The Ithaca Bioblitz
We held our first ever Bioblitz on April 28 and it was a lot of fun. You can check out our photos, posted at my Flickr site. We found lots of different things–so many that we’re still tabulating. I’ll get back to you soon with the final species count and THE BIG LIST.
I have to say, April 28 is a pretty bad time for fungi in upstate New York. Morels aren’t out yet, and what fungi we found were mostly remnants of last Fall’s fruiting bodies, like the empty bird’s nest fungi at right. The only real “fresh” mushroom we found was this LBM (little brown mushroom), Mycena alcalina. Not that I’m any kind of Mycena expert, but when you crush this one, it smells like chlorine.
We found some very interesting organisms. At right is Lophodermium pinastri, a little discomycete that inhabits the needles of pines. It’s related to the tar spot fungi, which you might’ve seen making big black blotches on maple leaves. This one on white pine causes a needle cast disease that can be pretty bad if you’re fond of growing monocultures of pine trees, but on this diverse property it appears to be a low key pathogen. In the photo the black fruiting bodies have not yet split open to release their payload of infective ascospores.
Dan over at Migrations came and helped out–you can check out his photos, too. Our greatest contributors were the bryologists, who came and scoured the landscape for itty bitties, then painstakingly identified them all back at Headquarters. More about their finds soon. For now, I’ll leave you with this plucky little guy, the leadback phase of the red-backed salamander–he was just wider than my finger, and man could he wiggle and jump!
Wow, your pictures turned out fantastic! (and you said you didn’t get time to take enough…)
Thanks again for pulling off the Blitz!
great photos! the salamander is now on my desktop.
That salamander is so cool looking. We had them when I was growing up in the NW, but the only ones I ever saw were orange. Thanks for the pics.
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