Fairy Bonnets

I just stumbled across this mushroom genus on the internet: Fairy Bonnets!

First off, what a whimsical name to describe these mushrooms!

The Mycenas of Norway

If I were a wee fairy I would totally use these as a head topper. These mushroom are very small and delicate, especially one very very tiny one:

Mycena culmigena from the Oregon Wild Blog

Mycena culmigena are found around Oregon, Washington, and British Columbia among wet, sedge dense areas. The caps of these are 1-3 mm! Wow! This is my new goal. To find one of these things. And I too will take a photo of my fingertip nudging an itty bitty M. culmigena. A quick search revealed its species name was given by someone named Maas Geesteranus in 1986, a particularly good year if I do say so myself ;) But it actually wasn't totally discovered for the first time ever this year - it was reassigned to the current species name from its former placement in Mycena juncicola (named by Gillet 1876).

It's always interesting when this happens - in this case it appears Geesteranus said this should really be a different species from M. juncicola (found in Norway though seems to be quite rare there in the record books...). Someone named Redhead described another similar species, Mycena cariciophila, in 1980 and Geesteranus folded that into M. juncicola. The specimen used to describe M. cariciophila was found in New Brunswick (next to Maine)...Anyways, this is probably not the most exciting post but untangling taxonomies is what I use to do and can be a fun exercise time to time :)


Sources:
http://linnet.geog.ubc.ca/Atlas/Atlas.aspx?sciname=Mycena%20culmigena
http://home.online.no/~araronse/Mycenakey/juncicola.htm
http://www.cbs.knaw.nl/Collections/BioloMICS.aspx?Link=T&TableKey=14682616000000063&Rec=13403&Fields=All

"Life...finds a way"

Echoing Jeff Goldblum's famous quote from Jurassic Park, scientists discovered bacterial life in one of Antarctica subglacial lakes!

Antarctic subglacial lakes: Lake Vostok was reached earlier this month, Lake Ellsworth is planned next. 

Lake Vida: this super salty lake sits under 27 m of ice at its thickest point (not a subglacial lake but it is the thickest layer of ice recorded); in 2002, researchers found and thawed microbes that were locked away in ice cores collected in 1996.

--------- Now these are the main subglacial lakes:

Lake Whillans: under 800 meters of ice it is the first subglacial lake discovered to have life! Big finding! It was reached January 28 2013.

Lake Ellsworth: subglacial (~3,400 meters of ice on top!);they started drilling this winter but had to call it off Dec 27th due to technical problems...the equipment needs to be reserviced and who knows how long that will take. Drilling this deep has never been done before and the procedure/technology completely new. What's crazy is that if things had gone according to plan, they would have just about 60 hours to collect all the water/sediment/ice they wanted! After that the hole they made would've frozen completely over...

Lake Vostok: the largest subglacial lake known in Antarctica it sits under a staggering 4,000 meters of ice; in Feb 2012 researchers reached the surface of the lake, no life has been found as of yet but it is still early in the hunt*...

http://feeds.nature.com/~r/news/rss/newsblog/~3/JUXIjXo87pQ/antarctic-researchers-find-life-in-subglacial-lake.html

--------------------------------------------
*News update!
March 7, 2013

I had this entry as a draft for quite some time but this came across my radar today: 

Antarctic Lake Vostok yields 'new bacterial life'

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-21709225

Well, they have found bacterial (what looks to be bacterial at least) life! Lots of press about it, now we wait to see what more the scientific team offers...Where does it fall on the tree of life? What might it be living on? Articles say it has 86% similarity with its closest sequenced relative...is this enough to make a new branch on the bacterial tree? What is it eating down there?