HAVE you ever tried to identify a collection of little brown mushrooms you've just collected?
Those who have will know just how difficult the process is.
Rodney Jones will be this month's guest speaker at the Wildlife Lunchtime Talk at the Hervey Bay Library where he will discuss how field guides, with good photos and well written descriptive text are a great place to start.
However, if you're a forensic scientist trying to determine which mushroom was responsible for a human death, then you'll need more than a field guide.
Rodney will give a brief outline of the several sources of information he used in his PhD research on a taxonomic revision of a group of mushrooms.
Detailed traditional morphology and pigment chemistry was used to establish initial groups, with rDNA sequencing used to classify 18 species.
Of these, eight corresponded to previously published taxa, while 10 are putatively new species.
The talk will be held at the Hervey Bay Library on October 19 from noon.
