Community-based Lobster Acquisition Workforce

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 br...

Hello, and welcome to the Community-based Lobster Acquisition Workforce (C.L.A.W.)! This is a project I’m conducting with the hope of learning more about the biology of lobster mushrooms. I’m an Ecology, Evolution, and Organismal Biology PhD student in a mycology lab at the University of Utah in Salt Lake City (incidentally, no lobster specimens have been recorded from the state of Utah, although the common host Russula brevipes occurs here). My interest in fungi actually started with lichens while I was an undergrad, and has expanded to include all sorts of fungal phenomena. I’m especially interested in insect-fungus interactions, as well as mycoparasitism (fungi parasitizing other fungi). At this point, I’m still at the beginning of my graduate work and exploring several different possible directions for the research that will become my thesis, as well as learning a lot about mushrooms!             “Lobster mushro...