On Time

There was surprisingly little fungi fruiting in the forest today. I roamed down Cataract Creek to see if I could find the same patch of Lipstick Powderhorn lichens I shot last week, expecting that a week's worth of rain would have plumped them up and put a lot more lipstick on. Reality was just the reverse. Time had made the patch look sparse and faded, kinda the way I felt a few mornings last week as I got up for work despite a nagging cold.

Otherwise the forest is greening up nicely, especially the moss. The moss is in a very happy place, in some places almost too green to believe. The Giant Chain Fern above (with an undergrowth of sword fern) reminded me of a line I came across last night as I was reading Nick Neely's Alta California. Neely has been hiking up the coast from San Diego, sort of retracing Gaspar de Portola's 1769 expedition. He wanders around the Ventura County Fair, past funnel cake and deep-fried watermelon, and catches a stray conversation or two: "I also overheard a man say, 'What the fuck's a fern?' walking past some potted greenery. His girlfriend replied, 'It's a little tree.'"

Which reminded me of the time I was down along the Embarcadero, standing at the railing and watching a cormorant paddling around the pilings, when a couple of young women who'd just arrived went OMG excited when they saw the cormorant suddenly arch and dive under the water. "What the heck is that?!" said one. "I think it's a fish!" said the other.

Anyway, I liked the scene above with the gentle riffles on the creek, the grey, olive and ochre cobbles still visible under shallow, clear water, and greenery coming all the way to the water's edge. There are lots of similarly meditative spots along the creek, and I usually take a moment to appreciate a few of them, even if I'm heading for the more attention-grabbing waterfalls (which, today, I was not).

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Lipstick Powderhorn

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I wish I could have set up a timelapse camera on this patch of lichen (which I'm guessing is Cladonia macilenta, or Lipstick Powderhorn) before it rained. I'd love to have seen the progression of growth as desiccated tissues took on water and the bright red spore-producing structures (similar to cup fungi) emerged from the tips of the stalks. 

The Foxelli trail cams actually do have a timelapse function, and last week I looked for a likely placement to capture an eruption of mushrooms. After poking around in the woods awhile I got a better appreciation for how difficult it was going to be to find a good spot! I'll have to try again another time.

I was just refreshing my memory of lichen biology when I read of a discovery in 2016 that the symbiosis of fungus and alga is more complex than previously thought. Instead of a single fungus paired with a single alga, a second fungus was found. And then in 2019, a third fungus was found. I love that we're learning more about these incredible life forms all the time.

The newly found fungi might not be part of the symbiotic relationship, although they don't seem to be harming anything either. It reminds me of our human gut flora, the several pounds of organisms that live inside us yet have their own genomes. We feel like individual creatures, but in fact we're all colonies of organisms. The interloper that recently crashed the gates of my immune system and made me sick was just doing what life does. It pokes around, settling here and there or just passing through as it looks for a connection that makes it safer, more resilient, and part of something larger than its individual self.

If science ever finds the motivating factor that convinces molecules to stop just sitting there, and instead to get off their butts and find something useful to do, such as become a living organism, that will be a mind-blowing day. I wonder if such a motivating factor would be considered a fifth fundamental force of nature, and whether its discovery would make a grand unification theory fall into place so elegantly that we would wonder why it took so long to figure it out.

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Fossil

When I saw the wet bracken fern frond plastered to a rock in a small side-creek it reminded me of a fossil, like something I'd associate with dinosaurs. Although ferns are believed to have first appeared 390 to 430 million years ago, the 10,500 or so modern fern species have only been around for about 70 million years, and the earliest bracken fossils are about 55 million years old. In other words, unless they are at least 10 million years older than their earliest fossils, bracken fern may be too young to have tickled the fancy of dinosaurs.

In all that time, there is still basically just one species of bracken worldwide, Pteridium aquilinum. As a Forest Service description puts it, its long evolutionary heritage has given it time to develop excellent defenses against disease and being eaten by animals.

Bracken was so valuable in the Middle Ages that it could be used to pay rent. It made a nice hot fire, and the ash was used as a source of potash by the soap and glass industry until 1860. The rhizomes were used to dye wool yellow and to tan leather.

There is also some impressive cognitive dissonance about bracken. Continuing with the Forest Service treatment linked above, we read that:

“Western brackenfern is most commonly used today as a food for humans. The newly emerging croziers or fiddleheads are picked in spring and may be consumed fresh or preserved by salting, pickling, or sun drying. Both fronds and rhizomes have been used in brewing beer, and rhizome starch has been used as a substitute for arrowroot. Bread can be made out of dried and powdered rhizomes alone or with other flour. American Indians cooked the rhizomes, then peeled and ate them or pounded the starchy fiber into flour. In Japan starch from the rhizomes is used to make confections. Western brackenfern is grown commercially for use as a food and herbal remedy in Canada, the United States, Siberia, China, Japan, and Brazil and is often listed as an edible wild plant. Powdered rhizome has been considered particularly effective against parasitic worms. American Indians ate raw rhizomes as a remedy for bronchitis” [internal citations (and double-spaces after periods) omitted].

The dissonance is that, despite being used as food, bracken is also likely carcinogenic: “All parts of the plant, including the spores, are carcinogenic,” the Forest Service writes, “and face masks are recommended for people working in dense bracken.”

According to the National Institutes of Health, bracken is “one of the few vascular plants known to induce cancer naturally in animals…. Some human populations also eat young bracken shoots and epidemiological studies in Japan and Brazil have shown a close association between bracken consumption and cancers of the upper alimentary tract. In addition, other studies reveal that the mere presence of bracken swards represents a greater risk to die of gastric adenocarcinoma for people who live more than 20 years in such areas or are exposed in childhood.”

I've been told by wild-food foragers that it's okay to eat them in small quantities, but I don't actually find the mucilaginous consistency of bracken fiddleheads all that enjoyable anyway. Apparently the choice edible species of fiddlehead is Ostrich Fern (Matteuccia struthiopteris), which according to Wikipedia “have antioxidant activity, are a source of omega-3 and omega-6 fatty acids, and are high in iron and fiber,” but alas do not grow wild in California.

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