This webpage is about some newly seen mushrooms in Starkville, Mississippi. I think the spores which gave rise to them were brought to ground by a brief rain shower which started at 3:09 P.M CDT on the afternoon of June 11, 2009. (The water from that shower was brownish in my CoCoRaHS Network rain gauge.) At Starkville, the surface wind at the time of the rain shower was about eight mph towards the WSW. Accordng to archived NEXRAD images, at altitude, the rain shower, itself, was moving at about 26 mph in a ESE (nearly due east) direction. (On the map the black arrow represents surface air mass displacement during the three hours preceding the rain shower. The green arrow represents the the distance that the air mass which bore the rain cloud would have covered during the same period.) At this point in time, I don't have a feel for the origin or the altitude history of the spores while enroute to Starkville.

Mississippi-Alabama-Tennessee (Mapquest)

Photographs of what I think are newcomers (hereafter called Newbies) are provided below in hopes that someone located along one of the speculated ground tracks might provide information regarding the spores' last address before setting off on their adventure. After the aforementioned browinsh rain shower on 11 June, followed by two days of moderate rain in Starkville, MS, (at 9:40 A.M. on 14 June) I found nine small parasol shaped mushrooms in my front yard, in a roughly 10 ft by 10 ft area. Ever since the initial appearance there has been an unbroken sequence of the small mushrooms in the yard (in the mornings) and the size of the area has increased. (A lady, across and down the street has her own batch, and the gent who tends our lawn reports that he has seen patches of them all over town. (You have to look for them in the early morning hours because they shrivel up by about 10:00 to 11:00 A.M.) I call these mushrooms Newbies because in all the years I've lived at this location I have never before seen the likes of them. Here are graphs which show the rainfall pattern for my rainfall reporting station, and the daily mushroom populations for a 30 ft x 30 ft area in my front yard. Daily Rainwater Accumulations and Mushroom Populations The 0.04 inch brown rain shower which occurred on the afternoon of 11 June 2009 appears in the 7:00 A.M. accumulation recorded on 12 June. (See red arrow in the rainfall plot.) Regrettably, I tossed the brown water and flushed the rain gauge. In their earliest appearance the mushrooms are dome shaped, and as they mature they open more and more (like a parasol) and finally have caps that are almost disk-like and typically about one inch in diameter. A lot of them have brownish teat-like nipples at the peaks of their caps. The Newbie mushrooms pop up during the cool part of the evening (pre-sunset), at night and in the early morning. They typically turn brown and shrivel up by late morning. This pattern, which is typical for mushrooms which digest lawn mower clippings, has been repeating ever since their intial debut on 14 June. So far, I have only seen them on Saint Augustine grass. By using my first photographs of the Newbies, Paul Scott, of Mississippi State University, provided a preliminary identification of them as members of the genus Panaeolus. Based on better photographic (and narrative) material Paul provided a revised but still tenative identification for them as Conocybe albipes (lactea), which are also sometimes also called cone heads.(1) There is a marked similiarity between my Newbies and C. albipes but there are some differences which may be significant. (See below.) This first picture shows a nearly fully developed mushroom. The stem (stipe) here is about four inches in height. 23 Jun 2009 08:36 A.M. - "Newbie" in grass Here is a spore print of one of the mushrooms done on 25 June. (I made a hole in card stock and threaded the mushroom stem through the hole.) The mushroom was in contact with the card stock for 3 hrs and 45 minutes. 25 June 2009 11:30 AM Spore Print Note that the spore print appears to be primarily brown to grey. Next is a micrograph of spores from the spore print above. Microscopic Image of Spores from 25 Jun 2009 Spore Print Courtesy, Paul Hamilton Scott, Plant Pathology Mississippi State University Newbie Spore Dimensions (blue dots) compared to Published Size Envelopes for Panaeolus foenisecii (1) and Conocybe albipes (lactea) (2) Graph updated 23 Jul 2009. The sizes of the Newbie spores are consistent with those for Panaeolus foenisecii but the color of the latter is black, so that identification ruled out. Published spore sizes (above) for C. albipes seem to be significantly smaller, than those of the Newbies, but I have been advised, twice, that sometimes innacurate spore size stats get propagated in the literature. Note. If published dimensions for any given sample of spores contain systematic errors, both dimensions should be affected in the same fashion. That would would have the effect of moving the centroid of their max-min envelopes along a diagonal that intersects the graph's origin (shown as a faint grey line, above). The envelope for Conocybe albipes (MushroomExpert.com) is displaced horizontally, (not diagonally) compared to that for the Newbies. I take that to mean that the size (and shape) differences are real, and thus may be evidence that the Newbies are, most likely, not the "USA" version of Conocybe albipes. The California version of Conocybe lactea (Mykoweb.com) may still be in the running. Comparison of Newbie and Conocybe albipes Caps.

