Contribution from a fun-guy

My old friend Dr. Chips lives in a place with only two seasons, cold wet and cool wet, so he sees a lot  of different things than we do here in the upper midwest.  Time to share an image that he sent along.  Shaggy mane or inky cap are common names of this Coprinus mushroom.  It's pure white inside when fresh, and edible, but it doesn't stay that way long. These are dissolving from the bottom up, a process called autodeliquescence, turning into a black spore-laden liquid.  These mushrooms tend to pop up in groups after a rain. Thanks Dr. C.

Fungus amongus - pays to pay attention

Fall is an excellent time for fungi. So while checking on the condition of this blue spruce (no improvement; no surprise), this handsome orange-brown bracket fungus presented itself. First reaction, the quite familiar "turkey tail" bracket fungus (some species of Trametes)(gray-brown), which had been growing on this particular tree stump.  The rich color was attributed to recent growth, i.e., fresh. Ah, then you notice the "growth" rings seem rather pronounced, and you know how it is with IDs, sometimes it's best to check things.  And, wow, instead of the tiny pores that were expected, there was a mini-labyrinth of ridges, so ID is now not turkey tail. Some genera in this group have been renamed, and TPP's fungal taxonomy is way out of date, so this bracket fungus is what TPP would call Lenzites. Any name updates?  The only species TPP knows is L. betulina. This is pretty common in the upper midwest, but maybe not so further south and west. The last image shows the underside of the two, the tiny pores of the turkey tail (typical of polypores) are just visible. And this how the spruce gets recycled.

Much rooms

June was the 5th wettest on record, most because of a couple of inches of rain right at the end of the month. The gardens, new plants, and some replants got plenty of water, and the lily pond even had to be drained a little. Wish it could be kept for later. Of course, our gardens have lots of mulch, which means lots of nice organic material to decompose, so the fungi have been busy too. The shredded wood mulch has provided us with some nice fungal fruiting bodies. Remember, the fungal organism is a filamentous mycelium, and sometimes you forget they are present except when the reproductive structures appear, and appear they have. Lots of areas have bird nest fungi by the hundreds, little cups with little egg shaped packets of spores (probably a species of Cyathus, but not exactly the species shown). The cups cause rain drops to rebound dispersing the packets of spores. 

Some Boletus bicolor, the two-colored bolete, have appeared here and there. They have a rusty red cap and yellow spongy looking pores beneath. When bruised they turn a green-blue color, and they are edible. A large mushroom has appeared in several places and it has a creamy-white cap, white gills, a veil around the stem, and a cup-like bulbous base.  OK, that's not a good combination and not a good bet for trying its edibility; most likely suspect is Amanita bisporigera, the so-called destroying angel. Most interesting of the recent appearances, and most curious, has been dog phallus stinkhorns (Mutinus caninus), which tells you pretty much what these look like, a red-orange phallus. Mutinus was a phallic deity for somebody.  The muddy-brown spore mass is wet, and the odor attracts flies to disperse the spores. Most fungal spores are dispersed by wind. There was a time when TPP was very good at fungus identification, but it's a secondary subject for him and he hasn't taught mycology in about 20 years, so you lose your edge.  Images courtesy of madjack74 and Roberto Zanon (respectively), wikimedia creative commons).

Friday fabulous fungi

This is terrific stuff. Fungi don't often get the attention they deserve, and this photo essay is just great.  Some of these images are just fantastic, wait, TPP means fabulous. The very first image looks like a species of Marasmius, little wheels.

