All things mushroomy. Wonderful read about fungi and the people who love them.
Scientists have found that only 43 percent of the cells that make up our corporeal form are actually human; the majority of what counts as "us" comprises bacteria, fungi, and other microbes. For every human gene in our bodies, there are 360 microbial genes.
Fossils in Quebec and elsewhere paint the picture of a 400-million-year-old world in which the largest things living on land were the prototaxites, twenty-five-foot-tall spires of what appear to have been a kind of lichen – themselves entanglements of fungi and photosynthesizing algae – that loomed over Ordovician landscapes like blind watchtowers.
Many [spores] are saprobes, which means they make meals of dead and decaying organic matter, often leaf litter or dead and dying trees.
Amanita muscaria, also called the fly agaric, is uniquely charged with spiritual and cultural association. [...] Anyone who came of age in the 1980s or later may well think of Super Mario Bros., and the power-up that embiggens the pixelated plumber with a satisfying chiptune thrill. The emoji symbol for mushrooms is modeled on the muscaria.
The sclerotia formed by Claviaceps purpurea, a rye ergot, causes trembling and sweating when consumed, along with intense hallucinations, such as the strong feeling of being covered in insects (a phenomenon called formication) a scourge known in the middle-ages as Saint Anthony's fire. Ergotism has also been convincingly linked to the mad behavior reported in the Massachusetts witch trials.
"A lot of fungi living in soil are prone to being attacked or eaten in some way by other microbes, or worms or nematodes, and copper is like an insecticide," said Stevenson, clearly enamored with the sheer cleverness of these fungi. "They actually glom it on, they 'paint' themselves with the copper as a form of shielding, making themselves toxic to possible predators."
Should a pine tree's nitrogen start running low, its associated Laccaria bicolor fungus will release a toxin that kills and springtails unlucky enough to be nearby, conscripting them into the role of emergency fertilizer.
Every part of a fungus, mushroom and mycelium alike, is made of hyphae, which are "totipotent." That means every single cell can start a whole new organism, multiplying into mycelia that ultimately produce mushrooms.
remember the taxonomic ranks of domains, kingdoms, phylum, class, order, family, genus and species with the mnemonic: Don't Kick Puffballs 'Cause Other Fungi Get Suspicious.
S. cerevisiae is the workhorse species of brewers (and bakers) the world over, responsible for the "clean" flavor of porters and IPAs (the sharp flavor of which comes from the hops); S. pastorianus are the lower temperature "bugs" (the industry term for yeast) used for lagers. On the other end of the flavor spectrum are the Brettanomyces, or "bretts," widely considered a contaminant in brewing for the "horse blanket" notes they produce. However, the "off" flavors generated by bretts can be exciting for those with adventurous palettes, showing up in Belgian lambics for reasons we'll get into.
the trend in beer had been swinging away from "funky" and toward "clean," the quality most associated with lagers. A variety of fast-acting, very clean strains of Norwegian yeasts called kveik were gaining popularity. Genetically distinct from the traditional brewer's varieties, kveik yeast was traditionally stored on a "kveik ring", a wooden assemblage that resembled a spine folded into a circle buried for safekeeping in stable subterranean temperature, or soaked into a cloth and then dried.
Cordyceps (cordies or cheetos, to those in the know) are subjects of intense passion for a growing number of young mycophiles across North America. They're at the center of a growing community of indepedent, tinkering cultivators. [...]
Another reason for the rising profile of these fungi is the shocking lifestyle they've evolved. Cordyceps are entomopathogenic, meaning they kill insects. But they don't just kill them. One of the scenarios most often recounted plays out like a scene from The Body Snatchers. It starts when the spores of a certain species of Cordyceps take root in the carapace of an ant–different species target different insects. Hyphae then thread throughout the insect's tiny body, eventually seizing control of its nervous system. The ant becomes, in effect, a living zombie, unwittingly stumbling up a nearby branch, inevitably one that sits directly over the path most used by its hive mates. Then, its final, irresistible impulse, is to latch its jaws upon the twig, dying as the mycelium finally consumes all of the insect's innards. After that comes the unsettling coda; out of the back of the ant's tiny neck slithers a slender "stroma," its surface bristling and primed to rain spores down upon the next group of unfortunate ants below.
Triops–they're similar to sea monkeys in that their eggs can be dried up and reanimated.
There are more than four hundred species of Cordyceps, each associated with a specific insect: spiders, grasshoppers, wasps, to name a few. In Tibet, Ophiocordyceps sinensis and its host moth larvae are methodically plucked from the foothills of the Himalayas. Locally known as yarza g"unbu, or "winter worm, summer grass," it is regarded as a potent aphrodisiac, often fetching a higher price than gold, always with the insect still attached.
In North America, alongside mushrooms like lion's mane, maitake, turkey tail, and Chaga, Cordyceps has emerged at the center of a fast-growing domestic market for medicinal fungi, representing an industry that is expected to exceed $50 billion by 2025.