27 Jun 2009 07:21 A.M. - Newbie Cap Top Narrative descriptions of C. albipes match my Newbies, but the photographs which accompany them do not show some of the finer points. Note the dark striations (a.k.a. wrinkles), which are spaced roughly every 10-15 degrees around the periphery of the cap. I haven't seen any photos of Conocybe albipes / (Conocybe lactea) which show them to this degree. None of the images (on the right), copied from MushroomExperts.com (2), show the striations to my satisfaction.

Next is the cap bottom of the same Newbie. 27 Jun 2009 07:22 A.M. - Bottom of Newbie Cap Here is a map showing mushroom locations recorded during a ten day period. (The grid consists of one foot squares and the dots which represent mushrooms are exagerated in size. The mushrooms do not appear to be distributed randomly. Red and pink dots correspond to mushroom locations after the lawn was mowed. (The mowing does not seem to have affected the pattern.) Map of Mushroom Locations, 21 - 30 June 2009 If the published size stats for C. albipes are correct, then I claim that the Newbies are not yet identified. A modest amount of Newbie spores are being retained at -15 degrees Centigrade, should someone wish to examine them further microscopically or perform DNA analysis of them. Extra-terrestrial Origin for the Newbies? Up to this point in this article, I have been focousing on terrestrial sources for the Newbies. There is, in my opinion, another option, extra-terrestrial. The idea, which is not without historical precedent(3), is that mushroom spores may be delivered to earth's atmosphere by meteors. A meteor which has penetrated earth's atmosphere down to the troposphere, might even furnish sufficient particulate matter to serve as rain shower condensation nuclei. In July to September of 2001, there was an extended period of red rain along the western coast of India(4). The rain contained what appeared to be microsopic biological particles which varied in size from four to ten microns. (Desert dust was ruled out.) The onset of the red rain was preceded by what may have been a sonic boom, produced by the passage (or air burst) of a meteor in the atmosphere. [Thanks to Jose Garcia for calling this article to my attention in March 2006.] If the Newbies were delivered by a meteor, then my nomination for the applicable meteor shower would be the Areitids which sprinkle down on us in the daytime between May 22 and July 2, peaking on June 7. Followup, 2010 When they were present in 2009, the newbies seemed to enjoy mown grass-clippings. As a means to eliminate them I began bagging my clippings (on 27 Jun) and the newbies begin to taper off in numbers. (Gotta be careful about false cause.) The last ones that I saw in 2009 popped up on 11 Sep. (One was in our yard and one was in our neighbor's yard up the street.) On 17 May 2010 I saw the first regular mushrooms of the season in our yard, but as of 19 May I haven't seen any newbies. If some of them pop back up, I'll note it here. On the morning of 20 May there were six dome-like newbies in our neighbor's yard. None had appeared yet in our yard. On 24 May I saw our first front-yard newbie of this season. On the same day there were nine newbies in our neighbor's yard. As time rolls by the numbers of daily newbies are increasing. Generally there is about a 10:1 ratio of newbies in our neighbor's yard versus those in our yard. It appears that disposing of grass clippings (our yard) is still adversely affecting the food supply for our newbies. In the first week since they reappeared, the newbies (both yards) were kind of weak looking, but since then, they have been looking as robust as they did last year. It may be significant that in this year the newbies appeared 25 days earlier than they did in 2009 (May 20th versus June 14th). That would be 21 days, based on those strictly in our yard (May 24th versus June 14th). 