AMS Spring Mushroom Talk Series:

Damon Tighe - Fungi of the Sky Islands

Southeast Arizona provides some of the most unique mushroom hunting habitats in the United States due to mountains rising up off the desert floor making islands in the sky that come monsoon season can be full of mushrooms. Changes in elevation quickly return big changes in flora and funga diversity. This talk will survey mushrooms that were mainly collected during a series of courses in Arizona where DNA sequencing was being used to confirm identities.

Born in Klamath Falls, Oregon and raised in the foothills of California's Sierra Nevada, Damon Tighe attended Saint Mary's College of California for a bachelors in Biology and Chemistry. He taught High School in Portland, Oregon, worked on the Human Genome Project at the national labs in addition to a number of other full genome sequencing projects at the national labs. He now works for Bio-Rad laboratories helping high schools and colleges bring modern biology techniques into their classrooms. He first got interested in mushrooms when he ran out of food on the 220 mile John Muir Trail in California and remembers seeing porcini, but not knowing if he could eat them. That spark of interest started a 10+ year passion for learning to identify mushrooms and being completely in awe of the diversity and ecology of these organisms. Damon in a big user of iNaturalist, a community science tool for documenting species biogeography. HIs love for fungi has led him to doing formal surveys as far away as Ecuador and informal surveys in Australia and Indonesia. 

Once registered for this FREE AMS event, you will receive a reminder email before the meeting with the zoom link.

This meeting will also be recorded.