Mushroom Hunting & Spore Prints!

Seren has joined 4H this month and we just completed our first project on Tuesday. We all met at the Sheldon Jackson campus at dusk and hunted for mushrooms in the wooded areas and on the lawns. We were guided by a mushroom expert and we spent about 20 minutes gathering as many fungi as we could spot in the dimming light. Then we headed over to the Sitka Sound Science Center, where there was a classroom reserved for us to sort and talk about what we had found. It was quite a collection, between the 5 families that shared in this event!

We learned about some of the types of fungus that are native to this area and that mushrooms are not dangerous unless they are ingested. I thought this last part was interesting because I had always been told never to touch an unfamiliar mushroom because it could make you sick. Apparently, any poison a fungus might have can not be absorbed through the skin, so as long as you don't lick your fingers or rub your eyes before washing your hands, it's all perfectly safe. We also learned that not all mushrooms have lamellae (or gills) under their caps. Some are sort of porous and spongy, like this one.

Seren and Porter both had loads of fun romping across the grass and hunting for anything even remotely fungus-like. Seren found one mushroom that was bigger than her head, though she decided not to pick it and it was too dark to take a decent picture with my phone. By the end of the hunt, she was spotting mushrooms far too small for me to see without getting down on my hands and knees and she did it without a headlamp!

After we sorted all of our mushrooms (and lichens and moss, among other things...) on the table and talked about what we had found, each family was given instructions on how to make a spore print from some of the fungi that were found.

First, we cleaned up our mushrooms as gently as we could (a little bit of debris doesn't hurt anything, but you don't want to bruise your mushrooms!). Then, we cut off the stems and arranged the caps on an 8.5"x11" sheet of white paper, so that the lamellae or pores were facing the paper.

It's good to use a white or light-colored paper because the spores from different varieties of mushrooms are different colors, ranging from black, to yellow and orange, to white.

After everything was in place on the paper, we covered the whole project with a bowl, so that nothing would be disturbed while the fungi were dropping their spores.

The next day, we uncovered our mushrooms, threw away the caps, and were left with a pretty print, left by the dusting of spores that had been dropped overnight. These prints are used to see the color of the spores and better identify the type of mushroom they came from.

Look up close to see the fine yellow-white spores from the big mushroom.