The Annual General Meeting of the Mycological Society of Toronto will be held this year on Wednesday, May 29th at 7:30pm, online via Zoom.
At the Annual Meeting the financial statements from the previous year are reviewed, resolutions for the upcoming year are decided, and MST members elect the incoming Board of Directors.
We have a fantastic AGM planned for you!
Fabulous prizes and games (trivia questions and a door prize of one $75 gift card from Forbes Wild Foods
Participate in the board election
Efficient – we are going to keep the meeting around 45 minutes, so have your whole evening free afterwards!
Remember, this is your MST. All members have a voice and a vote - so if you have an interest in shaping the activities and the future direction of the MST, please attend! We're looking forward to seeing as many members, old and new, as possible at this year's Annual Meeting.
As part of the MST's membership in the Myco-Consortium series of Zoom talks, MST members are invited to join the presentation on Thursday, May 9th at 7:30pm ET:
Fungal World Wonders
A talk by Bob Blanchette Thursday May 9th, 7:30pm ET
About Bob Blanchette
Bob Blanchette is a professor in the Department of Plant Pathology at the University of Minnesota where he teaches classes and carries out research on the biology and ecology of fungi that grow on and attack trees and wood. He has studied fungi around the globe, from Minnesota’s old growth temperate forests to the rainforests of the Amazon and tropical forests of Asia, as well as many investigations on fungi in the Arctic and Antarctic. His studies on wood decay processes have led to many collaborative projects internationally, to help conserve ancient and historic woods including sunken ships, Old Kingdom Egyptian wooden statues, King Midas’ Tomb, expedition huts in Antarctica built by Scott and Shackleton, and many others. He also has been involved with many ethnomycological investigations to understand better how Indigenous People from different parts of the world used forest fungi. A few of his current studies include investigating gigantic bioluminescent fungal networks in the Ecuadorean Amazon, using fungi to control invasive exotic species such as the emerald ash borer and buckthorn, and the taxonomy of Ganoderma and other polypores.
Since the MycoConsortium of the Northeast is filled with people that have great interest in fungi, this presentation will focus on some of the wonders of the fungal world that Bob has encountered over the past decades. These examples are in his top list of fungi that represent the extraordinary nature of the fungal kingdom – they are fungi with a WOW factor.
As part of the MST's membership in the Myco-Consortium series of Zoom talks, MST members are invited to join the presentation on Sunday, April 28th at 11:00am ET:
Not All Coral Fungi Are Ramaria: Field Characters and Taxonomy of Ramarioid Fungi Within the Order Gomphaceae
A talk by Martin Axegård Sunday April 28th, 11:00am ET
About Martin Axegård
Martin Axegård fell down the Ramaria rabbit hole 3 years ago. Ramaria are some of the most conspicuous members of basidiomycota – colorful, prolific, and frequently growing to an impressive size. They have a reputation of being hard to identify. Martin took this “bad rep” as a provocation and leapt into all the literature on the subject, picking up basic mycological Italian along the way. He is now one of the top Ramaria experts in the EU, particularly in the Nordic countries, with a proficiency for identifying them by macroscopic characters. Over the past 2 years, he has sequenced over 500 collections of Ramaria, providing a more complete picture of species occurring in Sweden. This work has demonstrated that many species have a strictly boreal distribution and are undescribed. He is a board member of Stockholms svampvänner (‘Stockholm’s Mushroom Friends’).
Roy Halling's presentation Getting a grip on Boletes: from there to here is now available to MST members to watch on the meetings video page.
Mushrooms with spongy pores under the cap (boletes) are widespread around the globe and are well-known for their occurrence in both temperate and tropical forest habitats and woodlands. They can be quite large (well over a foot across) or very small (less than a half inch in diameter). Species recognition is often fairly straight forward while generic concepts have been subject to a north temperate bias due to historical precedence. Morphological diagnoses (both macro and micro) have been the primary bases for distinguishing one entity from another. With expanded access to, and increased exploration of under explored parts of the world, especially the southern hemisphere and the tropics, increased complexity and diversity of boletes has become evident. Also, with the recent development of techniques to analyze DNA, the testing of hypotheses on evolutionary relationships among morphologically based distinctions has come under scrutiny. Examples derived from an expanded biogeographic sampling and DNA testing illustrate the dissection of the original broad concepts of Boletus, Leccinum, and Tylopilus.
Roy Halling was born in Iowa and grew up in Southern California. He received his B.A. from California State University Stanislaus, his M.A. from San Francisco State University, and PhD from University of Massachusetts. A three-year post-doc at Harvard University’s Farlow Herbarium came about before his posting at the New York Botanical Garden. He is a Curator Emeritus of Mycology at the New York Botanical Garden, where he carried out research on the classification, systematics, biogeography, and diversity of mushrooms. Roy has been involved in exploration, inventory, and documentation of fungal diversity via field work around the world in northern and southern temperate zones as well as the neo- and paleotropics. Field efforts in these areas have added substantially to general knowledge on tropical and temperate fungi. Recently, explorations have emphasized surveys to document the diversity, evolutionary & mycorrhizal relationships, and distribution of the Boletineae (a suborder of porcini-like mushrooms). International collaboration with other specialists has been underway on systematics, biogeography and phylogeny of Bolete mushrooms with particular emphasis in Australia and SE Asia. He has authored or co-authored over 120 scientific publications. He has mentored undergraduate interns, honors students, and four PhD candidates. He served the mycological community as President of the Mycological Society of America, a society from which he received recognition as a Fellow of the MSA and as a Distinguished Mycologist.
