#IdentiFriday is the happiest day of the week

General
1096

As part of a broad mushroom cleanup I’ve been doing, I’ve run into a lot of branch disagreements in Agaricomycotina, which is the bin that “jelly fungi” go to when people can’t decide. There a lot of “typical” mushrooms stuck in there due to a disagree, that ideally could be moved out of the way of the jellies.

If anyone can recognize the differences at a glance and wants to help weight those some Friday, the earlier pages in this view (by date updated) are likely to contain the items that need more weight to get to Agaricomycetes. Look for obs with 3 or more id’s, and if you see me commenting “still in here?”, that’s what’s going on. Thanks for any help!

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1097

I can fix some of the ones with a disagreement between Order Auriculariales and Order Tremellales where I’m familiar with the species.

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1098

Looks like I have a project later XD

BTW if anyone is interested in getting in the weeds a bit on Auricularia, this paper (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8625027/) is recent (2021) and does a good job breaking down the ranges and differences between different species / groups.

Most of the ones that are getting confused with other jelly fungus species in the US are probably A. americana, A. angiospermarum, or A. fuscosuccinea (the last one is a southern US species)

EDIT: Honestly there’s a ton of wood ear fungus across the eastern US that are probably wildly IDed, that paper lists A. fuscosuccinea as a southeastern species but INat has research grade observations as far north as like… northern Indiana or New England. That doesn’t seem correct, though I wish I knew someone who was a little better at these guys to confirm my suspicions

@NoGenAI I know you know a bit about jelly fungi, any insight on Auricularia ranges?

EDIT 2: If you want to help knock any of these out without having to get too granular, anything that’s a cap & stem mushroom with gills or pores is pretty safe to put in Agaricomycetes. Also shelf fungi.

Also if you can’t tell if its Exidia or Auricularia, Auriculariaceae is an okay guess

EDIT 3: Since I forgot to mention - AFAIK A. americana is the only species of Auricularia in the US that grows on conifer wood. So if its on confier in the US, its safe to mark to species. A. angiospermarum and A. fuscosuccinea both grown on angiosperms, and are visually… pretty close, all three are visually really close, so the latter two probably come down to a range issue, or honestly, microscopy unfortunately

EDIT 4: Also TBH don’t stress too much if some of these are unidentifiable - a lot are never going to get past Agaricomycetes

EDIT 5: Slightly older paper but it talks specifically about differentiating A. fuscosuccinea and A. angiospermarum (referred to, in this case, as A. americana ‘deciduous’) https://openjournals.wsu.edu/index.php/pnwfungi/article/view/1126 - macroscopically it seems like the biggest difference between the two is A. fuscosuccinea has more reddish-brown hues, though it does also have a white morph apparently - here’s an example https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/28084802

EDIT 6 I swear I’m stopping after this: There’s also A. cornea which ALSO is present in the US and has a densely hairy upper surface and variable morphology. So technically its more a look alike for A. nigricans which shares the hairy upper surface but from pictures it can honestly be hard to tell density of mushroom fuzz unless its a really sharp pictures.

Correct me if I’m wrong on any of this, I’m just combing through papers ATM

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1099

Okay, so if I’ve photo’ed the top, gills, and stalk (including base) of a mushroom, and it still isn’t identifiable to species. What is the likelihood that taking a spore print will make a difference?

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1100

Spore print could help, a little, maybe. I suppose there’s probably species where color can help weed out look a alikes.

Chemical tests might be more useful than spore prints, TBH. Ammonia/KoH/Iron Salts are the most common ones, the color change can be really helpful in differentiating different species, though I’m most familiar with using them for bolete ID. If you look, places like Mushroom Expert, Bolete Filter, and some books will have details about what color changes you can expect, though not every mushroom will have this (for example, one of my obs https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/173523733)

Honestly though, microscopy I think is better. I really want to pick up a microscope so I can start getting shots of spores and other microscopic features, because that’s really the big ticket for narrowing down some of them.

But sometimes there’s just nothing you can do. There’s extremely well known mycologists on inat who can’t get all their stuff to research grade.

EDIT: I bet this is why mushroom observer has more of a confidence vote/percentage system versus a straight yes-or-no like inat does. it allows for someone to go 'I think its PROBABLY this thing but I’m not 100%)

1101

Oh I found a messy one that’s going to need more than the pre-maverick project to get it solved

https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/3631517 if anyone feels like adding their input (quick ID tip: Phallus species have a distinct skirt area that is slimy, Mutinus lack this distinct area.)

1102

Our August for Africa IDathon

https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/mission-impossible-identify-plantae-in-africa/43528

Lots of lD links to play with in that first post.

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1103

If you guys think mushrooms are frustrating – I have 18 Ascomycete observations, of which only two are RG, and that only because they are diseases of economically important plants. One of them took a year to get from class to subclass.

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1104

I feel like outsides of the Pezizales order, most ascomycetes are just like screaming into a void

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1105

I think a lot of these are candidates for can’t tell species (or even genus) without DNA sequence. Sometimes not even with DNA sequence.

1106

Pretty much. Most people just arent able to upload microscopic features

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1107

Yeah, started clicking it on red top russulas today.

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1108

On the other side of the Caribbean, Honduras could always use help. I did fieldwork on Utila where Anolis lemurinus does not occur (instead, the locally endemic Anolis bicaorum is "the anole that looks like that). However, because of the proximity of Roatan to Utila which does have A. lemurinus, the AI still doesn’t want to ID A. bicaorum.

Anyway, there aren’t a lot of observations to sort through on those islands (and I’ve worked to catch them up to the best of my ability), but occassionally an iNaturalist shows up there.

The mainland is a whole other story. Endemics, endemics everywhere.

Edit: I was wrong, A. lemurinus is only on the mainland, but again, the AI tries to stick the island endemics with this species due to the proximity.

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1109

I can totally identify on the Honduran islands, but identifying in mainland Central America is tough since it’s so rich in biodiversity.

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1110

Iiit’s friday night and I’m … id’ing plantae to dicot for Mission impossible.https://www.inaturalist.org/projects/mission-impossible-identify-plantae-in-africa/journal
That seems to be just the niche for me :sweat_smile:

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1111

I hope your niche has room for me

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1112

It’s a big one with 27k and I am on random sorting so you won’t find me :wink:

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1113

With trees in Burkina Faso in April, yowza that’s a big set. If I figure out some tricks by the end of the day, I’ll pass them along…

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1114

Trees in Burkina Faso, South Africa en masse and that one guy in Madagascar…
But at least I seem to have poked a few people into refining their ID into something more concrete after sleeping for a few years (and some agreeing with my dicot which I’m interpreting as a thank you :joy:) so mission accomplished :rofl:

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1115

I’ve done some of that (and a few monocots) for stuff in bloom or fruit so I could annotate phenology. The thought was to make it easier to sort for broadly ID’d plants with reproductive stages that are presumably easier to push to finer ID levels. As mentioned before, annotations don’t appear on Plantae or Tracheophyta, it has to be Angiospermae or monocot/dicot level to be able to add these or filter for annotations in the Identify window.

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Mission: Impossible - Identify Plantae in Africa