“Discover” a New Mushroom Species

Hey Citizen Scientist, want to discover a new species? Your best bet is in the kingdom Fungi, where scientists estimate there are 2.5 million species and that 90% of them are undescribed. Most species of plants and animals have been "discovered" or described by scientists, but fungi remain significantly under-studied. This gives every one of us, as citizen scientists, a unique opportunity to contribute our discoveries to the rapidly growing body of knowledge about these weird/fascinating/otherworldly organisms known as Fungi. The easiest part of a fungus to see is a mushroom (the macroscopic fruiting body where some fungi produce their spores). Take a closer look in your backyard, or out on a hike, and you could stumble upon a new species of mushroom. With a few simple tools, you can make a scientific discovery or learn to identify a mushroom you didn't know about before.

Even if you don't discover something new to science, you may discover a new-to-you mushroom, identify a new wild snack (***caution: only eat a mushroom you can 100% positively ID!), get some cool pictures, or just spend some quality time outdoors. It's a win-win!

*The two mushrooms pictured above were tagged as potential undescribed species and are awaiting DNA sequencing confirmation

You can get as fancy as you like with this, but the essentials are pretty generic and you may already have everything you need laying around the house.

Required:

1. Cell phone with camera
2. Knife (pocket knife works best)
3. Waxed paper bags or tacklebox
4. Clothes that you don't mind getting dirty
5. Notepad or slips of paper

Recommended:

1. Hiking shoes or muck boots
2. Rain coat
3. Mushroom basket
4. Stiff paintbrush
5. Snacks and extra water
6. Sunscreen and bug spray
7. Field guide(s) *great starter guides include:

All That the Rain Promises and More By David Arora

National Audubon Society Mushrooms of North America

This key from MushroomExpert.com

How to Identify Mushrooms to Genus I: Macroscopic Features by David L. Argent

Nice to have:

1. Fishing vest
2. A nice camera
3. Jeweler's loupe or macro lens
4. Mechanic's mirror (peek at a mushroom's undercarriage)
5. Dehydrator or silica gel packets
6. aluminum foil

Full-Science Mode:

1. Microscope and slides
2. KOH (potassium hydroxide) 3-10% solution
3. Other stains for microscopy (Melzer's reagent)
4. 365 nm uv flashlight
5. battery-operated photography lights and collapsible light bounces

If you thought this project was about unplugging and getting outside, you're right! Don't worry- we won't be spending too much time on our phones.

iNaturalist is the ONE app I recommend for mushroom identification (there are some good social media groups for ID help too). You do not need to have mobile service during your foray (mushroom search party) and this is an integral tool for connecting your discoveries to the experts.

1. Create an account at iNaturalist.org
2. Go to your App store or Google Play store on your device and download iNaturalist. You want the bird logo, not the leaf.
3. Sign in and you're ready to go.

Whether you're planning a hike or just snooping around in your backyard, you're probably going to need to go outside to find some mushrooms. If you're lucky enough to live in a fungi-friendly climate, there may be mushrooms outside year-round rain-or-shine.

Here are some of the best times to find lots of mushrooms:

a few days after a rain

when snow is melting

--- moisture is a trigger that tells the mycelium that it's a good time to send out spores via a fruiting body

Some good places to look:

decaying logs/stumps/trees

wood chips or mulch

cow pies

near living trees

in meadows

Move slowly (seeing more >covering more ground) and Look for irregularities in pattern or color and "mushrumps," lumps of duff or soil that have been pushed up by the mushroom before it fully emerges.

Once you see a mushroom or two, you'll start seeing more--- it's wild!

***safety tip: don't get lost; use a GPS tracker to record your route, pin where you parked your car, stay one side of a stream/road/trail/hill!

*you might see some cool, colorful, big, interesting, or choice edible mushrooms. These are the LEAST likely to be undescribed species but go ahead and enjoy them anyways :) The most likely mushrooms to be undescribed are white/brown/gray, nondescript, and/or very small, and not known to be delicious or safe to eat; aka LBMs or "little brown mushrooms"

**If available, I recommend joining a guided mushroom foray with your regional mycological society to you to get an idea of what's well-known, edible, or poisonous. Mushroom clubs are an invaluable resource whether you're just getting started or have a good deal of experience.

