My Lost Lobster

In the summer of 2014, I had just graduated from high school and was working for the summer at Camp Cooper, a Boy Scout camp close to Willamina, Oregon. It's an incredibly lush temperate rainforest area crammed full of mosses, ferns (sword, bracken, and deer), red huckleberry, salal, Douglas fir, false Solomon's seal, and all sorts of other recurring PNW characters. I even saw some Indian pipe (Monotropa uniflora), an achlorophyllous (lacking chlorophyll) plant which receives its carbon from fungal mycelia belowground. Indian pipe is traditionally believed to be a parasite on fungi, but sometimes the dynamics of these types of associations can be difficult to pin down--we're not yet fluent in the language in which many fungal associations are conducted.

At the end of the summer, all the campers were gone and it was up to the staff to clean up the many campsites nestled among the thick vegetation. I was scanning a particular campsite for trash when I noticed something brightly colored in the bushes. At first, I thought it was a rotting pumpkin and it took a few double-takes to disabuse myself of this idea. It became clear that it was, in fact, a large, pockmarked, orange mushroom bigger than my (notably small) hand! However, possessing no knowledge of fungi, I took some pictures and left it.

I had forgotten the encounter until this last year when I started graduate school at the University of Utah in a mushroom lab and began my plunge into the strange and surprising mycological realm. During one of our weekly meetings, my advisor piqued my interest in the unusual results of a particular fungus-on-fungus parasitism, commonly known as the lobster mushroom. Immediately, my 2014 discovery flashed before my eyes. The specimen may have been too old to eat, but there was so much complexity that I'd completely overlooked as an eighteen-year-old, uneducated in the mushroom arts. Now, I'm looking back and totally kicking myself for not preserving or at least closely observing this magnificent specimen.



Rest in peace, Lost Lobster, gone but never forgotten.


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