• Editor’s Letter
  by Britt Bunyard
  
  
• Letters to the Editor
  
  
• Telluride Mushrooms
  
  
• The Wild Epicure:
  A Pacific Northwest Dynamic Duo
  by Tobiah Orin
  
  
• Mushroom Show Display Trays
  by Andrew MacMillen
  
  

• Mining for Mushrooms
  by Carissa Halton
  
  
• Notes from Underground
  by David Rose
  
  
• Mushrooms of America
  by Taylor F. Lockwood
  
  
• Bookshelf Fungi
  
  
• Complete Guide to Telluride
  
  
• Advertiser Listing and Final Shot

VIDEO EXCLUSIVE:
Explosive Spore Discharge in Morels

Discharge of a single ascus of the half-free morel, Morchella semilibera, revealed by ultra-high-speed video microscopy. The tip of the pressurized ascus opens via a lid (invisible at this magnification), and the spores stream into the air at a speed of 45 miles per hour and scatter like shotgun pellets. Simultaneous discharge, or “puffing,” of groups of asci on the head of a small morel aerosolizes an estimated 100 million spores over the course of two or three days. All eight spores discharged from the ascus are visible (two are out of focus) in the fourth frame of the composite figure constructed from the video recording; the scale bar is 0.1 mm in length. The video was captured with a Photron camera at 250,000 frames per second by Dr. Jessica Stolze-Rybczynski, in Nik Money’s lab at Miami University, Oxford, Ohio. Click here to download the video (very small 200KB .AVI file).