Boletes Come of Age

This talk features the incredible colorful diversity of the boletes of eastern North America, and uses them as examples in an introductory discussion of how and why name changes occur in the fungi.

Three hundred years ago, all gilled mushrooms were placed in the genus Agaricus. Back then, all pored mushrooms were placed in the genus Boletus. While Agaricus has long since been split into hundreds of smaller groups, the boletes have only had a few genera broken off. But mycologists have been getting better at defining the species in small groups of mushrooms that were previously considered "complexes" - the honey mushrooms and the chicken mushrooms, for example. Come and learn what some of those small groups in the boletes are, and why some of them are now being recognized as new genera. As with the honey and chicken mushrooms, these new distinctions help us do better in our determinations of mushroom identity and edibility.

Speaker: Leon Shernoff