Moths, Owls And Fungi With Over 20,000 Sexes...Oh My!
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You're listening to Shortwave from NPR.
What's up, Tutorinos? It's Emily Kwong. And Burleigh McCoy, freshly back from parental leave. And Emily, today I hear you recently embarked on some late-night reporting in the woods under the cover of darkness. Yeah. So is this your way of telling us you're a spy? Would a spy reveal that? Okay, my thoughts exactly. But seriously, what were you doing out there? Well, Burleigh, I was on a night hike.
So in about two minutes, we'll get started. Okay.
Meanwhile, enjoy yourself.
It was a tromp through Patuxent River State Park in Maryland, hosted by a group of naturalists, people trained in gathering observations and educating people about the environment. Now, naturalists lead hikes all over the world, but not all of them like this crew hand out homemade banana bread. That was pretty cool. And UV lights provided by our leader.
Hi, my name is Serenella Linares. I'm the facility director at Mount Rainier Nature Center and the program's chair of the Mycological Association of Washington, D.C.
Okay, so Serenella is a mushroom expert? Yeah, along with other fungi. She's been leading nature walks since 2013, and tonight I really wanted to see the forest through her eyes. to know what flaps and flutters and fluoresces when the sun goes down in winter.
It is a night for nature magic. Bioluminescence, fluorescence of fungi and lichens, of insects that fly in the night and are attracted to the bait that we have set up.
So I should really try to listen very closely to everything.
We will have a...
And that's what I want to do with you today, Burleigh. I want to just get real quiet and listen to the sounds of a winter's night when everything is dead or dormant. Or is it? Okay.
Today on the show, we are taking you on a night hike through the Patuxent River watershed in search of owls and salamanders and maybe, if we're lucky, a bioluminescent mushroom. You're listening to Shortwave, the science podcast from NPR. All right, Emily. So you went on this night hike last month. Set the scene for us. What does this park look like?
No idea, because it was so dark. And we don't have half of these critters' night vision.
Okay, this makes sense.
But I know that the park, because I looked at a map, sits along the Patuxent River, which flows into Maryland's Chesapeake Bay. We were bundled in our winter coats, and the first stop along our night hike was a patch of lichen growing along a tree just off the parking lot.
Remind me, what are lichen exactly?
Yeah, lichen is that stuff that grows on trees. It kind of looks like seaweed, but it's actually a hybrid colony of fungi and algae in a symbiotic relationship. To show us, Serenella dramatically shines her flashlight up the tree trunk.
Nothing out of the ordinary, right? That blue-gray lichen color, everything looks pretty much the same.
Serenella then flips on her UV light and the patch of green lichen totally changes. And it suddenly glowed. Neon yellow. The lichen, one particular part of it was fluorescing. So absorbing the ultraviolet light from the flashlight and emitting visible light.
Oh, and I'm just looking at the pictures you just sent me, and this is like neon, neon yellow.
Yeah, it was like the Las Vegas strip. Natalie Howe, an ecologist with the U.S. Department of Agriculture, steps forward and shoves her face into the tree bark.
If you come up real close, you can sort of tell that there's a lot of diversity there because there's some that are a little yellower, some that are a little grayer. There's a lot of green.
She sounds so excited. So we take a UV light and get up close to that tree to look. And pretty soon, Serenella shouts. Oh, Natalie.
What did you find? Oh, orange. That's true. We barely ever see that orange one. They just sound so excited. This sounds like my kind of group. Okay, so like what do the different colors mean?
Yeah, okay. So the yellow lichen is called red. Pyxene subscenaria, and the orange lichen is Pyxene syridiata, and both have chemicals in their tissues which allow them to fluoresce. Okay, but like why? Natalie explained to me that lichen fluoresce as a protective response against ultraviolet light damage from the sun.
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