Chicken-of-the-woods

Dan was in San Francisco last weekend to see his sister Rada, and at their suggestion we all went out for Mexican food in the Mission, followed by mojitos which she bought for us (yay!) at a bar whose name I regretfully can't remember. Two days later I was back in San Francisco tonight for a Biosystematists' meeting at the California Academy of Sciences. Jennifer and I met up with Chris and Andy, and we initially went to a fancy hotel where Andy said his boss had called ahead to let him and three friends eat Filipino food for free. We arrived to discover that they had never heard of us, that the event was a centennial gala for a Filipino-American society with a full evening of events, and yet somehow they let us in anyway. We ended up leaving because it became apparent that not only were they not going to start on time, but it really was not the sort of event where you can eat free food and then leave thirty minutes later. There are limits to being a grad student.

The meeting was very well attended, and was on the theme of "conservation and systematics". Normally I think of this as meaning the use of systematics to identify evolutionarily unique species within clades or some other large-scale approach that is not very justifiable to people who actually do conservation. However, the talks and panel focused more on identifying distinct populations or groups of populations within a species, and whether such subspecies are biologically meaningful, with a very clear application to the Endangered Species Act. The problem, of course, is that subspecies can and do interbreed, so the genes you look at might not form a distinct monophyletic group, even if the "subspecies" is a real and distinct group of populations; furthermore, you can have lots of distinctive local adaptation that isn't reflected at all in the genes you look at. So what are we supposed to conserve? It all made my head hurt, and it made a bunch of Berkeley and Davis professors start arguing with each other until the moderator told us it was time to leave.

Here's a mushroom, Laetiporus sulphureus or chicken-of-the-woods, which I found on Friday growing out of the base of a eucalyptus tree behind Moffitt on campus.