Learning about Mushrooms, Identification, Toxins and More
The Mushrooms 101 Room was created several years ago to offer an introduction to fungi for those persons attending the Fair who were unfamiliar with the identification of the strange things they saw growing on their lawns and in the woods. Since then the classes have evolved to include other topical subjects such as mushroom poisonings. Check the schedule below and see what you can learn!
Mushrooms 101 Schedule
Friday, January
Saturday, January
Sunday, January
Speaker Bios
Philip Carpenter
Philip Carpenter has been a mushroom picker (versus "hunter") all of his life, having started picking midwest morels at a very early age. He has been pursuing mycology for over 30 years in California. He has been a member of the Fungus Federation of Santa Cruz for the full 25 years since it was founded, and has been an officer in the club for at least 23 of those years.
Except for a class given by David Arora in 1978, his extensive knowledge of mushrooms is self-taught. He has been associated with the Santa Cruz Fungus Fair for over 30 years and has been the chairperson or co-chairperson for nearly 10 years. Phil is often called upon to identify mushrooms for club members and in poisoning cases.
David Rust
David Rust is co-founder of the Bay Area Mycological Society (BAMS!). He has helped organize three All California Club Forays and coordinated the Mycoblitz cooperative science forays at Point Reyes National Seashore. He has given talks at the Point Reyes Fungus Fair, Santa Cruz Fungus Fair, the Cascade Mycological Society, the Colorado Mycological Society, and the Alameda Natural Grocery.
He has followed research on the devastating forest pathogen Phytophthora ramorum, which causes the disease known as Sudden Oak Death (SOD). He is a member of the California Oak Mortality Task Force. Rust has written for Mushroom The Journal on the discovery and science of SOD.
David is Region 11 Trustee of the North American Mycological Association (NAMA), co-chair of NAMA's Marketing Committee, and is last year's recipient of NAMA's Presidents Award for Outstanding Service for his work on the NAMA website.
Debbie Viess
Debbie Viess, aka "Amanitarita", is a trained biologist, writer and artist who has been seriously obsessed with the study of all things fungi for over fifteen years. She is co-founder of the Bay Area Mycological Society (BAMS!), the newest and most dynamic, science-centric mushroom club in the San Francisco Bay Area. She has written about mushrooms extensively both online and in print, and has lectured about mushrooms to mushroom enthusiasts and the general public across the country. In March, 2008 she produced an extensive, illustrated lecture on California Amanitas for the U.C. Berkeley Natural History Museums for a "Science Cafe."
Viess has taught mushroom classes through the California Academy of Sciences, Albany Adult School, the Audubon Society, UC Berkeley Botanical Gardens and Pt. Reyes Field Seminars. Debbie was most recently published in Manzanita, the journal of the Friends of Regional Parks Botanic Garden. Her lead article, East Bay Amanitas: The Good, the Bad, and the Beautiful, has generated quite a bit of interest.
Henry Young
Henry is an amateur mycologist who has collected and studied fungi for 30 years. He started by taking identification classes with David Arora. He joined the Fungus Federation of Santa Cruz in 1986 and has been a board member since 1987. Henry attended the San Francisco State University “Spring Fungi of the Sierra Nevada” course taught by Dr. Dennis Desjardin and several other workshops and classes dealing with various aspects of mycology.
He has been a contributor to mushroom identification for the Santa Cruz and San Francisco Fungus Fairs. His name is on the call list at local hospitals to help identify mushrooms in poisoning cases. In between giving classes at the Fair, he works at the identification table helping to identify mushrooms.
In addition, locally, Young has led several forays at nearby state parks, and with Phil Carpenter he has taken groups of students from UCSC out to hunt during mushroom season. Besides a general interest in all types of fungi Henry has a particular interest in ascomycetes and lichens. Henry is also a member of BAMS and NAMA and has attended several national forays.