honestly just stick to the web uploader then if your phone is tiny; the website functionality is better than the app functionality IMHO
I cant figure out how to post an observation. I feel super stupid.
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I’m going to message you privately, I don’t want to go too off topic okay?
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Definitely don’t feel that way, some of this isn’t easy and even long-time users (and staff members like myself) make mistakes and get confused! Welcome to iNat!
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Is this private?
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I send you a message, click on your profile image in the top right of the forum page and you should have a notification in messages - Its the fourth icon down, looks like a letter. Open that and we can just talk back and forth that way <3
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This is the foum. But if you look at the top right cormer, you will see your avatar. Click on that, and a dropdown will appear, like this:
The envelope icon indicates private messages.
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I’ve been trying to find useful information on these, and most of it seems vague if not downright obscurantist. Why, for example, can I not find something along the lines of “these species taste peppery or acrid, these other species have no taste”? Or “these species are mycorrhizal with oaks, these with beech, these with pines…” and so forth? Everbody is so busy writing about how difficult they are that nobody bothers to group them by any observable characteristic. In post #22, you gave us a breakdown of Amanita sections, even if they cannot go to species; it sure would be nice to have something like this for Russula.
The only two Russula sections I’m personally any good with are Cyanoxanthinae and Virescentiae, and that’s mainly because I’m personally familiar with those from my own collections. As far as I’m aware, there aren’t really any good, detailed books that specifically dive into the genus russula broadly, though googling I’m noticing there’s a few regional ones, especially old world examples (there’s a guide for great britain, specifically, for example.)
So basically, I didn’t touch much on them because well… I just don’t know as much about them. They’re harder to research, information is harder to find, I’d probably have to go digging through scientific journal articles and, while I do that often, its usually for very specific things that I need cleared up, not broad species treatments. And on top of that, field guides almost NEVER touch on sections for genusus that aren’t Amanita, for whatever reason (maybe because the amanita sections are incredibly important to know if you’re a forager and you don’t want to die.)
As far as why nothing says ‘these species are peppery, these have no taste, etc’ I blame the amount of variability in species along with lots of potential overlaps. I really think extensive DNA testing of type specimens is going to be necessary to really get US russula species sorted and to get the actual species boundaries delineated. Almost every Russula sequence I look at ends up with a temp code because like… how the fuck do you even figure out what something is without reference data or at least good descriptions? And so many russula descriptions are just not great at differentiating them. To the point where even people who are much more expert than me basically throw their hands up in frustration - see Michael Kuo’s hilarious article about the genus https://www.mushroomexpert.com/russula.html
See also this note in the recently updated Peterson field guide
RE: temp codes, for example, there’s over a hundred and fifty russula temp codes that have been created on mycomap for things first sequenced from the state of Indiana alone (I can get into it more if anyone would like, but basically temp code = this is distinct and we’re not sure what it is, NOT that we’re specificaly saying its a new-to-science species. Its for bioinformatics purposes, because just saying Russula cf. cyanoxantha isn’t particularily useful for grouping distinct sequences.) Russulas are nuts and up there as one of the biggest messes when it comes to macrofungi.
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Tl;dr you can’t find good information because even the scientists aren’t that sure. There’s just not enough money in mycology.
That said, cross your fingers, I really believe that the various US sequencing projects (The Fungal Diversity Survey, Mycota, & the Ohio Mushroom DNA lab) are really going to at least start getting some of this sorted, especially as holotype specimens in herbaria continue to get sequenced.
https://www.inaturalist.org/observations?place_id=any&taxon_id=48339&verifiable=any&field:DNA%20Barcode%20ITS= here are all the russula sequences on iNat currently with the field ‘DNA Barcode ITS’ filled in - you can see how few, even with a sequence, are unable to be positively IDed.
For contrast, here’s a similarly cryptic genus, Crepidotus - https://www.inaturalist.org/observations?place_id=any&taxon_id=118288&verifiable=any&field:DNA%20Barcode%20ITS= - these are also very hard to ID from macromorphology alone, but because a number of type specimens from the University of Michigan herbaria have been sequenced, there’s a good reference database that can be pulled from, and thus its easier to get species confirmed.
https://www.inaturalist.org/observations?place_id=any&subview=map&verifiable=any&field:DNA%20Barcode%20ITS= this is the full map of all the ITS sequences on inat, if anyone is curious - for what its worth, Indiana, Ohio, California, and the PNW are more heavily represented because of where the sequences projects I mentioned before are located.
