Fungal Taxons
May 22, 2025
The title picture here is of Boletus edulis mushrooms, a decent quantity picked up from Telluride, CO in 2014. I first attended the Telluride mushroom festival in 2012, based off seeing a random flyer posted somewhere on the internet. Subsequently, I visited the area again in 2013, 2014, 2016, 2018, until the pandemic threw a wrench into the gears, but I eventually did go back again in 2023. Suffice to say, Telluride became one of my favorite places to visit. During a great season, you can barely walk 20 feet without finding another mushroom. During a dry season however, you might find exactly zero mushrooms. In either case, the scenery will be beautiful.
One nice perk of hunting mushrooms during the festival is that there are plenty of experts to help you with indentification as well as other mycological inquieries. But. That was all pre-AI, of course. Identification with current machine vision, such as convolutional neural networks, CNN, seems to be a great success so far. Even if it's not perfect, it gives you a boost in the right direction. Unfortunately, no great tool, nor mighty expert, will force the information to stick around in your brain -- that part is determined by the effort of yourself. And that's one of the purposes of this blog, so that I can document my own journey and hopefully some of the dang latin names finally stick.
Speaking of experts, pictured here is John Holliday from Aloha Medicinals in 2014 dressed up as an insect with a cordyceps mushroom growing out of his head.
There was seemingly a theme about mycologists I had met. For many of them, psilocybe mushrooms served as the gateway drug to mycology. It's quite natural after all to ask, if this thing exists, what else like it might also exist. So what are all the mushrooms out there? As far as I understand it, mycology is simply not as well-developed of a science as plant science. Consequently, the estimates for, say, the number of fungal species, are not given out as confidently as for plants. So for now, I'll skip any fancy plots as I record my progress visiting the various fungi that I encounter in the wild.