Brood XIX—the famous 13-year “Great Southern Brood” Magicicada emergence!

Yes, yes, it’s a mushroom blog, but I keep finding other marvels too, and I take pictures and then I have to post about it.  And sometimes it’s just in-between mushrooms.

I’ll stall a little to give you a chance to leave, if you’re not into big close-ups of bug faces and bulging red eyes (especially the very last image) and waving bug legs, and worse, because that’s what’s coming up here. I even heard some “Bleah” and “Ew” from people who aren’t all that squeamish and “love nature.” I got a little squirmy about some of this too. But I did it anyway, even after telling myself not to get all swept up in this crazy Magicicada phenomenon because half the internet was going to be filled with images of emerging cicadas, so why should I make pictures of the same thing? But I couldn’t resist, once I saw it.
It was nuts!

(Last chance—leave now if you’re not into giant bug faces)

So, let us begin.

Mid-Missouri (and many other states) just experienced the emergence of millions of 13-year cicadas. There’s “annual” cicadas and “periodical” cicadas, and the broods are made of periodical cicadas, and Brood XIX is Magicicada with a 13-year life-cycle (there’s four in the genus, I don’t know which one we had, could be more than one).

Periodical cicadas have 13- or 17-year lifecycles. The "annual" ones actually have 2-to-7 year cycles, depending on the species (there’s not really a one-year model) but some come out every year. They’re not synchronized, so even though a species may have a 3-year cycle, some come out one year, and another group comes out the next, kind of leap-frogging. The "years" refer to time spent underground as larvae, quietly feeding on sap from tree roots. Broods are named for life-cycle length, and region, and the fact that they’re periodical, and synchronized so they all come out the same year. Brood XIX only comes out every 13 years, and in a particular area. It’s also the biggest brood (numbers-wise), showing up along the east coast to the Midwest, in about 15 states! All at once! Pretty much! Depending on weather and soil temp. I can’t tell you how long it took me to get this straight. I hope I have it right.

I’ve never caught the familiar dog-day cicada molting (well, once, but years ago, and no camera), but there were so many of these (let me stress that—SO MANY) that it was hard to miss. For at least a week, you could just walk outside and see them all over the trees and walls and fences around the house, before they took to the trees and started singing and looking for mates. Pretty much everywhere. I took pictures over several weeks, so some are on fences, and some are on trees, and some are in state parks and some are in my front yard, etc.

Here we go!

          

Cicadas busting out of their shells (things that make you go “bleah”)



Their best option is to be vertical. After they split their shell (“eclose” from their “exuvium”) they stick out horizontally for a while, with the end/tip of their abdomen still in the shell.



(From above--the camera’s aimed towards the ground)



I like their little orange armpits.

Nobody talks about how their tiny empty feet stay grabbed onto things.



Above, that’s one of my favorites…



They just hang there for a couple hours, doing whatever secret things they do. Their wings start to un-crumple.

What happens next is they wiggle all the way out of their shell and grab onto it (or a tree or whatever) and hang vertically, as their very delicate wings take shape and dry. If they’re not in the right position when they come out of their shells, things don’t go right. Sometimes they can’t get into the right position, sometimes because there’s so many other cicadas in the way, but their sheer numbers (hundreds of thousands per acre) compensate for the ones that don’t make it. I skipped pictures of problems. Big fat “ew” there.

There’s billions total in this brood, no lie.

They start out pink and tender (just like soft-shelled crabs!) with tomato-red eyes and two dark patches.

I wonder if they saw me looming over them in their most vulnerable state and thought, “Oh sh*t oh sh*t oh sh*t”…sorry!

Here’s one (below) in an in-between stage, starting to darken…



Above left, dozens of cicadas and shells on bushes in the backyard      
Above right, hundreds on bushes at the edge of the woods

Here’s five of them marching along a blooming rose bush, really lush colors all around, fresh cicadas, after a spring morning rain


Let’s see what else we have here--

Fresh cicadas


Mating cicadas!


They lay their eggs in slender branches, near the end, by cutting a series of slits in them, and laying a bunch of eggs in each slit. I didn’t catch them laying eggs, but I did find all kinds of evidence of this. First I saw crazy numbers of branch tips all over the place, which I thought was just an odd result of some recent violent storms. They were everywhere, for weeks. These branch tips had a lot of people scratching their heads! Eventually I understood that the branch ends must have been weakened by the slit-making, making it easy for storms or wind to tear them off the tree.




