Tag: mycology

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Ancient Web: Ways of Enlichenment Built an 11,593-Image Lichen Reference

Ways of Enlichenment begins with a pun and then quietly turns into a serious natural-history reference.

Visit Ways of Enlichenment

The site is devoted to lichens, especially the species of western North America. Its most useful component is a photogallery built as the first phase of a larger online flora.

The gallery reports 11,593 images covering 2,183 species in 397 genera. Images are organized alphabetically, phylogenetically and by visual growth form, with categories such as Flames, Gels, Script Crusts, Button Crusts, Navels, Leafs and Cling-ons.

That is taxonomy translated into browsing.

The site credits Curtis Björk, Trevor Goward, Jason Hollinger and other photographers and specialists. Most images were vetted by Björk and/or Goward, and voucher specimens are available for many critical species.

The gallery itself was generated with Perl scripts maintained by Hollinger.

That sentence alone puts the site firmly in CacheRat territory.

A scientific website with an argument

Ways of Enlichenment is not merely an identification gallery. The surrounding essays ask what a lichen actually is.

The standard answer is already strange: a lichen is an enduring partnership involving a fungus and one or more photosynthetic partners such as algae or cyanobacteria. The site pushes further, asking whether lichens should be understood as organisms, ecosystems, fungal greenhouses, algal farmsteads or emergent properties.

Its planned book project was designed around forest, ground-dwelling and rock-dwelling lichens, with identification keys, species accounts, range maps and broader ecological interpretation.

That combination of hard taxonomy and philosophical curiosity gives the site personality without weakening its usefulness.

The photogallery is particularly valuable because lichen identification is visual and difficult. Growth form, color, surface texture, fruiting structures and substrate all matter. A generic image search may return attractive pictures; a specialist gallery tells you what somebody knowledgeable thought the picture actually showed.

The gallery’s 2019 statistics make the scale concrete: thousands of photographs, thousands of species, hundreds of genera, all sitting behind simple indexes.

The Web is very good at this when people let it be.

Not every useful database needs a dashboard.

Sometimes it needs 11,593 pictures of lichen and a category called “The Cling-ons.”

Explore the Ways of Enlichenment lichen archive

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Ancient Web: Hugh Smith Made a Photo Catalog of Fungi That Grow on Dung

The modern Web is full of sites trying desperately to be about everything. Hugh Erle Smith built a page about mushrooms growing on poop.

That is better.

Visit Hugh Smith’s Dung Fungi page

The page is a simple photographic catalog titled Dung Fungi. Smith identifies the fungus, where and when he photographed it, and—critically for this particular branch of natural history—what kind of dung it was growing on.

Horse manure. Cow manure. Moose dung. Deer dung. Elk dung. Dog feces.

There is no algorithm attempting to determine whether you are emotionally prepared for Phycomyces blakesleeanus on dog shit. You clicked Dung Fungi. You knew what business you were getting into.

Field notes disguised as a web page

The value here is not visual sophistication. It is accumulated observation.

Smith’s examples span years and locations. Entries on the page include Panaeolus semiovatus photographed at Fort Bragg in 2001 and 2011 on horse manure; Panaeolus papilionaceus on cow manure; Protostropharia alcis on female moose dung in Alaska in 2011; Coprinopsis nivea on horse and moose dung; and multiple examples of Phycomyces blakesleeanus growing on dog feces.

That structure turns a gallery into a compact field record. Species, substrate, place, year. Four pieces of metadata, repeated consistently, become more useful than a page full of SEO paragraphs explaining that fungi are “fascinating organisms.”

It also illustrates a recurring strength of personal specialist sites: weird subjects do not need permission.

A magazine editor might reasonably ask whether a multi-year photographic archive of coprophilous fungi could support an issue. A social platform would probably bury it unless somebody found a way to make a mushroom on elk dung controversial. A personal website only has to answer one question: does the person maintaining it care enough to put it online?

Smith clearly did.

The page also preserves the visual culture of the scientific hobbyist Web. Thumbnails lead to larger images. The browser is expected to behave like a browser. The visitor is trusted to click around. No carousel hijacks the mouse. No modal asks for an email address before revealing the moose shit.

That matters because natural-history knowledge is often built from many small observations, not a single grand publication. A photograph with a date, location and substrate can remain useful long after the software around it looks ancient.

CacheRat’s 1,967 Ancient Web Domains research list is full of pages like this: aggressively narrow, deeply personal, and far more interesting than their traffic numbers would ever suggest.

The old Web had room for somebody to spend years documenting mushrooms on animal droppings and publish the evidence for anyone who cared.

That is what a healthy information ecosystem looks like.

Browse Hugh Smith’s Dung Fungi photographs