Taking good photos of your mushroom(s) helps with identification:

1. remove anything distracting from the shot (blades of grass, brightly colored leaves, etc)
2. provide shade if needed, it can be easy to overexpose your outdoor photos
3. provide a dark neutral background for light mushrooms or a light neutral background for dark mushrooms
4. capture the top and underside of your mushroom in one photo if possible. Resting your phone on the ground with your lens as low as possible can help.
5. make sure the image is in focus. pull back and zoom in if needed.
6. if you have acces to multiples of the same type of mushroom, show different life-stages of the same type of mushroom in one photo. Include a photo of the inside of the mushroom sliced lengthwise if you can.
7. expose the base of the mushroom. Its shape and features are important, especially if the mushroom has emerged from an egglike sac or volva.
8. consider including object for scale like a coin, bottlecap, or tape measure
9. for very small mushrooms, you can clip on a macro lens or use a jeweler's loupe

Take descriptive notes about:

MORPHOLOGY (how the mushroom looks)

you may want to include:

1. overall shape of the mushroom- does it have the typical cap and stalk shape or is it shelf/bracket/hoof like? spherical maybe? club-shaped? irregular?
2. size: bring a tape measure or compare to the size of a standardized object
3. remnants of a ring or weblike strands around the stalk, and/or patches on the cap and a cup around the base
4. type of spore-bearing surface (hymenium): gills, pores, ridges, none visible?
5. colors of different parts of the mushroom. Do any of the parts stain a different color when handled or cut?
6. textures on different surfacesof the mushroom: smooth, sticky (viscid), slimy (glutinous), hairy (there are several names for different types of hairiness), wrinkled (rugose), scaly (squamose or squarrose), etc...
7. if there are gills, how do they attach to the stalk?

SENSORY INFO

1. odor or aroma: mushroomy/nondescript, apricot, anise, coffee, chocolate, honey, green corn, seafood, almond, etc...
2. taste: it's safe to taste a mushroom if you spit it out completely. common tastes: acrid (radish-like), bitter, sweet, sour, earthy, any of the above aromas, etc...

ECOLOGY and BEHAVIOR

1. What substrate is your mushroom growing on: soil, wood, dung, pine needles, something else?
2. TREES growing near your mushroom. Some mushrooms participate in symbiotic relationships with certain types of plants. If you don't know the names of the trees you can include a photo of leaves, fruits, pine cones, etc to help ID.
3. location: under a tree or out in a meadow, close to water, etc... Don't worry too much about specific coordinates; iNaturalist will import the geotag from your cell-phone photo. I do like to pin the location of a cool mushroom in my Gaia gps app so it's easier to revisit later.
4. growth habit: how close to one another are individual fruit bodies of the same species growing?
5. Solitary= all alone
6. Gregarious=near its friends
7. caespitose=growing in a clump
8. spore dispersal: does your mushroom put out spores when you interact with it (dropping water or blowing on the mushroom)?

Also helpful:

1. chemical interactions that produce color changes, ex: KOH, ammonia, iron salts.
2. spore prints: place the mushroom hymenium-down on foil or paper (cutting the stalk of might help) in a still-air environment to collect spores. The color of the spores is helpful for identification and documentation. Sometimes you can see spores on the gills or stalk of the mushroom, but not always.
3. Thumb through your field guides to try to ID your mushroom and see if there are any characteristics you forgot to check.

Store the mushroom sample

1. I like to put them in my tackle box in the order that I found them. If the mushroom doesn't fit, I keep it in a waxed paper bag in my basket

*** For each notes entry, I like to use the timestamp from the photo to help me stay organized and know who's who when I get back to the lab. Alternately you can bring tags into the field, each with a unique ID number. Photographing and storing the mushroom with its unique tag helps with keeping track of your mushroom observations

Upload your observations to iNaturalist

1. click on the "observe" button
2. choose "photo library"
3. select the photos you want to use for each mushroom
4. click "add"
5. type your notes
6. click "what did you see?" to view AI- generated suggestions. This is a pretty cool feature that can help you identify your mushroom with varying degrees of accuracy based on your location and other users observations. the quality of your photo affects the quality of suggestions offered.
7. compare suggestions to your field guides to choose an identification. If you're not sure, you may want to go up a taxonomic level (species<genus<family<order<class<phylum<kingdom
8. click "Share"

Choosing an identification

Ex1: I know I have a mushroom with a cap and stalk but don't know what it is -> select phylum Basidiomycota

Ex2: My mushroom has brittle cap and stalk and gills, no cup on the base. The skin peels off the cap easily- I know I have a russula but don't know what species. ->select genus Russula

** the mushrooms you find in the field will be in one of two phyla: Basidiomycota and Ascomycota. You can usually tell the difference easily via microscopy of the spore-bearing surface. With some study and practice, you will be able to tell the difference by looking at macroscopic features

Congratulations, your observation is now live! Community members and experts can comment on your observation with ID suggestions and notes. Mycologists can let you know if you found something rare or possibly undescribed!

