Ann Harmer

South Vancouver Island Mycological Society (SVIMS)

December 3rd 2020: A Zoom presentation post the Annual general Meeting

Our speaker of the month: ANN HARMER

Mushroom dyeing is a passion, combining the best of both worlds: fibre arts and fungi.

Ann Harmer ( Shroomworks, Garden Bay, BC) has found the perfect fusion of her love of fibre and her never-ending interest in the world of fungi: exploring the colour potential found in mushrooms. The rainforest surrounding her home on BC’s Sunshine Coast is a mushroom paradise, and she spends many hours in the woods every fall in search of the dye fungi. Once mushroom season is finished, she can be found in her cottage studio in the forest, ever in awe of the rich, earthy colours that come out of the dye pots. Ann uses wool dyed with mushroom colours to spin interesting yarns—yet another chance to handle and play with these forest hues.

While researching dye mushrooms, Ann learned of the International Fungi & Fibre Symposium, an event held somewhere different in the world every two years. She has attended each such gathering since 2008, learning from others who share her passion. She brought the 2016 Symposium to her home village of Madeira Park and was the principal coordinator of the event.

Ann has taught mushroom-dyeing workshops at Maiwa School of Textiles in Vancouver, at the Contemporary Textile Studio Co-op in Toronto, and to fibre-arts groups in a number ofcommunities in British Columbia. She is active in the Sunshine Coast Spinners & Weavers Guild and the Sunshine Coast Fibreshed.

Now Ann eagerly awaits every mushroom season and spends most fall days exploring her backyard forest with her dog, searching out the next fungal treasure.

Ann’s Book Magic in the Dyepot is available through her blog:

email: shroomworks@gmail.com

blog: https://shroomworks.co

 

MycoMatch (MatchMaker) new version with beta iPhone app

MycoMatch (MatchMaker) Version 2.4 is now available at www.mycomatch.com.

New: MycoMatch Mobile for iPhone will join MycoMatch (MatchMaker). A menu item in MycoMatch (MatchMaker) will take you to its web pages which can also reached from the main download site above. Download the iPhone app 2.4 beta version and its future updates there.  MMM is designed to work on iPhones, covering over 1200 gilled mushrooms of the Pacific Northwest. As in MycoMatch (MatchMaker), there are photographs and detailed descriptions, and a way of putting in characters to identify mushrooms.

The program is newly designed by Douglas Alder and Danny Miller.

The Mac version of MycoMatch (MatchMaker) has been discontinued due to difficulties with making it work with recent Mac operating systems.

About 75 species have been added and about 135 primary names have been changed in MycoMatch since the March 2019 version 2.3.1.

                                  —-  Ian Gibson, Danny Miller, and the rest of the MycoMatch Team

Mount Doug Illegal Picking

CTV did a video news piece on unauthorized mushroom collection on Mt. Doug. It can be viewed at:

https://vancouverisland.ctvnews.ca/saanich-residents-concerned-over-illegal-mushroom-picking-at-mt-douglas-park-1.5188750

It features an interview with SVIMS member and past-president Andy MacKinnon.

November 5th General Meeting

SVIMS General Membership Meeting for November 5th 2020

(South Vancouver Island Mycology Society)

This will once again be a Virtual Meeting via Zoom.

All members will be sent an email about 3 days prior to the event with the secure log in link to the Zoom meeting. Please make sure that you copy down the Meeting number and the password as you may be asked for this before you are let into the meeting. Please make every effort to mute your sound and video. Wear headphones where possible to cut down on background feedback as this interferes with any recording and can even block the feed from the speaker. All registered members with an email and who have updated their profiles should have received a Username and Password over the past 6 weeks. The latter only can be changed at this time and not the username. The website continues to be developed and all sections are accessible to the public except the secure members’ only section and that only by logging in. You do NOT have to log in to this member’s site to join the Zoom meeting which can be accessed by that link in the email sent to the members. Please do not share that link. We have received permission from our speaker to record the meeting which will then be included in the members only section as well as to  post it as a live feed to the Facebook site, which is the backup if for some reason you cannot get into the Zoom meeting.

