Culturally -- and this was even obvious when cutting out the tissue blocks for culturing -- some of the mushrooms I was babbling about in Cimarron Canyon are A. subfloccosus, and some are A. bisporus. They are sister species and really tough to tell apart without microscopy or other voodoo. However, the red staining of SFLC (my abbreviations) is much more intense than that of BISP. I was able to make clean cultures of 8 collections: 5 SFLC; 3 BISP. I will culture many other collections from spores later this week.

One BISP collection has now been confirmed by sequencing, so it's official: you have A. bisporus in them hills. I think it's a new, isolated and genetically novel population, but exploring that is a master's project for someone else. The ARP will pay $25.00 bounties for each different viable BISP sample received from your area. By different I mean all mushrooms growing within about 5' of each other should be treated as a single collection (unless they are obviously from multiple mycelia). This is admittedly a crass offer so to placate you scientific idealists I'm willing to waive the bounty payment upon request. The ARP website is at home.alltel.net/kerrigan/ but it is long overdue for updating and the bounty info has changed, as has the address: 160 N. Jefferson St., Kittanning, PA 16201. Dried gills are almost as good as a sporeprint.

John Sparks Jr. gets credit for discovering A. iodosmus s.l. in North America (well, I might have seen it once in California). The brown stinking Agaricus thing in his yard is better than 99% identical with European data, based on a preliminary, partial DNA sequence. If more differences emerge it might be better treated as a variety (or even a sister species).

The big whitish mushroom, non-fragrant, non-staining, from the Sandias is apparently a new, unnamed species. It is related to the campestris group. We don't have much info on this group of mushrooms from forested areas, so it's a nice bit of data. I've seen this mushroom in Colorado and in BC.

I obtained a partial sequence from A. chionodermus, enough to compare with Eurodata when any is produced.

Some of the sequencing was 'sub-optimal' so I'll take another whack at it later this week. At some point I'd like to revisit the species list I roughed out at the foray.