Vinalhaven Sightings

Welcome to the Vinalhaven Sightings Report - July 15, 2020

Leif calls this a 'Jawa spider'.

Brought to you – in part – by the nice folks over at the Vinalhaven Land Trust and Maine Coast Heritage Trust. ‘Two great tastes that taste great together’

this is a chocolate tube slime

Highlights – Not animals -plants. slime molds, mushrooms,

Business : Pardon our appearance - for some reason 'blogger' (no relation to 'frogger') has updated the whole 'uploading and putting together a blog post' and it is something that I figure I will get used to over time. we are not there yet! a little funky, but ain't that the way we roll....

Contact us - feel free to contact us with “questions, queries, queasts” about anything nature or naturally feeling. Good way to share, and an even better way to make friends. At least 10 people have become friends directly related to the VSR . vinalhavensightings@gmail.com .

Tiit Trick – click on the photos and they magically will fill your screen. Great way to avoid reading whatever is being typed here!

try it with the tapioca slime to the left! i dare you!

Bittersweet PSA - The 'royal we' ran into some technical difficulties earlier this month which led to not only photos that has been 'dealt with' disappearing, but also an almost completed 'VSR text'. Losing photos of slime molds is not a big deal - trust me - but losing the VSR throws me off. As a naturalist/nature bum, I prefer to move forward to see/find what’s next, and at times writing about the past can be a 'drag'. Writing about the past twice 'drags' for sure, and not in a good way, but we deal. anyway, just to let you know some of the stories may not be embellished as much as usual. Truthiness lies in the drag. And in the end there are two separate VSR summaries for the past weeks. Hope you enjoy!

Lost non animal photos – bladderwort, slart (slug-art)

There are two kinds of animals included in this report, and they make sense with their connections to the non-animal subject of the observations. Springtail and slug, including some basic slart.

On the lookout – there are 2 photobombs in this particular report, both of a particular slime mold that just happens to be fruiting particularly close to the subject of the photos. See if you can find – 10 points if you do!

Sightings – It’s a non-animal story about flowers…while some appreciate heath plants (Family Ericaceae) for their fruits that are blue – here is a photo of Leif picking blueberries. some of our favorite heaths are the parasitic and epi-parasitic ones in the genus Monotropa. are up and blooming. Ghost Pipes (Monotropa uniflora) and Pinesap (M. hypopithys).

Here’s what John Eastman says about the ‘Corpse Plant’ in ‘The Book of Forest and Thicket’

‘Botanists of an earlier generation, convinced that nature had made a bad mistake, deplored this strange little perennial for its ‘degenerate morals’. How dare a seed plant give up being green and become a parasite! Today, botanists call them epiparasites, for it feeds indirectly from the roots of green plants. Its source of nourishment is sub-surface mycorrhizal fungi, which interconnect with the roots of nearby plants and derive nourishment from them. The fungi act as a middleman that processes food delivery to ghost pipes from their neighbors.’

I think they call that ‘stealing from fungi’ actually. The ‘nourishment’ or ‘sugars’ the tree provides are shared with the fungus in exchange for phosphorus and nitrogen. It’s a symbiotic relationship known as ‘mycorrhizal’. What these ‘heaths with degenerate morals’ or the ‘HWDM’, are doing is tapping into this symbiotic relationship for their own benefit. Taking from the fungus, not the plant. It may be epi-parasitic on the trees, but it is parasitic on the fungus!

Anyway , that’s the good ol’ Ghost Pipe.

And some Pinesap are out and about on the trails in smaller numbers. We love dem parasitic plants almost as much as we love dem carnivorous ones. Bladderwort photos next time, I promise!

It’s a non-animal story about fungus and mushrooms….. low rain year, and the mosquito numbers reflect this. not every spot is 'mosquito low' but mosquitoes have been scoring 'low' on the annoying matrix this year.

this is a dye maker's polypore from near Old Harbor Pond

always a good year for mushrooms though (even though 2009 was not the best mushroom summer), and at the time of this writing it appears the announcement 'year of the blusher" is appropriate. Amanitas in general always seem to represent, and 'I'manamanitaman' should be copyrighted - we like 'em, they help the trees grow - hardcore mycorrhizal relationships here, every amanita tells a symbiotic story. and some of them can kill us, while most will disagree with us to a certain extent.

this is a Yellow patches (Amanita flavoconia) pushing through the earth

They are sighted along most/all trails all summer.

Yellow patch buttons coming up...

..favorite food of slugs (I shouldn’t really speak for the slugs)....

Tawny Grisette (A. fulva)- all-time favorite mushroom, lots of personal history here, and not in a scandalous nor slightly interesting way.

Cecillae amanitas (A. cecillae) - seen around, especially in the Basin preserve

but the Blusher (A. rubescens) seems to be the local amanita that is diggin' the conditions.

what about BOLETES you say?

Bitter bolete (Tylopilus felleus) with some slug art (slart).

Nice webbing pattern of the bitter bolete stipe.

King bolete (Boletus edulis) out on lanes, past prime for sure

and leif with an 'in prime' king he found

It’s a non-animal story about slime molds…. once again, a dry spring and summer overall. The numbers say this year is not last year as far as slime molds go, much less anything like the summer of '09! (Will there ever be another one like '09? the summer of the slime mold! what if that was the 'once in a planet's lifetime' event as far as slime molds go? that's how legends are born..... but I digress).