Recent Activities: March 2020

Lots of activity in the first few months of 2020, which has kept us (me) away from the blog. What has happened are a few other blogs related to Colorado Mycology and the Sam Mitchel Herbarium of Fungi.
Gary Olds (Ph.D. Student, CU Denver) wrote his blog on Lactarius for Denver Botanic Gardens. https://www.botanicgardens.org/blog/lactarius-colorado-rockies
Lactarius is currently the focus of his dissertation work. We’re mulling over the world of possible research questions, but at the moment his focus on is the ‘low hanging fruit’ of systematics and taxonomy of the genus in the Southern Rockies. This week (March 9-13) he’s stressing out about his qualifying exams on Friday (the 13th!!!). I keep telling him I’m not worried, but that seems to be of little comfort. Ah, well. It’s a character building experience at the very least.
Our comrade Rick Levy also wrote a blog on imaging of the fungal collections in the SMHF in preparation for the move:
https://www.botanicgardens.org/blog/imaging-sam-mitchel-herbarium-fungi
Rock Canyon High School students – Camden, Andrew, and Jason – finished their research project on Russula. They have a blog too:
https://sites.google.com/s.dcsdk12.org/russula-dna-barcoding/home
I believed they learned a lot from their experience. The results were a mixed bag however. I strongly encouraged that they present these results – good, bad, and ugly – into their science fair poster, but they opted for a more streamlined, but less transparent version. It still was a nice looking poster and it’s understandable that they chose to sanitize it of ‘bad data’. However, too little value is placed on what is learned when things go wrong in science, in my opinion. But this kind of wisdom is something that really can’t be taught because appreciation of the learning process can only be developed through repeated experience.
There’s my opinion that you never asked for.
{Soapbox Achievement Unlocked!}
Thanks for reading…