Aspies For Freedom

My teacher didn't show up to class today so I went into a forest and wandered around for a few hours, taking pictures of any cool stuff I saw. I saw lots of birds and deer, but I wasn't able to get any good pictures of them. I did find some interesting smaller animals though, which I was able to get halfway-decent photos of (though it was cloudy outside so it was difficult because of the flash).

The first one is another Millipede, a Harpaphe species. They're brightly colored for a good reason - when disturbed they give off copious amounts of hydrogen cyanide, which is highly poisonous and makes the entire area smell like almonds.







This next group of photos are of a Pacific Banana Slug, Ariolimax columbianus. The genus Ariolimax contains the some of the largest terrestrial (true) slugs in the world - the one in the photos is about 7" (18cm) long. There is perhaps no other invertebrate animal as ubiquitous to the humid forests of Pacific North America as the banana slugs... They are found in a huge swath of land from southern Alaska down to southern California, and tend to be abundant in their range as long as the habitat is right. Normally I see California Banana Slugs (A. californicus) around here, which are just plain yellow-green in color, so coming across this spotted A. columbianus was a treat.

I like how in the third photo it seems to be posing for the camera or giving me a strange look. In the fifth photo it had a "head-on collision" with a piece of grass, the photo taken at the moment of impact. Then it just crawled over the grass.















And these last photos are of a huge Artist's Conk (Ganoderma applanatum), a type of polypore mushroom. This one was one of the largest, if not the largest, specimens I've seen, and measured about two feet wide (that's going from one side directly across to the other, not the circumference). Their flesh is as hard as the wood they grow on, and on the underside of the mushroom is a thin layer of white spore-producing tissue that bruises to a dark brown color easily upon being touched. People often write their names or draw pictures on this layer, which is how it got its common name (you can read more about that here). This one was completetely untouched, and judging by its size I would not hesitate to say it is possibly 15-20 years old. It was spectacular find, and I was quite excited when I discovered it.





(Despite the way it looks in those photos, it wasn't night when I took them. The sky was just overcast and the trees blocked even more of the light.)

Wow!, they're really amazing. I've got some of those fungi in my backyard on an old tree but they aren't as big as those ones and nowhere near as old.

Great photos - thanks - they've really cheered me up, especially the banana slug. I've always been fond of slugs, but none so exotic around here!

Slug: "la la..HOLY ***!"

Thats the vibe I got off him anyway.

Hey natalie

Are you sure that is artist's conk? we have a lot of those self fungi round here, and I think it could also be razor-strop bracket (Piptoporus betulinus), they start soft and white, but with age, look just like that.

My favourite have to be the sulfur shelves though, (Polyporus sulfureus), yellow, squishy buggers, very tasty fried in breadcrumbs.

Thanks for the replies.

Haha, it's good to see someone else who likes the banana slugs. Most people around here hate them, I guess because they are so large and slimy. I really enjoy seeing them, though; I think they are kind of cute.

Yeah, I think I sort of startled it with the flash of the camera.

I'm fairly certain the one I found was Ganoderma applanatum. While generally similar in appearance, Piptoporus betulinus tends to have a smoother cap (especially when young) and does not leave brown powder everywhere like Artist's Conks do.

I think the most interesting mushroom I've found before was a huge Hericium americanum I found growing on a tree near my house a couple years ago.

Hericium...icicle fungus if I remember right, never seen one in the flesh, but that would have been headed straight for the kitchen had I.

Fellow myco-nutter are yeh? I thought I was the only one

Most interesting things I've seen over here were a couple of huge specimens of Langermannia Gigantea (giant puffball, professional mycologists are as far as I know, biologically incapable of forming a conclusion and sticking with it as far as nomenclature goes), found a huge one as a kid, had it sliced thickly, like steak, and fried in breadcrumbs.

At the house I used to live in, we put a crapton of woodchips down on the garden once, and up came some species of morel, Morchella Elata, to the best of my I.D, made some of the best gravy ever to go with my steak stews, and once the morel run had finished and it was getting late in the year, we had a load of Psilocybe Cyanescens sprouting, I must have ended up collecting a bucketful or so :evil:

Every spring here at my local park, we get a massive crop of various Boletus/Leccinium species, I go out every spring and pig out on wild mushroom fryups.

Natalie, the photos are brilliant-and I learned alot, thanks

I like this phrase:

It's as if the slug was travelling so quickly that it simply couldn't get out of the way fast enough to avoid the impact

Be careful... if you don't identify a mushroom properly (some poisonous ones look similar enough to some you might find in a cookbook), you can get dangerously ill and lose your liver...

Yeah, I read an article in Reader's digest years ago when these people picked some toadstools thinking they were mushrooms and got seriously ill and had to spend months in hospital.

I would imagine there would have to be a field guide to fungi though. We've had some interesting fungi this year after a wetter than usual summer. As far as I know, we just get toadstools.

When I was kid, I used to like kicking dry puffballs and seeing the brown powder (spores) fly up.

Yeah, those koreans? east asians eat a lot of straw mushrooms, Volvariella species, which have a basal sack, or volva, like some deadly hepatotoxic Amanita species, a novice or stupid collector could mistake the two, which is what happened in that case.

Happens a lot apparently especially to east asian immigrants.

Yes, three of the victims were Asian immigrants and the other was the husband of one of the ladies.

Really great pictures! Maybe I should do that sort thing, it would give me some inspiration. Is there anything to keep in mind (like how to find them, or how to avoid disturbing their habitat)?

I second that.  I think these are some great photos.  You should try to submit the "startled banana slug" picture to some publication.  That one is a gem.

Thanks for the replies everyone.

I enjoy looking at mushrooms, though my interest in mycology is casual for the most part. I've never done a spore print or collected specimens, and I can really only identify the more distinct species that live around here. I would probably be more into it if all the agarics weren't so hard to identify without a microscope and spore prints.

There used to be a mushroom growing next to my shower. It isn't there anymore, though, so I guess someone removed it.

Yeah, that's why it's one of my favorite photos. It reminds me of that segment in the BBC's Life of Mammals when the elephants are walking into a cave at night to get to salt deposits, and one of them walks right into a large boulder and hits its head pretty hard.

That happens all the time here as well. They mistake highly-poisonous Death Caps (Amanita phalloides) for their Straw Mushrooms and end up dying.

I just try to make sure I put whatever I turn over back to the way it was located when I found it. I move all the larger animals out of the way first so I don't risk crushing them when I put it back, and then I put them back next to the object so they can crawl back under. The only time I don't put the objects back is when I risk causing even more damage by attempting to move the object again (such as heavy rocks or large logs). It's not the end of the world if the object isn't exactly the way you found it - the animals will just crawl back under it again even if it is in a slightly different position. Nature is very resilient.

Usually the best places to look for small animals are under boards/planks of wood, then logs, and then rocks.

I'm in Northern California (more specfically the San Francisco Bay Area). We tend to get a lot of interesting wildlife around here, but there are also a lot of introduced species that threaten the existence of native ones (European Starlings, House Sparrows, House Mice, Brown Rats, Scotch Broom, Mosquitofish, Mitten Crabs, etc).

Thanks. I'm not sure what I could submit my photos to, though, or even if they are high enough quality to submit to anything. Real photographers tend to use expensive digital single-lens reflex cameras.