About mushrooms, beetles, sports and trash cans
This year I promise to be very poor on the expedition: a couple of two-day trips to Transbaikalia, and then it will be like a 'card'. And nature blooms, breathes, lives; beckons to itself with insignificant riddles and big secrets. With the onset of the 'green season' outside the window, my work capacity in the office drops sharply. Earlier at this time we already traveled somewhere in the steppes of Mongolia or the Trans-Baikal Territory; they crossed rivers not yet saturated in protected thickets or plowed the surface of lakes on a boat … After such trips it is difficult to sit still on sunny summer days. In order to at least a little to calm his research passion, he decided to realize his plans, which he had been hatching for a long time, but still could not realize due to endless travels. I thought of monitoring the microflora of our Akademgorodok. Our surroundings are quite forested, and the place is extremely convenient – you can always take a walk here without much damage to work. In addition to the rather 'pop' drip shoes, such orchid ones grow here (see photo).
I myself am engaged in a relatively small group of mycetophilous beetles from the Staphylinidae family – such a hobby. And it’s interesting for me to track not just the change in the species composition of fungi over time – I want to see how the species composition of the group of obligate mycetophiles I have chosen (tribe Gyrophaenine) changes along with this; what mushrooms do they prefer; are there any preferences at all … I pick mushrooms, suck beetles from them into my gauster; I put mushrooms in a paper bag – I herbarize; I pour the beetles into Eppendorfs, the sea with ethyl acetate— In general, I shock the people a little. Local runners with passers-by look at me and … run around. Of course: an adult uncle, but he sits in the grass with some kind of 'garbage' in his mouth … the booger packs up bubbles in bubbles. Pipettes, jars, test tubes are lying around … I think: 'a normal person will not take all this for a walk.' It's like with us: everyone is 'normal' – only in sports or business. Why don't I run like athletes and businessmen? Because a healthy person does not need sports, and a sick person is contraindicated. Well, that's not about that.
I began to survey the territory on May 28, I continue to the present and plan to finish it some days in September, as it happens. The first to populate with mushrooms in our Akademgorodok were polypores: Fomitopsis pinicola and Fomes fomentarius. Moreover, on the first, there are always much more beetles than on the second. It is understandable – the size of the pores of the bordered tinder fungus allow my insects to climb into them. In Fomes fomentarius, the pores are very small and the beetles are forced to feed on the surface from the underside of the fungus (they feed by scraping off spores and basidia). And they, like all living things, probably have natural enemies, and they must be in earnest competing with each other. Mushrooms are a very ephemeral substratum, but beetles need to eat and bring out their offspring … So here whoever had time to eat it. That is why the competition for the mushroom must be fierce.
Rich material collected from Trametes gibbosa and Daedaliella gr. confragosa; I was pleased with one tinder fungus, spread out under an aspen log (Datronia mollis): the cap barely protrudes as an edge, and then a solid fleshy white spot of hymenophore tubes. Such mushrooms can also contain interesting entomological findings. I also met one prostrate tinder fungus, which grew under the birch bark so that it burst in several places and bristled up, exposing the moist, porous, dark brown, like the lungs of a smoker, the body of the fungus.
A thick layer of spores was striking (I think it was them), as if the dead cambium of the tree was smeared with phosphorus. It seemed like bringing such a piece of wood into a dark room – it would give so much light that you could read a book.
Shamelessly, with great appetite, rust mushrooms ate the briar bush.
Well, phytopathology is a separate topic, for an amateur.
Nevertheless, no matter how numerous tinder mushrooms were in the forest of Akademgorodok, no matter how abundant they were inhabited by beetles, I wanted to meet agaric mushrooms, classical, with a cap, a leg and, best of all, a lamellar hymenophore. Although, of course, I love all mushrooms no less than my own Gyrophaena s.str. The first Agaric I encountered was Lentinus fulvidus on the trunk of a dead aspen.
This is the smallest of the sleepers. The author of a monograph on the genus Lentinus – Pilat – was running around with him, that with a decommissioned sack, considering him a rare species. Of course, at that time there were still single finds of this species somewhere in mountain broad-leaved forests – there is an oak, a hornbeam … The mushroom has established itself as a clear nemoral species. Therefore, when Lentinus fulvidus was found on the territory of the Irkutsk region, they immediately began to 'stick' it into all regional Red Data Books. Now it becomes obvious that it is not that rare. Moreover, in some places there are places where any 'self-respecting' mushroom will not grow. There was a find in the Bodaibo region on a charred, thickened cross tie, at some dump – a mushroom, as if it was deliberately choosing places with a high anthropogenic load. Apparently, this is also a matter of interspecific competition, or rather, in its absence. A holy place is never empty. Here, too, interesting, rare (in the wild) mushrooms with low competitiveness are being mastered by anyone who has not been mastered by anyone. By the way, for a long time already there has been such a tendency that all the most 'Red Book' things 'shoot' somewhere in parks in the city center, along roadsides, in cemeteries, lawns and city dumps.
I met quite a few fruiting bodies of Lentinus fulvidus, but all of them are very small and grow scattered … It is clear that there were not many beetles on them either. Although, as they say: 'the spool is small, but expensive.' Further lengthy searches brought small results in the form of a couple of mushrooms from Tricholomotaceae, boletus,
a couple of lines and some other small marsupial mushroom on the trunk of a dead birch.
And my beetles have not settled in any of them, as a sin. Now, wood-destroying mushrooms are the best option for them. Needless to say, every tree in a forest – living or dead – is the center of an ecosystem. By regulating the regime of heat and moisture and thus forming a special microclimate, a tree creates a habitat for a large number of living organisms that settle in it, on it, in its neighborhood or visit it at certain periods. The litter saprophytes will be colonized by my beetles later, when the time comes for these mushrooms to flourish.
