Mendocino Woodlands Foray Nov. 9 to 11

This year¹s annual MSSF Mendocino Woodlands Foray will take place on the weekend of November 9-11, at the Mendocino Woodlands camp, in the mushroom-rich hills above the town of Mendocino.

Brian Perry, an authority on the Mycenoid fungi, will be the foray mycologist. He will be assisted at the specimen tables by Norm Andresen and Mykoweb's Mike Wood. Brian will also do a presentation Saturday night on bioluminescent fungi.

Planned classes include mushroom dye, papermaking, identification, photography, and cultivation, including a mushroom kit making session. Fee of $140 includes lodging, meals, and all forays, classes, and events ($90 with offsite lodging). Kids under 13 half price (w/ adult), under 5 free.

Registration form available online at www.MSSF.org/mendo, or send check with names and all contact info to:

Liana Hain - MSSF 

49 Hancock St. San

Francisco, CA 94114.

Questions? E-mail to mendo at MSSF dot org, or call either 650-728-9405 or 707-829-2063.

 

David Arora's Annual Mendocino Foray

November 23 to 25, 2007

Celebrate the fun in FUNgus by joining David Arora & special guest speakers from Thailand, Russia, and Oregon for a weekend of mushroom hunting, feasting, and lecture-workshops beginning the day after Thanksgiving. $190 per person includes lodging and most meals. To register and for more details, contact: maxfun at cruzio dot com

Point Reyes National Seashore Mycoblitz V

December 29, 2007

This will be the only Mycoblitz for the 2007-2008 collecting season. We will meet at the Bear Valley Visitor Center at 9:00 a.m., then split into groups and collect fungi in many different Pt. Reyes habitats. After the foray, we will all gather in the large and well-lit Red Barn to sort, name and gawk over our finds. For more information, contact David Rust at incredulis at yahoo dot com, or 510-468-5014.

 

 

Thank You BAMS!

By David Grubb

The Bay Area Mycological Society has done us all a big favor.  They had the brilliant idea of starting a Yahoo Group, where members could share messages and pictures.  This local effort quickly evolved into a national forum. Many professional and serious amateur mycologists are regular contributors.  While the primary focus is still on mushrooming in Northern California, there are interesting  comments and reports from all over as well.

If you have not joined, do it now.  You can sign up for a daily digest, so you only get one message a day (when there are any).  Most mornings, I get my daily mycology fix by reading through the messages.  To join, go to:
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/BayAreaMushrooms/ and follow the instructions.

While you are at it, join the local version we have set up for SDMS.  That is at:
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/SanDiegoMyco/.

 

Meeting Oct 1

The first meeting of the new season will be on Monday, October 1^st , 6:30-9:30pm,

Paul Maschka, S.D.M.S. President and former Lead Organic Gardener for the Zoological Society of S.D. will present: Fungi In Your Garden, Friend Or Foe? Learn what mushrooms really do in our  gardens.

This fun talk will enlighten the novice mushroom enthusiast to the important roles fungi play in our ecosystems. We will explore some intriguing areas of mushroom life styles and habits. Hopefully answering some of those nagging questions, like do mushrooms have sex?, or how do mushrooms feed themselves? or what are mushrooms made of? This program will feature digital images of a multitude of mushrooms found through out S.D. County rarely seen by the non mycophile.

There will be a short business meeting to elect officers for the new year.  Consider serving on the SDMS Board to help us keep the club running smoothly.  (See the back page for a view of the board at work.)

 

Program Preview

Programming Update:  In April, Nancy Mirr was unanimously elected to the new position of Program Director. She has put together a tentative plan for the year:

October:  Paul Maschka

November:  Patrick Hamilton (chef)

December:  Holiday Potluck

January:  Gary Lincoff

February:  Nancy Mladenoff, artist

March:  Steve Farrar

April:  Elio Schaechter

May:  Potluck

Fungi As Building Material

Mushrooms become source for eco-building

By JESSICA M. PASKO, Associated Press Writer

 

TROY, N.Y. - Eben Bayer grew up on a farm in Vermont learning the intricacies of mushroom harvesting with his father. Now the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute graduate is using that experience to create an organic insulation made from mushrooms.

More at home on a pizza, mushrooms certainly aren't a typical building material, but Bayer thought they just might work when given the assignment two years to create a sustainable insulation.

Combining his agricultural knowledge with colleague Gavin McIntyre's interest in sustainable technology, the two created their patented "Greensulate" formula, an organic, fire-retardant board made of water, flour, oyster mushroom spores and perlite, a mineral blend found in potting soil. They're hoping the invention will soon be part of the growing market for eco-friendly products.

Bringing the insulation to market is still at least a year away though, said McIntyre, and will require much more research and work, not to mention more sophisticated equipment and a better work space.

"We've been growing the material under our beds," said McIntyre, adding that they've applied for a grant from the National Collegiate Inventors and Innovators Alliance.

The two young developers — Bayer is 21, McIntyre 22 — graduated in May from RPI with dual majors in mechanical engineering and product design and innovation.

"I think it has a lot of potential, and it could make a big difference in people's lives," said RPI Professor Burt Swersy, whose Inventor's Studio course inspired the product's creation. "It's sustainable, and enviro-friendly, it's not based on petrochemicals and doesn't require much energy or cost to make it."

The two say recent tests at the National Institute of Standards and Technology have shown it to be competitive with most insulation brands on the market. A 1-inch-thick sample of the perlite-mushroom composite had a 2.9 R-value, the measure of a substance's ability to resist heat flow. Commercially produced fiberglass insulation typically has an R-value between 2.7 and 3.7 per inch of thickness, according to the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee.

