) to cylindric cheilocystidia along lamella edges which look like whitish “frosting” under lens. Unfortunately, way too often that’s nearly as far as you can get with identifying species of this section, because even microscopic differences are often subtle; it’s hard to be objective about some of the key features; other are evanescent or hard to put into words (such as the strength and unpleasantness of smell, degree of light-brownness and non-yellowness, scarcity of tiny patches of cottony hyphae = velar remnants, and so on).

Despite these deterring complexities I decided to study and sort out the big pile of specimens that’s accumulated over the past few years, including about 20 more or less decently recorded specimens collected last August. Upon initial examination, many of them fail to fit into the available keys seamlessly: a feature or two always stands out.  My plan now is to to measure spores and cheilocystidia, look at stipe and pileus surfaces of all specimens, take notes on gross morphology, then to sum it up in tables and see if any patterns and correspondencies emerge.

Meanwhile I’m just enjoying their grayish-brownness.

Here is a curious one. It was a common sight in late summer on areas of dry, semi-barren, compressed soil, such as abandoned lawns, sides of park trails, etc.

It keys out half-heartedly as Inocybe perlata (using the key to the section provided in a 2009 article by Ellen Larsson et al.) based on its robust habit, spore shape and size, and lack of yellow shades in its coloring, but one thing doesn’t fit: fresh fruitbodies had a faint earthy-spermatic smell, but a very strong and surprising smell appeared when I soaked a tiny piece of dry specimen in water. I ended up running around the nature reserve HQ with pincers:  – “Here, smell an Inocybe!” – “Ugh, no way!” – “Smell it!” – “Why… well ok…. Cool! Honey!”. The consensus was, the smell was not even real honey-like, but stronger and clearer, rather like cheap artificial honey flavoring.

I’m not sure whether the slight brownish discoloring seen on some parts of the fruitbody is taxonomically relevant.

There are two species in the aforementioned 2009 article that are said to smell like honey – one is Inocybe cookei, which our mushroom is definitely not, and the other is an Inocybe melliolens, described from France. I haven’t found a detailed description of the latter yet, but Google shows images of very similar-looking fungi, e.g. here or here. There is even what looks like thin velar remnants on pileus surface in the second photo, and I also found what appears to be velipellis fragments on the surface of one of the fruitbodies.

However, these fungi seem to have broader (clavate, not cylindric/subcapitate) cheilocystidia (up to 22 μm wide), although I’m not sure that this feature is stable enough to mean much (if it does, then Inocybe maculata appears in the picture).

There are abundant refractive hyphae found throughout the fruitbody, which in my experience correlates directly with smell strength. Here’s a picture of such refractive hyphae in the pileipellis:

The caulocystidioid elements on the stipe (they’re the whitish fuzz) are very typical for species of this section:

Here’s the pileipellis, with rather wide, inflated hyphae:

and the velipellis:

Spores

I guess the only way to get a definitive answer is molecular study: hopefully one day an Inocybe expert becomes interested in Siberian samples….

New finds in 2013. 2 – Clavulinopsis subarctica

Clavulinopsis subarctica (Pilát) Jülich 1985 is a rare fungus which is occasionally found among Sphagna in raised bogs. It’s one of the very few clavarioid fungi (along with Clavaria sphagnicola) that grow in the demanding conditions of this biogeocoenosis. Indeed, I was surprised to find a coral fungus in the middle of a wet, sparsely treed peatbog west of the Kinyamiskoye lake near Ugut, and I doubt I’d ever find out what it was without help from a true expert in wetland fungi, Nina Filippova (check out her amazing flickr album).

You can read about this species (as Ramariopsis subarctica) in a 2012 Czech Mycology article by Martina Vasutova. As far as I know, it’s been collected in Yugra on one occasion, but, just like Ascocoryne turficola, it’s so rarely found mostly because it grows in nearly inaccessible spots very few mushroom enthusiasts would visit voluntarily 🙂

New finds in 2013. 1 – Tricholoma matsutake

Winter is the time to sum up the results of the past season. Despite the cold long spring and dry, fruitless summer which brought little but wildfires all over the taiga belt, we still found a few noteworthy things. Several hundred kilometers south east of Ugut, in Novosibirsk, summer was wet and almost subtropical, with countless unusual species popping out here and there, but I missed most of it (can’t be in two places at a time…). In my next posts I’ll tell about some of the more interesting finds.

Tricholoma matsutake

An old Boletus pinophilus on last year’s burnsite

In early September we went about 30 kilometers up the Yugan river from Ugut to check a good Boletus pinophilus spot – Leikovskiy bor, a variously-aged Scots pine and Cladina lichen forest both with untouched patches up to 300 years old and younger patches which appeared after extensive logging in the 80’s. Much to our disappointment most of the good forest had been destroyed – at least to some extent – by a wildfire a year earlier. Few fungi fruited on damaged soil: only Lactarius rufus and Russula cf. emetica were relatively abundant, with an occasional Suillus or old, maggot-ridden Boletus pinophilus. Sad and fruistrating.

On our way back we found a group of large gilled mushrooms that I at first mistook for pale Tricholoma focale. I picked one of the fruitbodies, and instantly felt its amazing smell – a strong aroma with notes of cinnamon, fruit and wine. It meant it was the matsutake, a much sought-after delicacy currently known from the Far East of Eurasia, parts of North America and Scandinavia.

Just as it often happens, I was tired (= lazy and inconsiderate) to take pictures at that moment, so I photographed my find a day later, when the fruitbodies began to dry and discolor: pileus surface, lamella edges and belts on the stipe (velar remnants) turned darker brown.

A few days later Elena went a bit further in the same direction to Kordon Kamennyi,  the northernmost ranger house of the Yuganskiy nature reserve, and – yay! – also found a group of matsutake.

Here is her find:

By the way, a crop of Tricholoma focale appeared about a week later and we were able to appreciate the difference between these two closely related species: Tricholoma focale has a bright orange-red tinge in its coloring, and its smell is plain boring – the usual dull “mealy” Tricholoma odor.

We’re sending a few pieces of our specimens to a matsutake expert in Sweden to incorporate our find into the global picture of this valuable species’ distribution.

A little culinary spinoff: I used the pathetic leftovers of my five years of learning Japanese to google up what the Japanese do with this mushroom. I ended up cooking matsutake gohan from non-herbarized fruitbodies. The taste is indeed pleasant but it failed to strike me as something unique. Good for the matsutake population 😉