The medicinal benefits of Cordyceps are largely credited to a special compound it produces, called cordycepin. The compound has been associated with anti-cancer, anti-fatigue, anti-inflammatory, immune and sexual function-boosting properties, among other benefits, elevating it to the realm of fungal superfood, complete with the full range of branding and value-added products that term implies.
The main wood-rotting fungi are called white rot, brown rot, and soft rot, so named for the appearance of the digested lumber they leave behind. White rotters are among the few living things that can break down lignin, a durable, water-repellent polymer that's essential to circulation in trees and other vascular plants. What these fungi leave behind is pale cellulose, hence the name white rotter. Brown rot fungi, on the other hand, eat cellulose and leave behind lignin, often in regular cubic chunks. When your newspaper turns yellow, it's because of a reaction between sunlight and the lignin lingering in the underrefined pulp. Soft rot fungi are similar to brown rot, and the two are often confused, although soft rot typically prefer higher moisture and lower lignin content, and create unique patterns of decay.
Slime molds are easy to picture even if you've never seen one. Physarum polycelphalum, a particularly well-studied species, takes the form of a gelatinous, bronze-colored goo. This is the plasmodium, a slithering slime that moves in glacially slow, searching waves comprised of pulsing, veinlike masses. To witness their movements requires use of microscopes, or time-lapse video, in which they look and behave exactly like the Blob. Usually just a few inches wide, but sometimes as large as two feet in diameter, they're commonly found in foamy splotches on the trunks of trees, with an appearance that is often aptly compared to dog vomit.
Despite such inauspicious associations, the more you interrogate a plasmodial slime mold, the more you understand why they've become subjects of intense interes in recent decades. Mathematicians, city planners, game designers, astrophysicists, computer engineers, researchers in all manner of fields have found deep insights and mysteries alike in slime molds. Why? For one, they are living examples of emergence, collections of simple individual parts that together exhibit complex behavior.
They are quite distinct from fungi. For one thing, they move. Rather than reaching into and absorbing their food, as fungal hyphae do, slime molds seek out and enshroud their meals within a sort of improvised stomach. Their proper name reflects a somewhat ambiguous nature: Myxomycota, or Mycetozoa, which translates literally to "fungus animal." The word polycephalum translates to "many heads," a nod to the organism's decentralized nature, and suggestive of its ability to optimize, decide, and even remember.
Plasmodial slime molds are actually a single-celled amoeba, composed of free-floating nuclei. Yet the plasmodium can also decide to reorganize itself into millions of individual cells–from an individual to a multitude.
Dussutour and her colleagues used a similar arrangement, only this time with a somewhat less distressing substance: salt. Test Physarum were "trained" on salt, once again developing an indifference toward the tainted bridges. But this time, instead of being given a chance to rest, they were cut into thousands of little pieces. (Don't worry, the slime mold can split and merge quite freely, given a few hours to rebuild their vasculature.) The trained fragments were then combined with the "naïve" slime molds, which had not been exposed to salt. The results showed that, when the trained and the naïve slime molds were combined into a single organism, the resulting blob retained the "learned" behavior of its trained portion.
It turns out you can teach a mindless blob new tricks. Build a maze with food at the other end, and after a bit of slithering exploration, the Physarum reliably and quickly finds the shortest possible route to its meal. In one of the best-known experiments, a team of Japanese and English researchers, led by Toshiyuki Nakagaki at Hokkaido University, laid out a miniature map of Tokyo and thirty-six surrounding towns inside a petri dish. Slime molds aren't much interested in tourism, so the scientists represented the cities with oat flakes of various sizes. A Physarum was then unleashed from the center, which began stretching out to explore its surroundings in its perpetual quest for food.
At first, it expanded like a web, with large arterial channels supporting its many slender exploratory fingers. As it found its oats and noted dead ends–marking them with pheromones, a sort of ani-breadcrumb trail–the least-utilized channels collapsed, leaving behind only those that could best direct the newfound nutrients throughout its body. The overall networks gradually compressed from slender and wide-reaching webs into refined pathways. Over the course of about a day, it had found all the flakes within the boundary of the dish, paring itself down to a lean network that looked remarkably like the Tokyo subway system, taking mere hours to mimic an optimized system of distribution that had taken human engineers years to design.
Throughout the 1970s and '80s, [Keller and Segel] developed mathematical models and experimental evidence showing how the cyclic AMP flows that ran through the Dictyostelium and correlated with a phase shift could be triggered by any combination of individual cells, responding to their local conditions and forming into clusters of activity that then spread out and triggered a totalizing change throughout the organism. These principles could account for the apparent ability of a decentralized, brainless mass of cells to "decide" to disaggregate, no special cells required.
Robin Wall Kimmerer, a professor of forestry at SUNY College of Environmental Science and Forestry at Syracuse, and member of the Great Plains Potawatomi Nation, notes a Potawatomi word that won't be found in a biology textbook: puhpowee, which can mean "the force that causes mushrooms to push up from the earth overnight." In Braiding Sweetgrass, her book about the relationships between science and Indigenous ways of knowing, Kimmerer notes the Potawatomi's animist language, and the difference it makes in the speaker's perception of the world around them.
