The day was crisp, the sky was clear, and the mushrooms were plentiful.  Lead by Vera Evenson, curator of the Herbarium of Fungi at the Denver Botanic Gardens, our most recent field trip focused on the wild fungi of the Front Range.  I had seen mushrooms before, of course, in my salad, on my front lawn, in the park, but they still seemed to me to be an alien life form, complex and strange.  Vera, author of Mushrooms of Colorado and the Southern Rocky Mountains, gave me a new appreciation for these evolutionary marvels.  While I still consider them to be mysterious, I can now see them for the important role they play in our local ecosystems. Here are some of the most interesting facts I learned about fungi on this trip:

• A single fungus can be among the largest living organisms in the world.
• Fungi are more closely related to animals than they are to plants; they exhale carbon dioxide and inhale oxygen, just like an animal.
• The mushrooms that we see above ground are just one small part of the larger fungus growing underground (think of an apple and an apple tree).
• There are 30,000 mushroom species in North America, many of which have never been seen by human eyes.
• There is no easy way for a novice to tell if a mushroom is toxic (Vera told me to think of how we distinguish whether a human being is dangerous, not by identifying just one trait, but by a combination of traits and our experience), making identification of edible wild mushrooms very difficult and dangerous.
  

With Vera’s help our group was lucky enough to identify an astoundingly wide variety of mushrooms.  We found coral mushrooms (they look like they should have little tropical fish swimming in and out of their appendages), puffball mushrooms (they look like little white, inflated balloons), and helvella mushrooms (resembling a deflated black balloon) among others.  Take a look below and let me know if you can identify any of them.

You can view more photos of our field trip here.