Copy your iNaturalist ID number

Fungaria (museum-quality fungi collections) and dna sequencers use the iNat ID to catalog samples. If you're going to submit your sample for seqencing, you want to keep the ID number with the sample

1. This is a 9-digit number specific to your observation
2. I've been told this is very straightforward on an android device, it's at the end of your observation's URL
3. If you have an apple device:
4. click on the share icon in the upper right corner of the photo
5. click "copy"
6. paste to your notes app or some other document. Keep the 9 digits at the end of the pasted url
7. I like to add a timestamp and short description to the entry in the document, write down the ID # in my original descriptive notes, and (most importantly) store a slip of paper with the ID# with my mushroom sample.

Dry your mushrooms

1. put your ID # with your mushroom- the mushroom might be unrecognizable when the drying process is complete
2. use a dehydrator, fan, or silica gel packets (works for small mushrooms only) to dry your mushroom completely - should be cracker-dry.
3. keep in your personal fungarium or proceed to sequencing

Get their DNA sequenced

That's right- some very cool molecular mycologists out there will sequence your mushroom DNA (sometimes for free). The information gathered in this DNA barcoding process can tell you where your mushroom falls on the tree of life and whether or not it's a "new" undescribed species.

1. Easy mode: send your sample to the Ohio Mushroom DNA Lab
2. place dry mushroom in a ziplock baggie with its iNaturalist ID#
3. ship to preferred address for your region in this document
4. Please DO NOT send samples of any of the common species listed in the doc
5. So far (as a total noob), I only prefer to send samples of mushrooms that have received a comment noting that it may be an undescribed species
6. Monitor iNaturalist for results
7. More Specific: Find out if there's a mycoblitz currently going on in your area- they will sequence up to 10 of your most interesting samples. Use the voucher slips provided to collect your data and note if there is a target survey area or genus that they'd prefer samples of. Add the voucher # to your iNaturalist observation. Send your dried mushroom to their lab with the voucher number
8. Down the rabbit hole: DNA barcoding at home, this one is good too (DNA extraction-> PCR,->electrophoresis at home; it's still more economical to outsource sequencing)... upload your sequence to GenBank and compare to other sequences in ncbi BLAST (maybe more on this in another instructable)

Optional: Microscopy

Before drying your mushrooms, put a drop of KOH on a slide with a tiny piece of hymenium. Smush that under a cover slip and get rid of any bubbles. Look at spores and spore-bearing structures. Ascomycetes produce spores in a sac or "ascus" and Basidiomycetes produce spores on structures called basidia. Take a picture and upload it to your observation. Feel free to play around and look at other parts of the mushroom too.

Optional: Photo Manipulation

make your photos look better using photo editing software (this is a whole other instructable outside of my wheelhouse but some observers have AMAZING photos, many have been edited or focus-stacked to look their best)

***disclaimer: unfortunately I haven't gotten to name a species HankHillius butteii, I made him up while playing with a giant gluteus-shaped bolete. However, scientists did name a mushroom Spongiforma Squarepantsii in 2011.

If you've found an undescribed species, or even a new-to-you species: congratulations! Please leave a comment letting us know what you found.

It may take a long time for the scientists who receive your data to be able to describe or name the new species. You can help them by providing the most clean, detailed, accurate data possible. If you're interested in becoming more involved, build your collection of your new mushroom: collect multiple samples, try to cultivate them, look at spores, check the same spot next year to see if there are more. The more evidence that yours is a unique species, the better. There may be opportunities to publish or co-author on a description once you've gathered enough info and experience, but that's a little bit out of the scope of this instructable.

Keep looking, and enjoy your time outdoors!

Also consider joining your local mycology club to nerd out about your findings with fellow mycophiles.