2011 The first Newbies (two each) seen in our yard made their appearance, in our side yard, on 29 May. A few "regular" mushrooms have been appearing in the front yard for a couple of weeks. Haven't seen any newbies in neighbor's yard yet. 29 May - 22 June During this period most of the "newbie" activity has been in our side yard, with daily numbers varying from zero to six. In the front yard, where most of the activity was in 2010, the daily numbers have mostly been "zero." (I had a fungicide applied to the front yard in late spring.) The neighbor's yards have also been bereft of "newbies." On 23 Jun I did a spore print from one of the newbies that I have been calling "the wimp." ("Wimps" are generally smaller in diameter than "run-of the mill" newbies and their cap ribs are straight and at right angles to the stalk.) The spores turned out to be black! That means that the wimps are a different specie from the newbies. Turns out that, based on cap shape, there's a third species, which I have started to call "the intermediate." (It's spores are brown.) The caps of the intermediates are actually concave. Looks like they could hold water. Throughout 2009 and 2010, I was assuming that all three "varieties" were different versions of the same critter. "Sometimes you feel like a dome, sometimes you don't." They all "pop up" sometime around sunset or during the night and wilt away by 10:00 AM. It now appears that all three species (actually seven) of mushroom (whatever their names) operate in a symbionic fashion. They tolerate one another in the same small area of our side yard (6 feet by 30 feet) and I have yet to see any other kind of mushroom in that shared space. Here is a montage showing details (as they develop) for each of the seven species. [Added 23 Aug 2011. Latest Modification 01 Sep 2011.] 2016 [Added 25 Jul 2017] On 25 July 2016 I planted some mushroom spores which had been collected on 25 June 2009. I took a spore-print card from our deep freeze and wiped the spore-print on the grass in our side yard, then watered the grass lightly to help some of the spores to find their way to the soil. In the days that followed no newbies appeared in my shroom garden. Eight days after the planting, on 02 Aug, I found three domed newbies in the front yard in a place where a fair amount of foot traffic (front door to street) takes place. Best I can tell I must have tracked some spores from the side yard to the front where they took purchase. I didn't find any more newbies in the following days or at any other time that year. I think that shakily enacted experiment gave evidence that the seven-year-old deep freeze spores were still viable. 2017 [Additions started on 25 Jul 2017] On the morning of 06 Jul 2017 I noted six parasol-like newbies in our front yard. On the 11th there were 20. (I don't check for them every day.) On either the 11th or 12th of July I checked our former neighbor's side yard (up the street) and found four newbies in the same area as back in 2009. (I did not track spores there!) On the 24th of July there were four newbies in our front yard. References (1) Michael Wood and Fred Stevens, Mykoweb.com: The Fungi of California: Panaeolus foenisecii (2) Michael Kuo, (2007, December), Conocybe albipes. Retrieved from the MushroomExpert.Com Web Site: http://www.mushroomexpert.com/conocybe_albipes.html (3) Martin Beech, "On Meteors and Mushrooms," J. Roy. Astron. Soc. Can., 81, 27, (1987). Abstract reads: Several folklore sources describe a connection between shooting stars and the appearance of mushrooms. This association has, on at least two occasions, been alluded to in historical "scientific" papers. These articles highlight how poorly understood the meteoric phenomenon was during the period c 1750 to 1800. [This article has been made available online, courtesy of the SAO/NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)] (4) Godfrey Louis and A. Santhosh Kumar, "The Red Rain phenomenon of Kerala and it's possible extra terrestrial origin," Astrophysics and Space Science, 302, 175-187, (2006). A preprint of the article's abstract is available at: http://arxiv.org/abs/astro-ph/0601022. Acknowledgements Information from the following meteorological websites was used in preparation of this article. Community Collaborative Rain, Hail, & Snow (CoCoRaHS) Network History: Weather Underground Weather Underground: NEXRAD Radar Archive for Columbus AFB, MS Send comments/questions to Bob Fritzius at fritzius@bellsouth.net Shade Tree Physics