Fun with science

On the Trail of the Death Cap Mushroom
"...Pringle rounds a corner on the trail, coming across her postdoc, Franck Richard, belly down in an alder swamp.

He's ecstatic. Richard's lab back in France studies fungi that only grow in alder patches. And here, on Point Reyes, he finds something similar to the European species but clearly different. In fact, it's a species unknown to science.

Pringle and grad student Ben Wolfe join in the hunt, and with little effort they find eight new undiscovered species. One looks like a small gray potato, another is luminous white."


Oh how that brings back the memories! Out in the middle of nowhere, in a cloud of insects (some of them looking to make a meal out of you), sweat rolling down your back, digging around in the leaf litter and coming up with yet another unidentifiable little brown mushroom.

This is a great story you should read/listen to it.

Unless you're a trained professional mycologist or a highly skilled amateur it's really a bad idea to eat any fungi you find in the woods.

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