Caught a video from Paul where he was using a thermal camera to investigate whether A. muscaria fruiting bodies were at ambient temperature or produced some identifiable heat compared to the background. In it he made a comment about the ambient temperature reaching substrate temperature being a pinning trigger. Can anyone corroborate this or bring some more information on the matter to my attention? I have been growing for 14 years now but this is the first I am hearing of this. It does not seem like the sort of thing one would overlook and I do not recall ever reading about it here. Kind of embarrassing if I missed it after all this time.
The clip was from November 2016 so maybe the comment was part of his research at the time or maybe it is a technique he keeps on the DL at his production facility? I will email FP to see if they will confirm, deny or even comment on it. If it is a data-driven claim then I assume it would be on his curated reference site but I do not have much time to perform a literature review because I am busy collecting data for my next journal article. I should have some free time to sift through the references this weekend unless someone wants to do that sooner.
If this has the potential to be a real thing but there are limited data on it, and anyone wants to put in some time to investigate the phenomenon with me, then by all means chime in or send a DM. We could design the experiment as a group and get it published in an amateur mycology journal like McIlvainea without much trouble. I think that would be fun. There is access to professional support for editing and publication here since my lab is always writing and publishing. We also have Origin and Adobe Illustrator to compile professional looking figures. I was thinking we might swap and use the same cultures of a few different species and try to grow them independently across whatever experimental and control conditions we arrive at, then run some basic statistics from there to see if there is a relationship. This is obviously in the initial phase of the process and so there is ground to cover as far as working out the materials and methods involved, but I am game if you are.
This kind of necessitates some experience growing several species of mushroom and also the ability to accurately and precisely control and monitor temperatures. People who fall into that capability set would be ideal for this. Unless it has been done before and I missed it
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