My collecting trip to Oregon

The week of Oct. 6th, my amazing field assistant/boyfriend Derek and I drove from SLC, where we are biology graduate students, to Oregon, my home state. This season has been exceptional for mushrooming on the west coast and I'd been watching on Facebook with envy for months. My aim for this week-long trip was to collect lobster mushrooms, unparasitized Russula brevipes, and whatever else caught my eye. These samples were dried in a food dehydrator we brought along. I also collected soil samples from beneath lobster mushrooms as well as fresh lobster mushroom tissue preserved in a buffer that should enable me to analyze RNA and metabarcoding data. RNA is the molecule that's created when a gene is "read", or expressed. If a gene is being used, its RNA transcript will be produced and can be detected and analyzed. This lets us know what an organism is "up to" and what kind of physiological activities may be taking place as a response to its environment. Metabarcoding allows us to not only identify the DNA "barcode" of a target organism, but of many organisms--with this, we can get an idea of who's around, in this case, in the microbial community.

First, we headed to Oakridge, near Eugene, to stay in an Airbnb. The house happened to be owned by a mushrooming enthusiast and was decorated appropriately, as well as being woodsy and beautiful! If you need a place to stay in Oakridge/Westfir, I'd highly recommend renting Scott's Airbnb.

We found plenty of lobsters right off the bat--this was my first time actually touching these guys and it was very exciting! Most were almost entirely submerged under the duff, which makes me wonder about the efficacy of spore dispersal. Russula brevipes, the common PNW host of the lobster mushroom parasitic mold, can push itself up above the duff as its cap folds upward like a broken umbrella, exposing its spore-producing gilled hymenophore. However, development of R. brevipes seems to become disturbed or even arrested after infection, sometimes halting before it can reach its full size and shape. 

This lobster fruiting body is pressed down deeply into the
duff--how do the spores, which are found mainly on the underside
of what used to be the host's cap, reach the air to disperse?

So, if many lobsters remain mostly below the top layer of soil, how do their spores disperse aerially? I could definitely be overestimating the barrier the partial submersion poses to aerial spore dispersal, as well as the ubiquity with which the lobster fruiting bodies are found submerged like this. But if aerial dispersal is an issue, we can look at fungi faced with similar problems and their solutions. Truffles are hypogeous (found completely belowground). They disperse their spores by attracting animals with sometimes pheromone-like scents, so that they are dug up, eaten, and subsequently defecated in a different location. This explanation would be a very convenient one for lobsters, as infection by H. lactifluorum turns a pale, unpalatable host fruiting body bright, conspicuous orange (visible to rodent vision) and packs it full of fats. My advisor and I have hypothesized that attracting animals to eat and disperse their spores is part of the H. lactifluorum lifestyle, and a mouse feeding experiment currently underway (Derek's lab had some mice to spare) could shed some light on this. My expectations aren't high, however, as meaningful results would rely on H. lactifluorum spore germination, which has never been obtained to my knowledge.

Derek is awesome at spotting lobster mushrooms
and surely would have won if we were keeping
track (and I would have kept track if I'd thought
I were winning)!

Our dehydrator was busy all week!

Next, we drove to Yachats, near Florence on the Oregon coast. The lobsters just wouldn't stop coming!
 The coast seemed to be the most prolific spot we visited--here is where we found the largest (and also the most brightly colored and reddish) lobsters. We went on a hike at Cape Perpetua that was cut short because we found too many lobsters and had to head back with our haul!

We stayed at the Drift Inn where we had an affordable and very small room (the rooms were named after colors so naturally I chose the Orange Room). We could barely fit all of our samples, processing supplies, and the dehydrator! We slept for two nights in a tiny room that was absolutely saturated with the smell of drying mushrooms, as well as very hot because I'm always cold. Derek, being incredibly tolerant, didn't complain. The Drift Inn is awesome, and their attached restaurant has the best gluten-free options I've ever seen in my ~5 months of being a diagnosed celiac.

I gave a seagull a little piece of a lobster mushroom
and it ate it very enthusiastically. I got kind of excited
about my animal dispersal hypothesis until I remembered
that seagulls will eat literally anything.

This trip to Oregon was incredible, and all in all we managed to cover three diverse locations (Oakridge, Yachats, and Gifford Pinchot near Portland at the end) in my favorite state. We gathered some great samples which I am currently processing along with samples kind mushroomers have sent me from around the country. I'll post updates when I have preliminary results to share with you guys!