Above, a torn-off branch. If you click to enlarge you can see many slits along the broken end.

Below, cicada egg-laying slits.
 

Here’s one with my finger for scale:


Then I got even more curious, and started messing with the branches, and broke one open, and there were the eggs (sorry)!


They look like little grains of rice. They lay 24-28 eggs per slit.

Shortly, the eggs will hatch, the nymphs will burrow into the ground (oh, how I wish I could have found some newly-hatched nymphs!), and spend 13 years underground, sucking sap from roots and not doing much of anything else, as far as I can tell. Occasionally molting as they get bigger. That’s really all.

So, over about six weeks, mid-May to the end of June, this whole 13-year cicada thing happened.

Bonus: I noticed that shiny black cars with their brake lights on looked like Magicicadas!

The red light of their eyes goes out when they die:


And this, below, turned out to be my all-time favorite image capture of the whole crazy phenomenon:



I owe a lot to these websites that helped me untangle the facts:
What's that bug?                                                                              
Cicada Mania                                                                            
Magicicada

The end!

Morels from April

Okay, yes, I found morels, it was two months ago, that’s how far behind I am because if I don’t post in a timely manner I just keep hiking and taking more pictures and this is what happens.

Everybody who hunts mushrooms and/or takes nature pics and/or has a blog has probably posted about morels, so I'm under a lot of pressure to think of how to make it interesting, but I did capture a few images that I thought were worthy of taking up space on the internet.

Here is the tiniest morel I’ve ever seen:

I went back a few days later, expecting it to have shot up to “beer can” size (apparently that’s an industry standard for describing how big your morel is), but it had hardly budged. So I got curious, having seen many other mushrooms grow at a furious rate in mere days (like they're known for), and I found some things like a pretty bad YouTube time-lapse video of some morels growing (bad because it was really a slide-show, which is cheating, with clever, spinning “fun” shots sprinkled in, and many shots with nothing to compare the size to, and there was goofy music), but appreciated nonetheless because I hadn't taken the time to do that, and I sure didn't know morels take up to a month to get full-sized…

*Edit*  Soon after I posted this, one of my faithful followers, the wise and lovely Maxine Stone, kindly took the time to email me this:

"Hi Lisa:
I think this is a Morchella deliciosa.  These are small morels and the ridges are more like lines that go up and down as you can see in the pic.  They are usually grayish but this one looks old."

So I thought this was just a very, very young Morchella esculenta, but it is, in fact, a different species. These don't ever get "beer-can sized," they top out at about 3". And besides the ridges having more "verticality," for lack of a better word, I would probably notice the stems, which seem to be generally more slender, and less gnarly than the common M. esculenta.

I sure am glad that people who have been at this a lot longer than me are actually reading this blog! Thanks again, Maxine.

Here is the most beautiful morel I found all season:



These are called “greys” on the street but it’s a “Classic North American Yellow Morel”, Morchella esculenta (near as I can tell, from this site). I loved how the pits were so dense, making it extra-crinkly, and the luminous moon-color around the dark pits. This would eventually turn blonde-yellow.

Even though this morel almost looks black-and-white, which seems like it would show up easily against new green growth and last year's brown leaves, it was very, very hard to see. Because it was a morel. And they just pop into this dimension when they feel like it. Sometimes it seems like they’re made more of shadows than solid matter.

 
The beautiful grey again, and a blonde and grey in hand. Same species.


Above, some morels that have offered themselves to me to eat, waiting patiently.

I hiked many, many times this spring, found enough morels to share, and one night fried a whole bunch of them in seasoned breadcrumbs and couldn’t stop eating them as soon as they were cool enough to put in my mouth so they never filled the plate and then I felt a little sick, but I think it was from eating too much, and not me developing a sensitivity to them (which can happen with any food), which would be fine with me because there’s a lot of anxiety around morels, everybody trying like hell to figure out what triggers their arrival and where’s the best place to find them, and all this protocol and etiquette and stories and legends (and sometimes bad feelings), when chanterelles are so plentiful and easy to find and sweet and delicious and can come up for months. But, it’s usually cool and pretty out when you go morel-hunting, and there’s all the other small waking-up forest citizens around, so all is well.

Hissing mushrooms, no lie!

I don’t know about you, but when I think of mushrooms, I don’t think about what sound they make. So I was thrilled when I captured a delightful video of Urnula craterium hissing quite audibly as they sent out a cloud of spores, after I blew on them. I’ll prepare you as best I can for what you are about to see.



