Good Mushroom Year

The last few weeks have brought an amazing bloom of mushrooms in these parts. Here’s me in the middle of a faerie ring of Russula. We don’t know the species, but this one appears to be an ectomycorrhizal symbiont of oak trees (as are many of the common basidiomycetes around here). The outbreak of mushrooms has been a boon for my lab because we have started some studies on native mushroom feeding Drosophila. We collected some of these Russula and placed them in a container as a bait in order to trap the flies by netting them. (You can also use store bought mushrooms for this, but for the purposes of the experiment, we wanted to use the same kinds of mushrooms as the flies had already been eating [as larvae].) Males of the mushroom feeding species also use the mushrooms as lekking sites.

It has always mystified me why so many people have the urge to eat wild mushrooms. Given that some are incredibly poisonous, it never seemed to me to be worth messing around with them. Of course, many of them are edible and some are incredibly tasty. Still, I’m happy with the ones from the store.

Stupid species names

Most of the hundreds of species of Drosophila, the organism my lab group and I work on, have perfectly good names (here is a list of the small subset of Drosophila species that are in a database of hosts of known endosymbiotic bacteria; Mateos, M., Castrezana, S.J., Nankivell, B.J., Estes, A.M., Markow, T.A., and Moran, N.A. (2006) Heritable Endosymbionts of Drosophila. Genetics 174: 363–376.).

Some really nice names are: D. albomicans, D. melanica, and D. palustris


But some species names are just stupid. These are often species named after people, but the Latin suffix system for species (seemingly not manditory for species but compulsory at the family level) is frequently, I feel, cumbersome and ridiculous.

Today's winner: Drosophila busckii

I really have no idea what the species is named after (a person perhaps; it was originally described by a taxonomist named Coquillett in 1901 and had the original name buskii; I don't know why it was change later or by whom). No offense, but whatever it was: bad move. Somewhere there are some "rules" for naming new species, either descriptively, by geographic location, or after people. It seems pretty arbitrary to me, so I think there should be an obligation to make species names that roll off the tongue and are easy to spell. Anyone who refuses to do so is kind of like someone whose name is Bartholemew and insists on being called Bartholemew and not Bart. Probably not a person I would want to hang out with.