scrambled egg slime

Last week my husband Jamie and I walked through the little nature preserve on Lake Drive in Shorewood. I wanted to show him how when you start to look for them, mushrooms are everywhere. But they weren't. We walked and looked, looked and looked. Didn't see a single one. But then he called me over to a decaying tree stump with yellow stuff seemingly smeared all over it. A slime mold. There was also a very active red ant colony living in the stump, and we watched them, hard at work, doing what ants do, or at least what the worker ants do--carrying incredible large and heavy things relative to their size, making it look like nothing. (Ever notice you never see an ant put down a load for to rest?) But we noticed that they were avoiding the yellow stuff, going around it. When I got home, I found a picture of what we had seen in a book I checked out at Shorewood library, with its common or folk name: scrambled egg slime. Slime, I discovered, is a fungus form that has motility, which is to say that it can move. It gets even weirder: I looked it up on Wikipedia, and found that it is smart too. This is from the Wikipedia entry on it:

A team of Japanese and Hungarian researchers, writing in the journal Nature^[1], claimed to have found the slime mold Physarum polycephalum is capable of finding the shortest way through a maze. Pieces of the slime mould were enticed through a 30-square-centimetre (five-square-inch) maze by the prospect of food at the end of the puzzle. The researchers concluded that the creature was exhibiting a kind of primitive intelligence.

Normally, the slime spreads out its network of tube-like legs, or pseudopodia, to fill all the available space. But when two pieces of food were placed at separate exit points in the labyrinth, the organism squeezed its entire body between the two nutrients. It adopted the shortest possible route, effectively solving the puzzle.

I'm going to check out this article. It's all a bit much for a Monday.

This video of the slime making its way through the maze is included as supplementary material to the article. Could use musical accompaniment.

shaggy mane at Walgreens

I'm thinking about joining the Wisconsin Mycological Society, but I'm afraid that it will seal my fate as a nerd. Check out the first sentence of their little informational brochure: The WMS is primarily an amateur organization dedicated to the study and enjoyment of wild mushrooms and other fungi. See what I mean? It's just that nerdy. Next I'll be wearing one of the t-shirts I saw at the mushrooming trip: I (heart) fungi.

It is great to be able to notice and even identify these moist and squishy forest creatures, though. I was coming out of Walgreens the other day and saw something sticking out of the woodchip landscaped parking lot barrier area. When I looked carefully, I saw it was a mushroom--a shaggy mane. According to the Guide to Fungi booklet that I got at the mushrooming trip, its latin name is Coprinus comatus. Description: One of the distinctive "inky-cap" mushrooms whose gills and flesh darken and dissolve into an inky-black mess. Before this happens, however, it's an especially beautiful and tasty mushroom with shaggy upturned scales. Right there in the parking lot.

Now I'm back to the brochure: WMS members are mainly interested in learning how to collect and identify wild edible and poisonous mushrooms and their relatives. This is the extreme sport aspect of mushrooming. You eat a poisonous mushroom and either live to tell the tale, or don't. What a way to go.

many years ago in Bohemia

It actually wasn't my first time. My first time was many years ago (1990) when I was living in Prague (Praha to the residents of this incredible city). One of my co-workers at Jazykova Skola (National Language School) invited me to visit her country house, about 40 minutes outside the city by train. Her name was Jana Rohlikova. I suppose she is still there, tromping around the wild Bohemian countryside with her long braid, grey now, thumping her back. The country was Czechoslovakia; the split-up of the Czech Republic and Slovakia would happen a few years later. We walked for hours and hours, through the forest, over hills, in and out of towns. We did find houby (mushrooms), filling the basket I carried. I took notes: mech (moss), borovice (pine), briza (birch), vrana (crow). That was my first time mushrooming.

isn't it fungi?

Yes, the plural of fungus is fungi, but I didn't know that last Saturday, the day I went mushrooming for the first time. The good folk at the Urban Ecology Center hosted the trip to a county park about 4o miles west of Milwaukee well known, apparently, for its mushrooms. We meet a dozen or so members of the Wisconsin Mycological Society in the parking lot there. Together, we walked into the woods.