Making dinner tonight, I was thinking about what I might focus on for the Friday Foto post. I was chopping up some mushrooms for pasta, and thought, “Well, mushrooms.” There were so many mushrooms on hikes I took this year, I was sure I’d find plenty of images.
Cabbage Palm, moss and lichen
But let’s start where I got an early education on biology—in the Erna Nixon Hammock where I’d take walks as young boy. Mrs. Nixon would point out the patches of brilliant red-blanket lichen and talk about symbiosis. How fungus and algae join together to make a different life form—lichens. And in the case of some lichens such as red-blanket, bacteria is thrown in the mix. From the Arctic to mountain tops to deserts to wetlands, lichens range all over the Earth.
Red-blanket lichen
Fungus and lichen paint many trees and rocks offering color and texture to places that might otherwise be very plain.
A final image from the hammock in Florida before we move north starts our views of mushrooms, and their great color and shapes.
At Erna Nixon Hammock
Next stop, another of my favorite places, Starved Rock State Park in Illinois.
Illinois canyon
The last two images were of fungus growing on logs laying on the ground. The next image is looking up high on a tree in a forest preserve in Cook County, Illinois.
Moving much farther east. We hiked on a trail just outside Portland, Maine and I don’t think we’ve ever seen so many and so many different types of mushrooms. According to wikipedia, 148,000 types of fungus have been identified, although there are an estimated total 2.2 to 3.8 million species in the Kingdom Fungi. Here’s one.
And the trails in Tennessee were filled with colorful members of the Kingdom Fungi.
At Obed National and Scenic River
Hope you found these fun to look at. The ones for dinner were very tasty!