There will be some general announcements preceding the speaker.

Meeting Start Time: The meeting will open at 6:45 PM Pacific time and it would be appreciated if everyone is checked in by 7:00PM. Coming in after 7:00 PM, when the meeting is under way results in interference particularly if you are not muted.

Our Speaker:  Editor-in-Chief of Mycotaxon: Lorelei L. Norvell editor@mycotaxon.com Pacific Northwest Mycology Service 6720 NW Skyline, Boulevard Portland, Oregon 97229-1309 USA

                     Title: Capturing hypotheses in Phaeocollybia: The Canadian Connection

“Dr. Lorelei Norvell is the editor in chief of the highly regarded journal- Mycotaxon.

The naming of fungi, their relationships and identification are critically important aspects in their study. Molecular approaches and concepts have impacted on our knowledge of species and genera.

Lorelei in her talk is going to use Phaeocollybia only as an example of her personal journey from the initial finds on Vancouver Island and her encounters with some Canadian Mycologists-characters. Did they get it right or wrong? What did the increasing sophistication of molecular studies uncover?”

 

https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Lorelei_Norvell which has details of her very impressive CV

Lorelei will be introduced by Adolf Ceska

 

 

 

 

 

 

Household hyphae: novel, remarkable, and obscure fungi of the indoor environment by: Joel Tanney

Meeting and Presentation

When: Thursday, October 1st, 2020, 7:00 pm

Where: This will be a Zoom presentation and will be limited to members only and not recorded, but will be live streamed to our Facebook page.

You will receive a link to the Zoom meeting 1 day prior to the event. 

Topic: Household hyphae: novel, remarkable, and obscure fungi of the indoor environment

We spend approximately 90 percent of our lives indoors – but exactly who are our fungal housemates? A global survey sought to provide insight into indoor fungal biodiversity and develop an authoritative and reliable identification system. Fungal biodiversity was explored using indoor dust samples collected from 93 buildings in 12 countries worldwide, and subsequently investigated with an approach combining next generation sequencing and a novel dilution-to-extinction isolation technique. I will discuss some of the results from this research project with an emphasis on the ecology and taxonomy of some of the common, novel, and remarkable fungi identified and described from more than 200,000 sequences and 9,000 cultures.

Believe it or not, your home is an extreme environment filled with extremophiles: fungi called xerophilies, who grow on substrates with low water activities (think deserts and desserts). Learn about Wallemia, typically associated with dried fruits, jams, maple syrup, and salted meats, which is sometimes one of the most abundant genera in homes. Meet the obscure Diploöspora rosea, a forgotten fungus described in England and re-discovered one hundred years later from a home in Kosrae, Micronesia. Prepare to be motivated to vacuum and mop after seeing Aspergillus subgenus Polypaecilum, a group including some opportunistic pathogens of humans and dogs, which lives happily in extreme environments such as desert caves, salt mines, salted fish – and indoors. Forget the COVID-19 travel concerns and vicariously join me on a mycological grand tour from Canada to Mexico to South Africa to Micronesia and more.

Photo: James Holkko

Presentation: Joel Tanney

Joey Tanney is a research scientist (mycologist) with the Canadian Forest Service (Pacific Forestry Centre) who recently moved to Victoria from Québec in the fall of 2018. He studied forestry at Lakehead University in Thunder Bay, Ontario but was bit by the mycology bug during a third-year forest pathology course and has never looked back. He completed his BSc. F. and MSc. F. at Lakehead University, PhD at Carleton University, and a post-doc with Richard Hamelin at Laval Université in Québec. His favourite fungi are dematiaceous hyphomycetes and inoperculate discomycetes and he looks forward to collecting and describing new species from Vancouver Island.