What I did not know about then, and have just discovered, is that this mushroom doesn’t merely lounge around in quiet pools. It stands up to stiff currents, as seen in this amazing video I found at the ASU site.

Both the Nat Geo article and the ASU page contained some other gems. The caption to the glowing mushrooms in the Nat Geo article noted

San Francisco State University’s Dennis Desjardin and colleagues scouted for glow-in-the-dark mushrooms during new moons, in rain forests so dark the researchers often couldn’t see their hands in front of their faces, Desjardin told National Geographic News in 2009.

Ummm  . . . have you seen many of the things that live in rainforests? Walking through them in pitch black sounds like a Herculean feat of will, and hands-down one of the most bad-*** things I have ever heard of any scientist doing (although the guy who set out to sample the stings of every venomous insect and rate them on a scale of pain comes close). I give a Pseudopod Salute to these guys for courage in the line of duty. And it seems to have paid off, too.

But “when you look down at the ground, it’s like looking up at the sky,” Desjardin said. “Every little ‘star’ was a little mushroom—it was just fantastic.”

WOW. Witnessing for the first time a few hours of profound biological beauty sounds like it could well make up for the seriously high sphincter factor of this study. Like when Edith Widder turned off the dive lights on her autonomous diving suit 880 feet below the Santa Barbara Channel, or when I jumped into the North Pacific at night in shark-infested waters to see the nightly ascent of the bizarre pelagic biota. Sometimes, the payoff is worth the bone-quaking fear.

In the ASU description of the dentally-well-endowed but reproductively less blessed T. rex leech, known for teeth “that the leech uses to saw into the tissues of mammals’ orifices, including eyes, urethras, rectums, and vaginas,” (oh dear LORD) according to Nat Geo, was casually dropped this detail

This T. rex leech was discovered feeding from the nasal mucous membrane of a little girl in Perú.

Eeeeeeeeeee! Nat Geo did not mention it was a human parasite too!

And finally, in the caption for the Darwin’s Bark Spider at ASU, hidden amongst some other more or less routine description of a spider that spins gigantic webs was this

This orb-weaving spider builds the largest orb-style webs that are known to science.  Webs of this species have been found spanning rivers, streams and lakes with “bridgelines” reaching up to 25m in length and total web size reaching up to 2.8m².  The silk spun by these spiders has an average toughness of 250MJ/m³ with the highest measured at 520MJ/ m³.  This makes it, “the toughest biological material ever studied, over ten times stronger than a similarly-sized piece of Kevlar” and more than two times stronger than any other known spider silk. The unusual behaviors of this new species will allow us to understand size dimorphism, mate guarding, and self castration (among others).

Wait . . . what was that last one?

Me and Ganoderma applanatum.

Mark your calendars — I’m excited to announce I’ll be teaching “Mushrooms of the Front Range” this August 19, 21, and Sep. 4 through the Boulder County Nature Association. If you are a fan of fungi or of just expanding your natural history world in general, come join us! The course description and instructions for signing up are here — and the class size is capped at 12, so reserve your spot now.

One of the things I enjoy most about mushroom hunting is the chance it gives me to *really* get to know the forest on an intimate basis — not just the fungi, but also plants, animals, lichens, and whatevers — and how the forest changes, and what grows where, and when. If you want to understand the part of life on Earth that takes place in a forest, picking up mushroom foraying as a hobby is a great way to do it. Plus you get to see some parts of your public land that almost no one else ever sees, and that’s on top of all the bizarre things you find in the woods. Really, there are few nooks and crannies of forests near towns that haven’t been touched by man, and that detritus is sometimes sad, sometimes fascinating, and sometimes utterly bizarre. And finally, it’s so quiet and relaxing out there. If you like fishing, hiking, or meditation, you will love this. It’s kind of a hybrid. With a nerdy basket.

We’ll be holding “Mushrooms of the Front Range” in August in Boulder just after the North American Mycological Association’s 2010 annual meeting Aug. 12-15 at the YMCA of the Rockies’ Snow Mountain Ranch over by Winter Park, so I will be freshly full of new fungal ideas and tales of Colorado fungi. Speaking of that meeting, you should come if you really want to immerse yourself in the world of fungi and perhaps equally eye-opening world of fungi-lovers, spend lots of quality time seeing beautiful views, get to know the Colorado sub-alpine forest post-mountain-pine-beetle (and I won’t lie — it’s a tree graveyard in a lot of places out there), and hear all sorts of colorful lectures by world-renowned mycologists.

It will be a ridiculously affordable natural history vacation: For about $300 (if you take a bunk in a room with five others and join the Colorado Mycological Society for a mere $28 or NAMA for $35/40) you can get all the fungal knowledge/foraying you can handle; all-you-can-eat buffet meals for breakfast, lunch and dinner; and lodging for three days. Trust me, as amazing science vacations go, this is dirt cheap, and it is going to be an awesome experience, even if it’s a terrible mushroom year. And if it’s a great mushroom year, the experience will be *unforgettable*.  We may even be doing our third annual mycoblitz at Rocky Mountain National Park that week, which would allow you to take part in Citizen Science!

One final note — I have confirmed* a speaking engagement at the Denver Museum of Nature and Science for their November 3 Lunchtime Lecture series. The title has not yet been decided on, but the format will be a photographic survey of life on Earth that incorporates as much diversity as possible — one beautifully photographed organism/phylum/minute for 45 minutes with a little bit of information about each. It will be less a science talk and more a science appreciation experience. Behold, and wonder. I’ll have more information on it as the date gets closer.

* Not so confirmed after all. Maybe not happening. : ( Stay tuned.