Mushrooms of Lake Merritt

With the first good rains of the year we have our first good bloom of fungal fruiting bodies (mushrooms) popping up everywhere. Our hour long walk will encompass the grassy areas around the boathouse and the Lake Merritt gardens. The focus will be on learning to identify the larger mushroom species of the area and learning to read the landscape for where these various hetertrophs hide out and about their many roles in the local ecology. We are very lucky in that Lake Merritt has a wide variety of mushrooms species for such a small location.

Please bring guide books if you have them. A one page guide to the commonly found mushrooms will be provided. We will meet rain or shine. Tools that you may want to bring include a small pocket knife, a paintbrush, and a jacket. This walk will not include tasting- all mushrooms will be passed around and placed back where they came from.

Your guide will be Damon Tighe, an amateur mycologist or five years and former research scientist at the Joint Genome Institute, where many fungal genomes have been sequenced for biofuel applications.