joannafolta's Journal

The weather today was in the 70s and it was windy but also sunny. McLain and I went to Houghton Garden again, but this time, we focused on finding plants instead of fungi. We found a few plants on the way to Houghton Garden as well as in Houghton Garden. I found multiple angiosperms (which produce seeds and have fruit and flower) as well as gymnosperms (which have "naked seeds"), non-vascular seedless moss, and vascular seedless ferns. Additionally, I found some lichen (plant and algae/cyanobacteria symbiont) on a tree.

Fun fact: I hate spiders because their multiple eyes and legs creep me out, but instead of freaking out and shaking it off of my pants, I took a picture of one as one of my observations.

Today, I walked through the little forests on Newton Campus. It was pretty sunny and a bit windy outside, but it was around 60° F. In one of the bigger forests, there was a nice path to walk through and the trees blocked the sunlight. I actually found a lot more fungi in Newton than I did in Houghton Garden last week. I found several mushrooms. One of the mushrooms I found was from the genus Cerioporus. A lot of them were hard to identify, but I found small mushrooms that looked like False Turkey-Tail mushrooms. I also found lichen, which is a symbiotic relationship between photosynthetic organisms and fungi. Some other interesting things that I found other than fungi are moss, stinging nettle (which actually stung my hand), oriental bittersweet (which looked like vines), burr seed, and hot pink Pokeberries.

McClain and I walked to Houghton Garden from BC's main campus at around 11:10 am. It was raining before we got there, but it stopped pretty quickly. It was cloudy and humid. So the forest was quite damp. Since the theme of this week was fungi, we tried out best to find fungi. We saw a lot of lichens (which consists of a symbiotic relationship between fungi filaments and algae) on trees. I found two organisms that looked like different types of mold, but it was hard to figure out what exactly they were didn't have very distinctive forms. Later, we also found a few mushrooms on a tree on the way back to campus. (Strangely, we couldn't find any when we were in the forest but found some on a tree next to the sidewalk).

Side note/"Fun" Fact: McClain and I saw a dead rat decaying in the middle of Houghton Garden.