Citizen Science: Collecting Specimens.
This is turkey-tail, which a lot of people are looking for these days, because it's got some amount of cancer-fighting properties. If you're collecting for science, what we want is some of the wood. so that in the future somebody could identify what kind of wood this was, if they want to, from the cell structure in the wood.
So, I'm going to cut the bottom of this. It's pretty tough in this case. So, I have a little bit of the wood here. So, what I do sometimes is look for a live tree that has the same bark. Try and match up the bark with something nearby.
Turkey-tail has these bright white pores and the hairy zones on the top. So, what we want to do is put it in a wax bag and this will keep it from drying out.
So, we've got that turkey-tail we've found on that log and we've found this tree that has the same bark, and turns out to be a black cherry. So, now that we've identified what kind of tree the turkey-tail was growing on, what I do, so I don't forget, is I take one of my little slips of paper and write, in this case, dead black cherry, because it was on the dead one. And I put this in the bag with the specimen. So, when I get back home later today and process these I'll have the information of what it was growing on.
Illinoismyco.org ; mycoguide.com
