Over the last year I gathered several pictures that got me thinking, and thought I would gather some in a post, riffing on the theme.

First, here is something I ran into last spring, as everything was finally greening up the middle of May.

The striking thing that is evident is the homogeneous nature of the vegetation behind the advancing invasion front. The extra nitrogen provided by the fungal activity releasing nutrients as it eats dead tissue (obvious in the verdant green of the grass behind the front) seems to be helping the cool season grasses. This picture mostly shows Kentucky bluegrass, but observation later in the summer showed lush bromegrass growth. Uphill from the boundary there are bunches of needle and thread grass, but it appears that the extra nitrogen has allowed the brome and bluegrass to outcompete and eliminate competition where the fairy ring has passed. I plan to return to this spot this spring and follow it through the summer to see if my assumptions are correct. If I can identify the same needlegrass clump I can see how it competes under the highly fertile conditions.

A constant worry in prairies is the loss of native species to the incursions of introduced species as in the example above. Much to my surprise I also found several areas on the gravelly hillsides that looked like this.

My assumption when I saw this was that a densely rhizomatous clone of blue grama (Bouteloua gracilis) was the culprit. The site is pretty droughty and there is plenty of blue grama on the hilltops. On closer inspection I think the blue grama seedhead is a red herring. The blue grama really shows up on the very worst soils on the hilltops, where little else will grow, and doesn’t usually grow in such a tight patch. To my surprise I think that this is sideoats grama (Bouteloua curtipendula). This is one more phenomena that I plan to follow through the course of the growing season, both to confirm the grass species and to watch the progress of the patches. There is a tremendous amount of variety on these hills and it is a little bizarro to find one of the native grasses doing a brome imitation. Here is a picture from a similar site nearby about Labor Day

To top everything off, I will return to mycology. A friend and I were out gathering seed and independently came upon several large mushrooms of a type I had never seen.

Perhaps it is just a puffball, but I have never seen one so substantial. I have a hard time forming an intuitive understanding of soil fungi. Even though I know that most of their life cycle is invisible to us it is hard to visualize the network of hyphae growing along and often symbiotically with plant roots. How large a network does it take to produce a mushroom like this? How big is the area contributing to the fruiting body? Is this a species with a symbiotic relationship with its plant neighbors, a mycorrhiza, or a free agent? Or perhaps it is competitive in some way; does it infect its neighbors? The grass around the mushrooms looked quite healthy and strong, so it seems likely the relationship is mycorrhizal. I am excited to try to learn more about the topic. As we used to say as kids, “At ease, disease, there’s fungus among us.”