With a rapidly increasing global population, a limited supply of natural resources, and rising energy prices, eco-friendly housing products are selling fast. Numerous companies have carved out their niche selling "green" building supplies such as recycled fiber board and plant-based paints. The Environmental Home Center in Seattle sells an insulation made from denim scraps and another made from 100 percent recycled paper among their many green building products.

After looking through about 800 patents, though, Bayer and McIntyre realized they'd hit upon a relatively original idea. Unlike many green building products, Greensulate isn't made from pre-existing materials. It requires little energy or expense to produce because it's grown from organic material.

Here's how it works: A mixture of water, mineral particles, starch and hydrogen peroxide are poured into 7-by-7-inch molds and then injected with living mushroom cells. The hydrogen peroxide is used to prevent the growth of other specimens within the material.

Placed in a dark environment, the cells start to grow, digesting the starch as food and sprouting thousands of root-like cellular strands. A week to two weeks later, a 1-inch-thick panel of insulation is fully grown. It's then dried to prevent fungal growth, making it unlikely to trigger mold and fungus allergies, according to Bayer. The finished product resembles a giant cracker in texture.

"It really allows for a myriad of uses," said McIntyre. He said they've envisioned modifying the product to make structural panels that could be grown and assembled onsite to produce sustainable homes.

"Green building materials should be evaluated on the idea of cradle to cradle," said Evelyne Michaut of the Natural Resources Defense Council.

In the cradle-to-cradle industrial model, goods should either be fully biodegradable or reusable, limiting waste and pollution, according to Michaut, a sustainable city advocate from Santa Monica, Calif.

"That's the ultimate environmental reference," she said, adding that it seems like Greensulate is on its way to fulfilling that criteria.

For Bayer and McIntyre, their next step will be creating larger pieces of Greensulate to use in building a wall. From there, they'll perform further testing to see how the product stands up to various elements, including saturation and humidity. McIntyre said they have one two-year-old sample that's been exposed to the elements and shown no sign of degradation.

As part of their development plan, they're entering a new business incubation program at RPI to get their company, Ecovative Design, off the ground. Eventually, they hope to land a partnership with another company.

"Our biggest challenge is that while we have this technology, we still have a lot of research to do," said Bayer. "The key is to really make sure we have a product that is mature and robust before we bring it to the market."

 

 

What’s Cooking?

Fungi As Food

Don’t miss the November meeting.  Patrick Hamilton, mycochef extraordinaire, will give us a cooking demonstration, and we get to eat the results.

SDNHM Mushroom Collection

By David Grubb

This summer, a discussion on the BAMS Yahoo group caught my attention.  It relates to our effort to collect specimens for the Natural History Museum, so I thought I would share some quotes with you.  Perhaps these will also inspire you to join the group.  For details, see "Thank You BAMS" on Page 1.

I have omitted a variety of web links from these quotes.  You can find them in the original discussion, and I will be adding them to our web pages for the collection project.

David Rust started it off when he wrote "What we're missing is an ongoing effort to voucher specimens in a herbarium where people can follow up and study. UC Berkeley has a herbarium, but I hear it's greatly understaffed. SFSU has one of the best in the Western United States. But... we in the clubs don't contribute our finds frequently enough to either of these resources, so we could argue after the fact until the cows come home what the mushroom collected "last weekend" or the one before that might have been. Without specimens in hand, dried, photographed, vouchered and stored for science, we may never determine whether the species was a H. discoideus or a H. hypotejus, nor can we compare material collected in subsequent years in the same location. Once the collections have been unceremoniously dumped over the back deck or heaved into the garbage, the information is lost.  At the same time, development of data and species lists could serve to map distribution and ecological change over time."

Michael Kuo responded "Nothing is more important for mycology right now than extensive collection and accumulation of well documented specimens. Some random thoughts: Virtually no one is depositing mushrooms in our country's major herbaria anymore. Check out your favorite mushrooms at the U. S. National Fungus Collection, the Michigan Herbarium, or the NY Botanical Garden Herbarium. Be sure to look at collection dates. You may be surprised how long it has been since anyone deposited a specimen!"

Rod Tuloss seconded Michaels comments.  He wrote "I'd like to strongly back the need for collecting and preserving well-documented fungi that Michael reiterated. It's not so much which words are used, but that the right data is covered. That's why checklists for diverse taxa are really important. If you're collecting a Russula, using a checklist available from Bart Buyck (for example) would be very good...no matter whether you say "cap" or "pileus." If you are collecting an Amanita, there are so many things that people will wish to know later that can't be told from a picture."

There is a good checklist for Amanita collections at the Amanita  Studies web site that Rod maintains with Zhu-liang Yang.

On the importance of keeping the collections refreshed, Michael Kuo writes "Normal, affordable methods for extracting DNA require specimens under about 15-20 years old. I just spent two weeks extracting DNA from false morels; I and my collaborators encountered quite a few hurdles (some insurmountable) attempting to extract DNA from herbarium specimens collected decades ago. But, for example, when it came to the huge, California version of Gyromitra infula, I had a beautiful specimen collected by Hugh Smith, accompanied by good notes on the ecology of the collection site, a good photo of the mushroom, and a photo of the site."

One point that was mentioned by a number of the experts was the importance of recording ecological data. Michael Kuo wrote "Documenting a mushroom collection's ecology is incredibly important--at least as important as documenting its morphology. Collectors have never focused much attention on gathering ecological data--and we are learning again and again what a mistake this has been.

SDMS Information