Species list from Lincoff Foray on 09/24/2022

The Lincoff Foray is the highlight of clubs calendar and a lot of preparation went into this years event behind the scenes. Guest mycologists Arlene and Alan Bessette schooled us on Polypores and Boletes while Stephen Russule reported on his project to know all the mushrooms of Indianan.

For the the first time we had vendors selling nature-themed merchandise at the event, a cultivation table as well as live music. The mushroom cultivation session was taught by Esperanzo Wilcox from PA Mushroom Company. The band playing in the afternoon sun was New Age Adenas and they perform in the Wheeling, WV area quite a bit in case you want to see them again. Our vendors were Wobble Mud Studios, Cedar Bridge Botanicals, Ritual Soaps, Mushroom Nerds and Wild Ones of Western PA. Again look them up if you saw something you liked but were not able to purchase it on the day. The mushroom feast was organized by Mike Henry and he orchestrated an army of chefs and helpers in order to feed the over 100 attendees. Kim Plischke gave a cooking demonstration. And last but not least there was a mushroom themed auctioned. A fuller list of credits will be in the November-December newsletter.

As for the mushrooms despite the dry weather we found a very impressive 199 species of fungi and slime molds of which 11 were new to the club species. There were also 6 unverified species observations and 2 lichen species. A number of new to the clubs life list were boletes. I think all of them were known to grown in the area but had not been collected on a club walk or foray before. There were also a couple of new to the club crusts. Many specimens were sampled for DNA barcoding and we expect the total numbers for both North Park and Cook Forest to increase in the coming weeks. In fact they have increased between the time I started writing this post and when I publish it. Participants of the walks were encouraged to upload their fungi observations to iNaturalist and this project. As of writing there are a total of 352 species in the iNaturalist project from the two days of forays.

After the Cook Forest walk a group of us returned to North Park and prepared hundreds of vouchers to dry overnight. After the walks at North Park another couple of hundred specimens were documented and added to the driers. Later that evening a work party was set up where the now dried vouchers were sampled by taking small amounts of mushroom tissue and putting them into strips of 8 eppendorf tubes ready for PCR. Approximately 720 specimens were sampled and guest Mycologist Stephen Russel took home the prepared tubes ready for analysis. Garrett Taylor, John Plischke and Cara Coulter were the main organizers of this project and you can see the results unfolding in the iNaturalist DNA project. Some of the DNA results indicate that they are new species never reported anywhere else in the world and some match species identified in Indianan or other locations in North America and are different from their European counterparts with whom they share a name. As always thanks to everyone that participated in the project and helped us to prepare so many specimens.

Thanks to all the organizers, cooks, identifiers and DNA barcoding crew. Also special thanks to those that set up and torn down the venue on the Friday and Sunday.

Species list entered by Richard Jacob.