Nearing the goal line

 

Carbon Experiment bags in drying chamber with 25 hour light to supress mold growth

Hello lovely funders,

Today we began the final stages of the Carbon experiment. Our mushrooms have been doing their thing for a little over a year and we are now drying them out. There was some variablility in outcomes. Some species just didn't like our growth conditions, or one or more of our substrates.

Let's quickly recap: We began with 10 candidate mushroom species. Each species was given a quick training so that we could both access their suitablity to thrive within our growth parameters and to aquaint them to living on wood types they definitely don't live on in the wild. Each group was then inoculated into 5-8 pound bags of a softwood mix and 5-8 pound bags of a hardwood mix. We kept them at room temparaure for the year of growth, monitoring each bags weight and room humdity weekly. They incubated in a 12 hr daylight cycle.

Bags that were contaminated were removed from the main growth chamber but not discarded. We are always looking towards developing better methods of environmental remediation and restoration, so, in the wild contamination is just a fact of life. We just wanted as little cross contamination as possible. The contam bags were kept seperate for the duration. This gives us two classes in the end: ideal and normative. This allows us a "second bite of the apple", and should yield some interesting data.

The ideal group are almost dry and today's weights confirmed what we were already suspecting. Up to one-half of the bone dry mass was gone. Poof. This material had been completely metabolized and exhaled as carbon dioxide and water vapor. Our final paper will explain the chemistry behind this, for now just take away that this is what we were hoping to see. It corresponds perfectly with the mass losses seen in our field tests. Next, we will begin the chemical testing to determine the carbon retained in the remaining mass and what form(s) it is taking.

In the end, this experiment cost twice as much as the amount we raised here on Experiment.com. But without you, we would not have had the momentum to raise this additional funding. Thak You thank thank you. We will continue to post here so that you will be the first to know what we're discoving about nature and its mysterious fungal ways. Kudo's to Kyle H. who has volunteered countless hours to this study.

 

Candidate mushrooms in various states of culturing and training