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I love the screenshot: “make your best guess and don’t worry too much about the exact species name.” If only we could get our iNat identifiers on board with that.
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TBH most mushroom folk seem to be in that mindset. If you look at Mushroom observer, their scale leaves a little more room for fuzziness.
Also, I realised I didn’t actually describe the two (sub)sections I did mention.
Virescentiae - green-cracking russulas. brittle gills, bluish or greenish or yellowish patchy top. Usually not viscous, at least as far as I’ve seen. Non bruising, not spicy, generally considered to be good edibles. (for example - https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/174588875)
Cyanoxanthinae - color ranges from pale yellow to greenish tones to purplish tones; can be very dark. The gills are notable because unlike with most Russula, they are not brittle and will bend if you push them. The gills also usually exhibit more forking than is typical for russula. No bruising. Can be spicy or not, if not spicy considered a good edible. (for example - https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/174588830)
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What you are asking for is a synoptic key as opposed to a dichotomous key. This is where each species is numbered and features are listed with corresponding numbers.
For example Russula alnicola might be assigned number 2.
The list of features would include cap color and taste, so
Cap Color Yellow 2,7,9
and
Taste acrid or peppery 2,6,9
The additional numbers are other Russula that have that feature. As you can see, some species drop out as more features are chosen and the species does not have that feature.
Here is a book for Britain that has such a key.
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Eventually you should have only one or two species to compare.
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I swear if someone ever published anything like this for US species of russula i would kiss their feet
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That’s not what I’ve been seeing on iNaturalist. The fungi identifiers here are as hesitant to be “fuzzy” as those of any other taxon.
Here is an example of the kinds of discussions we have:
Identifier: Ramaria formosa s.s. does not occur in North America - there is an epitype sequence in Genbank (KY626155) and there are no sequence matches outside of Europe. See [redacted] for details.
Me: Then it would help to discuss which ones do occur in North America. According to iNaturalist, there are 41 species of this genus in Washington. Of those, the ones that look the most like this are gelatinosa, testaceoflava, and conjunctipes.
Identifier: Ramaria is extremely diverse and the majority of species in the US are yet to be discovered and that iNat list is far from complete. What [the observer has] pictured might very well be a new species to science.
Identifier again: Even experts usually have a hard time IDing Ramaria from images alone. It’s usually easier to rule out Ramaria than to confirm them. It’s not R. testaceoflava or R. gelatinosa which both have different coloration and branching.
This is fairly typical. It’s not this, it’s not that, but nobody dares suggest what it might be.
Unfortunately, the case really might be that we don’t know. Coral mushrooms are really understudied. One of the guys helping out with our sequencing project has entire 96 well plates of corals done at once and huge percentages of the sequences will come back with almost no good matches, or if there is one, its an environmental sample with no real context. Some of these probably do match described species and we’re just lacking in reference data, but you know, mushrooms are ephemeral. They’re hard to study. And corals just aren’t as interesting to a lot of people as some of the big iconic well-studied genuses.
On mushroom observer the coral you found would probably be marked as Ramaria aff. formosa. But we just don’t have that option on iNat.
EDIT: Let me clarify a bit - I’m sure people know that there is a species of Ramaria on the west code that has visual similarities to R. formosa. Someone needs to describe it, is the problem, but iNat doesn’t support annotations like ‘aff.’ or ‘cf.’ so we’re basically stuck using observation fields to clarify on known but undescribed species.
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Danny Miller is doing some good work in the Pacific North West at Danny’s DNA Discoveries. Check out Russula and Ramaria.
I agree that iNat should allow for aff. and cf.
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That sounds like an exellent time to apply the advice from the field guide. “Make your best guess and don’t worry too much about the exact species name" – if it was someone using that field guide, and that field guide showed a species that looked like the coral in question, the user would probably go with that. But that is not the mindset on iNaturalist. If you do that on iNaturalist, if you’re lucky, you will be asked an expert-level question about how you ruled out X, Y, and Z that weren’t in the field guide; if not so lucky, maybe you will be told that there is no possible way to know what it is. And then you wonder, why did I spend money on this field guide?
And then we here on the forum wonder why you gave up and left iNaturalist.
I guess that just depends on who is doing the IDing and their own personal stance?
Sometimes I’m okay with the scientific answer being ‘we don’t know.’
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