Installed on 30 Jun 2009. Latest Update 01 Sep 2011.
Revised or added text is in bold.
This webpage is about some newly seen mushrooms in Starkville,
Mississippi. I think the spores which gave rise to them were brought
to ground by a brief rain shower which started at 3:09 P.M CDT on the
afternoon of June 11, 2009. (The water from that shower was brownish
in my
CoCoRaHS Network rain gauge.)
At Starkville, the surface wind at the time of the rain shower
was about eight mph towards the WSW. Accordng to archived
NEXRAD
images, at altitude, the rain shower, itself, was moving at about 26 mph in
a ESE (nearly due east) direction. (On the map the black arrow represents
surface air mass displacement during the three hours preceding the rain
shower. The green arrow represents the the distance that the air mass
which bore the rain cloud would have covered during the same period.)
At this point in time, I don't have a feel for the origin or the altitude
history of the spores while enroute to Starkville.
Mississippi-Alabama-Tennessee (Mapquest)
Photographs of what I think are newcomers (hereafter called
Newbies) are provided below in hopes that someone located along
one of the speculated ground tracks might provide information regarding
the spores' last address before setting off on their adventure.
After the aforementioned browinsh rain shower on 11 June,
followed by two days of moderate rain in Starkville, MS, (at 9:40 A.M.
on 14 June)
I found nine small parasol shaped mushrooms in my front yard, in a roughly
10 ft by 10 ft area. Ever since the initial appearance there has been an
unbroken sequence of the small mushrooms in the yard (in the mornings)
and the size of the area has increased. (A lady, across and down the street
has her own batch, and the gent who tends our lawn reports that he has seen
patches of them all over town. (You have to look for them in the early
morning hours because they shrivel up by about 10:00 to 11:00 A.M.)
I call these mushrooms Newbies because in all the years
I've lived at this location I have never before seen the likes of them.
Here are graphs which show the rainfall pattern for my rainfall reporting
station, and the daily mushroom populations for a 30 ft x 30 ft area in my
front yard.
Daily Rainwater Accumulations and Mushroom Populations
The 0.04 inch brown rain shower which occurred on the afternoon of
11 June 2009 appears in the 7:00 A.M. accumulation recorded on 12 June.
(See red arrow in the rainfall plot.) Regrettably, I tossed the brown
water and flushed the rain gauge.
In their earliest appearance the mushrooms are dome shaped, and as they
mature they open more and more (like a parasol) and finally have
caps that are almost disk-like and typically about
one inch in diameter. A lot of them have brownish teat-like
nipples at the peaks of their caps.
The Newbie mushrooms pop up during the cool part of the evening
(pre-sunset), at night and in the early morning. They typically turn brown
and shrivel up by late morning. This pattern, which is typical for mushrooms
which digest lawn mower clippings, has been repeating ever since their intial
debut on 14 June. So far, I have only seen them on Saint Augustine grass.
By using my first photographs of the Newbies, Paul Scott, of
Mississippi State University, provided a preliminary identification
of them as members of the genus Panaeolus. Based on better
photographic (and narrative) material Paul provided a revised but
still tenative identification for them as Conocybe albipes
(lactea), which are also sometimes also called cone heads.(1)
There is a marked similiarity between my Newbies and
C. albipes but there are some differences which may be
significant. (See below.)
This first picture shows a nearly fully developed
mushroom. The stem (stipe) here is about four inches in height.
23 Jun 2009 08:36 A.M. - "Newbie" in grass
Here is a spore print of one of the mushrooms done on 25 June. (I made
a hole in card stock and threaded the mushroom stem through the hole.)
The mushroom was in contact with the card stock for 3 hrs and 45 minutes.
25 June 2009 11:30 AM Spore Print
Note that the spore print appears to be primarily brown to grey.
Next is a micrograph of spores from the spore print above.
Microscopic Image of Spores from 25 Jun 2009 Spore Print
Courtesy, Paul Hamilton Scott, Plant Pathology, Mississippi State University
Click on image for larger version.
Newbie Spore Dimensions (blue dots) compared to Published Size
Envelopes
for Panaeolus foenisecii (1) and Conocybe albipes (lactea)
(2)
Graph updated 23 Jul 2009.
The sizes of the Newbie spores are consistent with those for
Panaeolus foenisecii but the color of the latter is black, so that
identification ruled out.
Published spore sizes (above) for C. albipes seem to be significantly
smaller, than those of the Newbies, but I have been advised, twice, that
sometimes innacurate spore size stats get propagated in the literature.
Note. If published dimensions for any given sample of spores contain
systematic errors, both dimensions should be affected in the same fashion.
That would would have the effect of moving the centroid of their max-min
envelopes along a diagonal that intersects the graph's origin (shown as a
faint grey line, above). The envelope for Conocybe albipes
(MushroomExpert.com) is
displaced horizontally, (not diagonally) compared to that
for the Newbies. I take that to mean that the size (and shape)
differences are real, and thus may be evidence that the
Newbies are, most likely, not the "USA" version of Conocybe
albipes. The California version of Conocybe lactea (Mykoweb.com)
may still be in the running.
Comparison of Newbie and Conocybe albipes Caps.
27 Jun 2009 07:21 A.M. - Newbie Cap Top
Narrative descriptions of C. albipes match my
Newbies, but the photographs which accompany them do not show
some of the finer points.
Note the dark striations (a.k.a. wrinkles), which are spaced roughly
every 10-15 degrees around the periphery of the cap. I haven't seen any
photos of Conocybe albipes / (Conocybe lactea) which show them to
this degree. None of the images (on the right), copied from
MushroomExperts.com (2), show the striations to my satisfaction.