Symbioses and the Origin of Life on Land

At least two of the biggest events in the history of life involve symbioses, which are intimate interactions of two organisms literally “living together”. One would be the symbiosis between the eukaryote host cell and the two organisms that became mitochondria and chloroplasts, and the other would be the symbiosis between fungi and liverworts, the most ancient lineage of land plants. The invasion of land by green aquatic organisms was certainly a major event without which our familiar environs would never have appeared. Liverworts are simple bodied land plants, although the one shown here (Conocephalum) is more sophisticated internally than most people would suppose, but they lack roots and leaves although the plant body itself might be considered "leafy" in the sense that it is way broader than deep. The so-called higher fungi appear at about the time life invaded land, and their filamentous bodies invade intercellular spaces and the body cells of modern liverworts functioning much like the mycorrhizal fungi so familiar in association with flowering plants. A recent study has demonstrated that such fungi associated with liverworts can enhance the uptake of critical mineral nutrients, thus providing one of the functions of a root system, especially under conditions where such nutrients are hard to come by. This enhances the photosynthetic output of the liverwort even after “paying off” its debt to the fungus. Such experimental work demonstrates the value of this symbiosis, which would is even more important under harsh terrestrial conditions, and 500 million years ago terrestrial conditions were very harsh because without its familiar mantle of plants and soil, the environmental extremes and weather would have been quite severe.

Are fungi plants?

An interested reader writes, "Are mushrooms plants?" Mushrooms are fungi, and fungi are not plants, although this is a bit more of a problem that you might imagine. First off, biologists have known that fungi were something quite apart from plants for a long time, but what happened was that in terms of teaching and academic departments, biology was divided up into zoology, the study of animals, and botany got everything else, and that not only included the fungi, but bacteria as well. In modern day biology, the old taxonomic concept of kingdoms is not faring so well, nor for that matter is the whole taxonomic hierarchy. However, let me stay on task. Fungi do form a single lineage, a group that shares a common ancestry, and this lineage conforms to what many mean when they refer to Fungi as a kingdom. The same may be said for animals, and interestingly enough, fungi and animals are each others closest relatives. That is, they share a common ancestry too somewhere back among their unicellular ancestors. See how similar these two pink-orange critters are?

So as bacteria and fungi were recognized as distinct groups, the old catch-all plant kingdom got smaller, and even more so when about 45 years ago, even all the algae were removed (and placed within a grab-bag kingdom of protists) leaving behind nothing but the land plants. No question land plants form a single lineage, but they share a common ancestry with a small group of green algae, and then a more general common ancestry with the rest of the green algae. So where do you draw the kingdom line? This is part of the reason why the concept just isn't all that useful anymore. And there are even more green organisms out there that are only very distantly related to plants, things like the chlorarachniophytes, little spider like green amoebae.

From carbon dioxide to carbon dioxide - lesson from the tropics

Here in the rain forest life is a pretty dramatic process. While the great towering giants of wood have a aura of permanence about them, the tree turn over in a wet tropical forest is 2 to 3 times as fast as in temperate forests. Trees are great store houses of carbon dioxide, relatively short term reservoirs, and it is hard for people to rap their brains around the fact that all that stuff is primarily built out of a colorless, tasteless gas that only makes up a fraction of one percent of the atmosphere.

In the temperate zone we are used to seeing mushrooms pop up out of the ground, reproductive structures that are dwarfed by the huge filamentous organisms hidden from sight. And of course such fungi are the primary recyclers of cellulose and the other stuff trees and plants are built from. So you might expect to see lots of fungi on the ground in rainforests, but such is not the case. Decomposition is so fast here, no organic material builds up in or on the soil. Most of the fungi you see are growing right out of decomposing plant material. The fungi shown here are called "dead man's fingers", cute, eh? And they are growing out of a log that is pretty far along in terms of decomposition. The Phactor is not an expert on fungi, but he seems to remember that this fungus is called appropriately enough Xylaria, after xylem, wood. And so after being stored in this log for decades or in some cases even centuries, all that carbon dioxide is going back into the air. And if, as some of the best data indicates (see for link), even a slight increase in temperature causes a higher rate of tree mortality, then you have a very scary scenario where an increasing concentration of carbon dioxide is driving an increase in tree mortality and more carbon dioxide is being released.