Earth’s secret miracle worker: fungi

It was pointed out to me kind of recently (I guess I'd never thought that much about it before) that the explanation for why we have fossil fuels today has something to do with a longish gap (150 million years or so) between when plants evolved lignin and could become trees, and when fungi caught up and developed ligninases to break them down. So during that long gap, trees could just fall over and remain that way long enough to get buried and become fuel. Today they'd just promptly become shroom food.

 

Some local tree eaters.

 

Our foraging season is almost over now. We had a very good matsutake harvest this year. Other mushrooms such as maitake (aka hen of woods), chanterelles, black trumpets, King Bolete, puffballs, shaggy mane, horse mushrooms, meadow mushrooms, oysters are all good eats. I inoculated ~100 logs with shiitake spores last year, but they have not produced fruitbodies yet. We make use of Aspergillus oryzae, the same fungus used for sake brewing, in our miso making. Oh, year, we also have Kombucha which is a symbiotic culture of bacteria and yeast (aka SCOBY).

 

If you have had only cultured shiitake grown on sawdust sold in a supermarket, wait to taste the real log grown shiitake. BBQ on a grill with a dub of soy sauce, you will be in heaven.

 

and psychedelics!

 

Welcome aboard, fungal fans!

A recent movie you might be able to see:

Fantastic Fungi: A film by Louie Schwartzberg on Mycelial Connection

While foraging, please bear in mind that many tasty mushrooms are similar in appearance to poisonous ones. Leading to a somewhat famous quote "All mushrooms are edible - once".

The largest organism on earth is

Strange but True: The Largest Organism on Earth Is a Fungus - Scientific American

(although it could be challenged by a big clump of clonal aspens in Utah)

Some fungi emit spores at an acceleration of 180,000 times that of earth's gravity. That would do more than knock your socks off

https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0003237

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The coal/fungal thing was first speculated in 1952 (it seems) but took a long time to catch on. So don't feel too bad for getting to the party late

Permian mass extinction may have been caused by fungi getting way too frisky on land, but that idea has faded. Even so there is a unique pile of fungal spores showing that after the cause (frisky Siberian volcanoes or a space rock), fungi ate all the dead stuff.

Way back before all that (and before coal), marine algae washed ashore and ... died, mostly. Somehow some hooked up with fungi and invented roots, and then there could be land plants.

Of all human-developed plastics, fungi are able to break down all of them except for ABS plastic. Probably only because no one has looked carefully enough. There are many weirder human-developed chemicals, and fungi eat those as well. Bioremediation of soils.

So, on balance, fungi seem to be handy to have around. Many amphibians and bats would disagree, but we can save that for later.

 

and then there's athletes foot, jock itch, ringworm, and a host of other fun fungus amongus

 

I could not guess how many fungal diseases afflict plant and animal kingdoms. A lot. Includes 1.5 million human fatalities per year. There are many similarities between human and fungal physiology, so many excellent fungus killing chemicals do you too. So that's a problem.

At the same time, the endless warfare between fungi and bacteria means that fungi have been sources of many anti-bacteria medicines. I do not know if those save more than 1.5 million human lives per year.

 

Steve McQueen's breakout movie success.

 

Fungal diseases on plants (we eat) are an excellent choice if one wants to indict Kingdom Mycota.

 

You have said little to explain why I can go buy a sack of n oranges at the grocery, and bring them home, where they all sit in the sack piled up on each other, and I look at them later in the week and have n − 1 perfectly fine oranges unaffected by that other one right there in the same sack that has gone furry all over and even removing it from the sack is some kind of hazmat operation launching spores at (what seems like) 180,000 g.

... and the rest in the bag will still be fine for 3 weeks more or so.

 

True. Let me try. Those n oranges came from <n trees, one of which trees had flies or mites punching fungal spores into a fruit you got. Those flies or mites may have little interest in that work (they were drilling for sugar water), but their puncher-thingees were contaminated by spores. I speculate that other fruits on the infected tree were fuzzy at time of harvest, but those fruits were not taken. Further that the fuzzy is a Penicilium (a genus also known for anti-bacterial medicine mentioned above).

Penicilium is not a spore launcher. It is a slouch in this regard. Without transfer agents, there would be a lot less of it 'going around'. But ecology is a jumble of intention and accident, if I may say so.

Oranges (fruits of Rutaceae in general) have surfaces that have evolved to be unwelcoming to airborne spores. They are not slouches in this regard. But they are not 'punch proof'. I don't know how they could become so without major overhaul of architecture, because a fraction of a millimeter under the surface are cells very amenable to Penicilium growth.

Fuzzy fruit fungi did the best they could, but lacked transfer agents to complete this task in your bag.

There may be more to the story because citrus growers have worse fungi than this to deal with, and can use high-power fungicides before fruit filling, and post harvest includes detergent washoff, so those fungicides would never reach your lips. But nobody expected the Spanish Exposition

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Finally, peel that fuzzy orange and eat it happily. The part you eat has low pH and fuzzy cannot grow there. Even if you are sloppy with hand action, your low-pH stomach protects you.

Emphatically this is not the case with all fungal-infected foods but that should be a story deferred.

 

The last such fuzzy one I removed from a bag literally left a pile of spores just from my handling it. Probably not quite a tablespoon. I suppose you're right about it not being much of a launcher, or it wouldn't have made a nice pile.

How to get the pile out of the kitchen was a matter of some puzzlement. My first instinct with powdery things is to dampen them to keep them down, but I've learned to expect surprises from spores. They often seem to be quite hydrophobic and any attempt to dampen or mist them just makes (dry!) clouds of them.

 

Water with detergent and something like Clorox (TM). Work slowly and wear your COVID face mask. Not against Penicilium per se, but there may be other angry fungi and bacteria now in the mix.

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I do not want to terrify readers, but in confronting any microbial free for all, you should protect YOUR DAMN LUNGS. Top priority.

I do want to terrify readers not to home brew their own penicillin. I just now saw a website promoting that and shall never provide a link to any like it. Don't sicken and die from idiots' advice. I had no idea that 'preppers' could be so evil.

 

Oh yeah. hydrophobic things ... detergent ...

I knew that .......

 

A couple more wood eaters I noticed yesterday:


(Second one may just be growing in mulch atop the stump, not sure.)

 

On the possible terrify reader front, death cap mushrooms continue to spread across North America.
https://slate.com/technology/2014/02/most-dangerous-mushroom-death-cap-is-spreading-but-poisoning-can-be-treated.html

On the fascinating fugal front, their successful spreading is do to transferring to new host trees. "Fungi such as the death cap are ectomycorrhizal, meaning that they live symbiotically on the roots of trees. The fungus extends from the roots to form a network in the soil, called a mycelium, which is much finer than tree roots. The mycelium can more easily reach nutrients like nitrogen and phosphorous than the tree can, and it trades these nutrients with the tree in exchange for sugars, which the tree makes using photosynthesis." The death cap came in with European oaks, then moved over to native oaks, and are now found living with pines. Such species jump for a symbiotic organism is quite rare.