Fungi Field Trip

On April 18th our class went to Pine Ridge Park to look at fungi. The trip was lead by Korena, a graduate from University if Washington. She talked about a pathogenic fungi that infected a tree. Korena was able to tell that the tree was sick because it was oozing sap in an attempt to get rid of the fungi.
Then Korena talked about lichen. An interesting fact that I didn't know was that lichen is an inductor of a trees age. There can be any types of lichen on a tree. Lorena showed us a few examples of branches that had three types of lichen growing from it.

On one of the logs there was a rock hard decomposer mushroom.  This mushroom's spores come out of its pores. It would continue to grow bigger until it fully decomposed the log or it ran out of nutrients.

Korena also talked about how vast the mushroom network was and gave a few examples of mushrooms that were related to each other. She showed and talked about using all our senses as a method to help identify mushrooms and identify whether they are poisonous or not.