On April 18, instead having an everyday-slides lab, we were having plenty oxygen time in Pine Ridge Park. It was literally a sunny day, but also hotter than usual a little bit. I prefer spending time in this kind of weather than playing in chilling lab room. For who enjoy to walk there, there is an easy way to walk to the destination. First off, you need to take bus 116 and stop at intersection between Main St. & 86th Pl W. From that, you just need walk straight for five more minute. Remember to take a right on 207th St W before walking straight. Here is the destination in Gwen's phone GPS.
The destination was shown in the GPS
Every trip, we must have a leader right? Unlike in lab we have Gwen, this time our Leader was Korena. She showed us how to identify the fungi, but not really deep in details because we are not mycologist. Ultimately, we learned that in the park near by, there were so many species of fungi, mosses, etc. Let's begin the journey, shall we?
The person in this photo is Korena, she is pointing out for us on that old tree, there are 3 kinds of fungus. Two of them are quite good, the other is bad. The three of them create lichens, which cover all over the tree. To me, lichens be like living everywhere on the tree bark. Refer to the picture, the most likely able to see lichen is the white greenish part. Moving on guys.
I had chance to take a closer look. As you can see here, this is the lichens growing on the same tree. To me, it's kind of cute when looking at teeny tiny lichens. It's not grossed at all, no slimy as well, it's just so dry and flaky. When I crushed it, it turned into white powder similar to cosmetic powder, I think.
This is one of the lichens I mentioned above. Especially, this one is very crispy just like your potato chips. In my opinion, it's quite look like kale chip though. If you think so you could leave the comment in comment section below.
Take a break from fungi a bit, here is mosses. They are small, I mean very small generally. Beside that the mosses are pretty soft. They are non- vascular and live everywhere such as on the ground, on the tree bark, etc. Honestly, when I look at this, I just want to lie down and take a nap; however, if I do so, my face will be scratched, and I will be bitten by insects and I don't like that, so... moving on.
Back to fungi, this kind of mushroom is hard and they are digesting the wood. They have covered layer of lignin, that's why they are so hard. It reminds me one kind of mushroom with the same shape but red and it's used as a medicine which is called Linhzhi mushroom. It is expensive though.
Here we come the queen of the field trip, this one is in Basidiomycota. According to Korena, she said this one may be an Amanita sp., which is pretty poisoning. This mushroom can give a hard time or lead you to die. Korena also dissected this mushroom for us. Inside the body, it was quite dense. Beside that, she listed out so many way you can identify a mushroom based on its characteristic. She also said the dog near by really love this because it's tasty. This mushroom is pretty cute and attracted to me, I think. The most beautiful of this mushroom is its cap. It has pattern of scale on it, which is pretty cool and interesting to study about. And that is the end for our field trip.
Final thought
I think this field trip is very useful in studying the material about nature organism, especially fungus and tree. I found out the park also has a lot of interesting trees such as different kinds of ferns, gymnosperm, angiosperm, etc. Also this field trip helps me in notifying the fungus characteristic.
I thought the mushrooms were cute fungi too! Your post was fun to read especially the part about moss. The descriptions you gave of all the lichen helps me remember the name of each type of lichen we observed.
ReplyDelete