I found out they do this because I wanted to take a picture of one and there were little pieces of leaves and things inside the cup (and springtails, seems like there’s always springtails in them), so I was trying to blow the stuff out of it to clean it up a little. There was about a one-second delay, and then it poofed out a cloud of spores. I’d read about this, but didn’t think it was going to be so obvious! This tickled me, and I wanted to capture it on video, so I started trying to make them poof out spores. It wasn't until I got home and watched the video that I could hear it. Maybe, when I was in the woods, I thought I was imagining it.

“Devil’s Urn” is one of their common names. It’s a cup fungus. Here’s more (a rotten image, I know—oddly, I do not have dozens of images of these to choose from, like I do every other thing I take a picture of--). When this cup fungus is young and fresh (above), it’s smooth and velvety, a little floppy, and a nice open shape, almost a cocktail glass. These (below) are starting to show their age and curl inward a little. Right about now is when their spores will poof out if you blow on them. And you can hear it.



So, they come out in spring, they’re pretty common, and are considered harbingers of morels, as in, when these are out, morels should be, too.

They’re usually about 2” tall and maybe 1-1/2” across (occasionally a lot bigger, we found a few honkers that were almost 4” across), with a stalk, and they grow on sticks and smallish logs, and even though it can look like they're growing out of the ground, there’s always a stick down there somewhere.

As they age, they start to toughen up and turn brown and get a cool scaly texture on the outside, and the top starts to close up and magically gets a nifty zig-zag edge (faeries with pinking shears).



They don’t poof out many spores when they’re this old. I know, because after I made the first ones do it, I hyperventilated my way all over the forest for days, trying to make other ones do it.



They’re also called “black tulip” fungus.




Now we’re talkin’! That’s some hot crackle-finish zig-zag Urnula action!

But, we need to talk about this audible spore shooting.

Here’s the video, it’s only 5 seconds long; the first sound is me blowing a blast of air on it, and the next sound is the cloud of spores being released.

I posted this video on Facebook (man, there’s a lot of mushroom people out there), which generated more comments (64!) than any other thing I ever posted, and people with a lot more mycological education than I chimed in with some really great input. My favorite, from Kathie Hodge of Cornell University (there’s a link to her blog on the left), was a link to the Biodiversity Heritage Library, which is digitizing hundreds of thousands of works of “legacy literature” (old research books) from natural history and botanical libraries all over the world, and you can just read them, right there online! And she steered me to a book, Researches on Fungi,  by A. H. Reginald Buller, written in 1934, with one chapter titled “Puffing in the Discomycetes” (which are now called “Ascomycetes”—see here), and another titled “The Sound Made by Fungus Guns”!!!   First he thinks he heard it, while puttering around in his lab while there was a specimen on the table, then he applies himself like a rat terrier to seeing if he can hear it again: lying next to them in the woods, holding fungi to his ear and finding “…when it puffs one can not only hear the sound of the puffing but also feel the spray from the asci as though the ears were being sprayed with a fine atomiser.” A man after my own heart! It’s really charming reading. But, I think I would draw the line at letting a mushroom spray spores into my ear. I think.

He wrote really great explanations of the mechanics of all this, which I didn’t have the patience to read. Maybe if I had the actual printed matter in my hands I’d read it. I’m just happy to know that some mushrooms make hissing sounds when you blow on them.

To help you calm down after all that excitement, here’s a few more images of Urnula craterium.



(Some of us think the smaller ones in the photo above are a different species, and I finally got a real live mycologist to confirm it--probably Pseudoplectania.)





With a human thumb for scale.



I've never seen any mention of these taking on the same color as the surface of the wood they're growing on, but it seems to happen fairly consistently.

Anyway, I’m just trying to tell you that some mushrooms make noise. Not all mushrooms release their spores in such an extravagant fashion, but these do. I feel lucky to have witnessed it. Now you can, too!

Sprouting acorns—who knew?

I’ve been stalling on this post for quite a while, wanting to give it special attention, because I was so struck by these. Couldn’t decide which images to use, in what order--real hand-wringing!

I was wandering around in the woods as usual, in mid-April, looking for things (mushrooms, if possible), and I noticed all these RED things on the ground, deep red spots all over the place. At first I just thought it was some leftover pieces of acorns, I don’t know, changing colors like a piece of fading fruit, until I got my face down closer, and found yet another whole new thing going on.

