November General Meeting -- Alan Rockefeller

Join us for our monthly meeting! We gather at the Harvey West Scout House for refreshments and informal mushroom ID from 6:30 – 7:00. Organizers will then provide updates on future forays and other activities, followed by our speakers. Bring along your sense of curiosity and any mushrooms you've found and would like help identifying. 

Alan Rockefeller is our speaker. His subject will be Mushrooms of Mexico and using technology to identify mushrooms.  He will be sharing recent finds from his four months of travel in Mexico this year including several new species of bioluminescent fungi, and the technology using Mushroom Observer, iNaturalist, and other internet forums and DNA sequencing.

Alan Rockefeller is a photographer, computer hacker, biohacker and mushroom identification specialist who currently lives in Oakland, California. In 2001 he began his autonomous studies in the field of mycology, beginning with the collection of fungi in California. Each year since 2007 he has traveled to Mexico to collect mushrooms, and has now photographed more than 1,000 species of fungi from Mexico. Based on phylogenetic and microscopic analysis he has identified several species not described in the scientific literature. Alan regularly identifies mushrooms for several fungus fairs in Mexico and the USA in addition to identifying fungi on websites such as Mushroom Observer, Facebook, the Shroomery and iNaturalist.