By Rick Steelhammer
For Charleston Gazette-Mail
In mid-June, when a planned trip to a state park to look for mushrooms fell through, Drew Palmer decided to take a walk in the woods near his Cross Lanes home to see what late-spring fungi could be found.
For Palmer, who leads mushroom walks across the state, serves on the West Virginia Mushroom Club’s board of directors and science committee, and administers Facebook pages for several mushroom-enthusiast — or mycophile — organizations, the missed outing turned out to be fortuitous.
“I saw two purple and yellow mushrooms in a very small patch of moss surrounded by oak and beech trees,” Palmer said. “It’s a really unique color combination, so far removed from other species found in this part of the country. I knew right away they were something special. I identify a lot of mushrooms, but I had never seen anything remotely like this in my entire life. I dropped to my knees and spent the next 45 minutes taking pictures.”
After poring over several books and papers in what turned out to be an unsuccessful effort to identify his specimens, Palmer posted photos and descriptions of the mushrooms on iNaturalist, a nonprofit online network of naturalists, biologists and citizen scientists used to identify, map and share field observations, as well as several international Facebook pages for mycophile groups.
After the postings generated a good deal of interest but no solid identification of the West Virginia species, Palmer sent dehydrated samples of the mushroom’s tissue to the Mycota Lab, a nonprofit molecular DNA laboratory based in Michigan, for DNA sequencing.
“I received the results a few weeks ago, which confirmed that it was a novel DNA barcode,” or an apparent new species, he said.
‘Almost certainly makes it a new species’
With the advances that have been made in DNA sequencing in recent years, “it’s not the rarest thing to have the results come back with new sequences,” Palmer said.
“But they often turn out to correspond to something that’s already been identified but just hasn’t been sequenced yet. There’s no known sequence that’s even close to this mushroom’s,” he said. “Its closest relative is a conifer-loving species from California and the Pacific Northwest.”
In the case of the purple-capped, yellow-gilled Cross Lanes mushroom, its genetic distance from any other DNA-sequenced species, its difference in habitat from its closest known relative, and its differences in structure and form, “almost certainly make it a new species,” Palmer said.
Photos and a description of the novel mushroom species, to which Mycota Lab assigned the temporary research name Hygrocybe sp. ‘WV02’, can be found at bit.ly/NewMushroom.
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