Myrio On Live Sedge

Day 244: Beth Fallon, the Park's new Arnie (Plant Ecologist), got to meet Myrio today when she and I took a field trip to the site of our largest population. The receding snow meant that we had to do a bit more bushwhacking than Joe and I had done on Tuesday, but it also meant that new fungi had popped out further upslope to the limits of the host sedge. Beth agrees with me that a survey would be helpful toward understanding the effects of the fungus on the sedge, but unfortunately, it's too late to push it through the approval process this year. That said, she was intrigued by Myrio and my description of its life cycle, so to that end, I tried to find a free-floating specimen with its sclerotium still attached. I was unable to locate one, but for the first time, was able to take a sample of the complete fungus attached to its LIVING host. The specimen will go in the Park's herbarium once it is dried and mounted.

An Historic Day

Day 243: You see before you the portrait and moment of scientific discovery. Yesterday was an historic day. Team Biota isolated a heretofore unrecorded host Carex (sedge) for our rare friend, Myriosclerotinia caricis-ampullaceae.

So momentous was this discovery that we made a trip out to a point where we could contact Plant Ecologist Arnie Peterson by phone. When he answered, I announced without preamble, "We've got the sedge!" He immediately dropped what he was doing and drove an hour to meet us at the site. Ankle-deep in snowmelt water and under a penetrating rain, Arnie and I obtained three juvenile specimens from the 42 inventoried on this trip, a painful but necessary sacrifice in the name of science. One was preserved with the Carex still attached, and the fungus' tell-tale knobby and diagnostic sclerotium visible.

Arnie was unable to identify the specific Carex in the field, but of the known hosts for Myrio, only one occurs in the Park. That host does not grow at this site. In and of itself, Myrio was a signal discovery; documenting it on a new host is emphatically more significant.

I am enormously grateful to my companions in Team Biota Joe and Sharon Dreimiller for their field-work in inventorying Myrio despite the unfavourable weather, and for providing this photo of a couple of soggy but very happy scientists.