Wednesday, March 27, 2013

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

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