itohan's Journal

I mainly stayed in the Reservoir close to the nearby Pine Tree Reserve. The ground was soaked but once I got there, the sky was only sprinkling rain. It was pretty chilly but I mainly blame the large body of water.

Anyway, I went on a mission to find different types of fungi. Fungi are generally hard to find because they live in shaded, moist places but I had difficulty because the forest floor sort of blends together after rain. Luckily, the ones I found came in different colors. I found blue-green lichen on trees and on rocks. I found a lonely porous brown one. I found dark brown ones that look like cow skins. They were pretty smooth and floppy for lack of a better explanation. I even found a group of three tan mushrooms with a inverted bowl-like cap. Those were going to be my last ones but as I was walking back, I noticed a very flat, white mushroom/toadstool shielded by a bunch of leaves.

Fungi look very different from each others since they are a broad taxa: a kingdom. Also, since I'm learning about Archaea, Bacteria, and Eukarya, I think it's interesting that Fungi are eukarya like humans. I suppose that is why their infections are harder to treat than bacterial ones. Or maybe it's because some of them are parasitic. Maybe one of the ones I observed were parasitic. After all, they grow near everything.

In chilly weather, I became a botanist for the evening and visited the wild forest six minutes away from Hammond Pond. The ground was wet and the air was humid. The plants finally got a break from the unforgiving Sun's heat after last week.

I figured this nature walk would be relatively easy. After all, I was looking for the four main types of land plants, not the entirety of the archaeplastida clade.

The only group that gave me a hard time was the polypodiopsida or plants that are vascular but seedless.

My first plant was a popular bryophyta: the moss. Although leaves carpeted the forest floor, I could see mosses everywhere. So I mentally crossed off nonvascular plants from my list. Next, was an evergreen tree. These gymnosperms are hard to miss during the fall. The angiosperms were also easy to spot. The one I found bore tiny red fruit.

Finally, I found ferns. As I should have guessed while looking for the seedless plants, they were beside a tiny stream of water and shared space with some mushrooms and mosses.

On my way back, I took some pictures of some more mosses.