Next is the cap bottom of the same Newbie.
27 Jun 2009 07:22 A.M. - Bottom of Newbie Cap
Here is a preliminary map showing mushroom locations over a ten
day period.
(The grid consists of one foot squares and the dots which represent
mushrooms are exagerated in size. The mushrooms do not appear to
be distributed randomly. Red and pink dots correspond to mushroom
locations after the lawn was mowed. (The mowing does not seem to have
affected the pattern.)
Map of Mushroom Locations, 21 - 30 June 2009
If the published size stats for C. albipes are correct, then I claim that
the Newbies are not yet identified.
A modest amount of Newbie spores are being retained at -15 degrees
Centigrade, should someone wish to examine them further microscopically
or perform DNA analysis of them.
Extra-terrestrial Origin for the Newbies?
Up to this point in this article, I have been focousing on terrestrial
sources for the Newbies. There is, in my opinion, another option,
extra-terrestrial. The idea, which is not without historical
precedent(3), is that mushroom spores may be delivered to earth's atmosphere
by meteors. A meteor which has penetrated earth's atmosphere down to the
troposphere, might even furnish sufficient particulate matter to serve as
rain shower condensation nuclei.
In July to September of 2001, there was an extended period of red rain
along the western coast of India(4). The rain contained what appeared to be
microsopic biological particles which varied in size from four to ten
microns. (Desert dust was ruled out.) The onset of the red rain was preceded
by what may have been a sonic boom, produced by the passage (or air burst)
of a meteor in the atmosphere. [Thanks to Jose Garcia for calling this
article to my attention in March 2006.]
If the Newbies were delivered by a meteor, then my nomination for
the applicable meteor shower would be the Areitids which sprinkle
down on us in the daytime between May 22 and July 2, peaking on June 7.
Followup, 2010
When they were present in 2009, the newbies seemed to enjoy mown grass-clippings.
As a means to eliminate them I began bagging my clippings (on 27 Jun)
and the newbies begin to taper off in numbers. (Gotta be careful
about false cause.) The last ones that I saw in 2009 popped up on
11 Sep. (One was in our yard and one was in our neighbor's yard up the street.)
On 17 May 2010 I saw the first regular mushrooms of the season in our yard, but
as of 19 May I haven't seen any newbies. If some of them pop
back up, I'll note it here.
On the morning of 20 May there were six dome-like newbies in our neighbor's yard. None had appeared yet in our yard.
On 24 May I saw our first front-yard newbie of this season. On the same day there were nine newbies in our neighbor's yard.
As time rolls by the numbers of daily newbies are increasing. Generally there is about a 10:1 ratio of newbies in our neighbor's yard versus those in our yard. It appears that disposing of grass clippings (our yard) is still adversely affecting the food supply for our newbies.
In the first week since they reappeared, the newbies (both yards) were kind of weak looking, but since then, they have been looking as robust as they did last year.
It may be significant that in this year the newbies appeared 25 days earlier than they did in 2009 (May 20th versus June 14th). That would be 21 days, based on those strictly in our yard (May 24th versus June 14th).
2011
The first Newbies (two each) seen in our yard made their appearance, in our side yard, on 29 May. A few "regular" mushrooms have been appearing in the front yard for a couple of weeks.
Haven't seen any newbies in neighbor's yard yet.
29 May - 22 June
During this period most of the "newbie" activity has been in our side yard, with daily numbers varying from zero to six. In the front yard, where most of the activity was
in 2010, the daily numbers have mostly been "zero." (I had a fungicide applied to the
front yard in late spring.) The neighbor's yards have also been dereft of "newbies."
On 23 Jun I did a spore print from one of the newbies that I have been calling "the wimp."
("Wimps" are generally smaller in diameter than "run-of the mill" newbies and their cap ribs are straight and at right angles to the stalk.) The spores turned out to be black! That means that the wimps are a different specie from the newbies.
Turns out that, based on cap shape, there's a third species, which I have started to
call "the intermediate." (It's spores are brown.) The caps of the intermediates are actually concave. Looks like they could hold water.
Throughout 2009 and 2010, I was assuming that all three "varieties" were different
versions of the same critter. "Sometimes you feel like a dome, sometimes you don't."
They all "pop up" sometime around sunset or during the night and wilt away by 10:00 AM.
It now appears that all three species (actually seven) of mushroom (whatever their
names) operate in a symbionic fashion. They tolerate one another in the same
small area of our side yard (6 feet by 30 feet) and I have yet to see any other kind of mushroom in that shared space.
Here is a montage showing details (as they develop) for each of the seven species.
[Added 23 Aug 2011. Latest Modification 01 Sep 2011.]
References
(1) Michael Wood and Fred Stevens,
Mykoweb.com: The Fungi of California:
Panaeolus foenisecii
(3) Martin Beech, "On Meteors and Mushrooms,"
J. Roy. Astron. Soc. Can., 81, 27, (1987). Abstract reads:
Several folklore sources describe a connection between shooting stars
and the appearance of mushrooms. This association has, on at least two
occasions, been alluded to in historical "scientific" papers. These
articles highlight how poorly understood the meteoric phenomenon was during
the period c 1750 to 1800. [This article has been made available online,
courtesy of the SAO/NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)]
(4)Godfrey Louis and A. Santhosh Kumar, "The Red Rain phenomenon of Kerala
and it's possible extra terrestrial origin," Astrophysics and Space
Science, 302, 175-187, (2006). A preprint of the article's
abstract is available at:
http://arxiv.org/abs/astro-ph/0601022.
Acknowledgements
Information from the following meteorological websites was used in
preparation of this article.
