Veteran Mycologist Rejects 'Too Good to be True' Morel Photo as 'Clearly a High-Resolution JPEG Artifact'

Silas Driscoll heard the verdict from the doorway, four feet from a laptop, before his housemate had zoomed in on anything: "That leaf edge is wrong."

The photograph had been up eleven minutes on the society's identification thread. It showed a rise of leaf litter beneath bare hardwoods, and morels, more than a person expects from one patch, arranged the way nobody arranges them. The poster had captioned it "too good to be true" and asked, politely, what he was looking at.

Dennis Farrow answered first, as he has answered first for most of four decades: "Clearly a high-resolution JPEG artifact." He attached his own copy of the image with arrows drawn along the cap edges where, he wrote, the compression had "invented detail the lens never saw." He did not zoom out. He did not need to.

What followed was not an identification. It was an audit.

Farrow requested the original file. The poster sent a second photograph of the same ground, taken from a lower angle. Farrow called it "a stabilized re-render." A third member asked to see the poster's hands in frame, so the poster sent a short video of himself turning over leaf litter beside the patch, and Farrow noted, correctly, that a video is a sequence of stills and therefore a sequence of artifacts.

"I don't distrust the man," Farrow wrote. "I distrust the pixels."

Nadia Evers, who runs the Tuesday walks that share half the society's membership, posted that the season, the substrate and the broad shape were all consistent with what her own group had turned up that week. Within the hour she was defending herself against the charge that she had signed in under someone else's name.

Vera Pike proposed the compromise: label the thread provisional pending a second identifier, leave the photograph up, and stop circling things in red. The poster said Vera had called him a fraud. Farrow said Vera had called a fraud a find. Both were wrong, and both blamed her for the outcome.

A second identifier walked the ground with the poster the following morning and put her name to the thread. The find stands. Nobody has withdrawn the word artifact.

The committee now wants a rule. A photograph showing more than a dozen specimens, the draft reads, must carry a second identifier's name before the find counts toward the season tally. Nobody has yet defined a dozen.

Three newer members have carried the thread's central term into their own replies. Anything they distrust is now "an artifact." One of them applied it to a photograph of a fern, which is neither compressed nor, in that instance, in dispute. It is the first foraging term this desk has watched newcomers learn to say before they learn to use.

Farrow posted his own find on Thursday: one specimen, a hand for scale, shot close and flat in overcast light. It drew four replies within the hour. The second read, "Looks composited." The third, from the poster whose patch had been confirmed by two identifiers, read: "Spore print?"