These look innocent enough, except for that startling red…

       

               
I don’t know what I thought about how acorns sprouted in the woods, but it certainly wasn’t this! I guess I thought a bunch of nice pale brown acorns fell, most were eaten, and a few sprouted like any other run-of-the-mill seed. What surprised me were the colors (many), and the shapes (as usual). Also, there were a lot of them. Every several inches there was another one! I took precisely one million pictures, then kicked myself later (only a little) for not taking more, and for not spending just a little more time getting better shots…tricky to get everything in focus with shoots up there and acorn down there…       



I wonder what those tiny white spots are (above). Nice touch!

Then I started to run into stuff like this:


Okay, here is when I began to realize things were getting a little out of hand. Which is the shoot and where is the root, and what are those sea-slug-like-like ruffles? And everything’s all tangled up and wild colors!



The wiggly red things are not the first leaves! They’re connected to the cotyledons. The shoot with the first true leaves is between the two flat wiggly things.

Why is everything red?



I actually had to stop and look at this for a while. If that’s the leaf/shoot sticking straight up, then what’s all that other stuff? I had to discuss it with a friend, who helped me untangle the structure.



This one (above) is waving one cotyledon in the air.

As near as I can figure, with acorns (at least this model) everything happens at once. Maybe since it’s got so much food available from the big fat nut meat (and it needs to move fast before someone eats it), it puts out a root and shoot with true leaves at the same time, ready to go, all the while taking sustenance from the big acorn nut (the cotyledon, which is like a placenta, really), so it’s all just *blam!*, get everything going all at once! It’s pretty much like any other seed sprouting, but the cotyledons are extra large, and they seem to not have to leave the shell for everything to work out.

The term “cotyledon” was coined by 17th-century physician Marcello Malphigi (“bad piggy”).

But, the operating words here are “as near as I can figure.” I don’t know any acorn experts yet.

A few more:



See, the shoot is already up, and those red arms are attached to the cotyledons, still in the shell.

Lastly:



Take that, Georgia O’Keeffe! Kids, go ask your parents what that means.

So you walk around thinking you have a basic idea of what’s going on out there, until you look closer. Well, good luck with that! Look where that got me.

More forest offerings, spring 2011 (almost everything up to late April)

After these there’s still a few more installments coming, of things that deserve their own posts, before I’m current. In the meantime here’s even more of the late leftovers. I can’t help it if there’s so much going on out there!

Here’s this year’s Virginia bluebell buds:

I tell you, I can’t stand it. The buds are this other-worldly opal/purple color, in that great unexpected shape, and then the flowers open very nonchalantly in a completely different color. But it’s the bud shapes that really get me.

Here’s some Goldenseal (Hydrastis canadensis). First time I’ve seen it. Then, of course, I started to see it everywhere.


Oh, and check this out:

Blooming even before the leaves are unfurled!

Here is a Gray Tree frog (Hyla versicolor).

Or it could be Cope’s Gray tree frog, H. chrysoscelis, but you can’t tell them apart in the field (well, their calls are a little different), but H. versicolor has an extra set of chromosomes! So they sometimes call it Tetraploid Tree frog! But never mind that, they can camouflage themselves, like chameleons (but slower)! I’d like to see that, but I think I was pretty lucky to get this close at all.

From a little distance I thought it was a lump of woody polypore or something, on a dead tree. I walked up to see it and it was a frog instead. I actually got this close (this isn’t a zoom shot), through sneaking.
He finally broke, and jumped away, which is when I discovered the yellow on his hind legs:

Yet another thing I had no idea about.

Here’s a tiny little snake I also sneaked up on:


No, I mean tiny, he was barely as thick as a pencil--

Storeria dekayi

He saw me first, and started to go away (made noise in leaves, gave himself away) but then slowed and stopped, so I began my sneaking. I don’t know why he let me get this close.
Its common name is "brown snake." Just "brown snake." Or "Midland brown snake," or "Dekay's brown snake." They don't get much longer than 12", and they eat mostly worms, and slugs, snails and soft-bodied insects. I know from his round pupils that he is not venomous (at least, that rule works in Missouri, barring someone's venomous pet snake having escaped). Here I confess that I did not know until recently that there are several tiny Missouri snakes, just because they're small doesn't mean they're babies.

One last thing. I keep finding may apples that have grown through a hole in a dead leaf as they emerge in spring, and they get pretty tall with this leaf stuck around them:


And yes, of course I free them by taking the leaf off, but not before I take a look at this:



 Cameras with macro-settings are the best thing in the whole world.