Real tough guys - lichens

Having dodged the worst parts of an ice storm, a few days of warmer weather are predicted where the daytime temps will be above freezing. Along with this comes rain, but with the ground still frozen, a lot of runoff is expected.  Here and there a few sprouts of early bulbs are peeking out.  However if you want to see some happily green organisms, start looking at tree bark and branches.  Without the crown of leaves, more sunlight will fall on tree trunks than you might expect, and lichens take advantage of this. These are really tough organisms. Tree bark, stones, cement, these are really hard substrates; organisms growing there are highly exposed, subject to desiccation and temperature extremes, and yet in places the lichens are almost luxuriant.  Locally common lichens grow as a crust and so don't look as lush as the larger, more branched or leafier types (fruticose or foliose).  Although TPP is not adept at identifying lichens, he loves the Lichens of North America; a wonderfully illustrated atlas of lichens (just the ID keys and other field guides are also available).  Should you decide to give it a go, you'll run into a bit of a terminological learning curve and the need of come magnification.  Maybe a kind reader will offer some suggestions about the lichens shown here.

If you don't already know this, lichens are symbiotic organisms, basically a fungal body housing symbiotic algae. The algae can still be free-living, and so to the fungus, but neither one alone looks like the lichen.



Friday Fabulous Fungus - Oyster mushroom

It's been a wet, cool fall, a great season for fungi, and this is just the right time of year to spot oyster mushrooms, Pleurotus ostreatus. And you urban dwellers don't need to miss out, a walk around almost any well-treed neighborhood should result in success. Oyster mushrooms grow on wood and they are pretty easy to identify, especially given the season, and they are very tasty, very choice, highly recommended by many. The caps are asymmetrical and around here sort of a pale silvery gray color on top, white gills beneath, firmly fleshy. There were enough growing on the side of just this one maple tree to feed a lot of people. 

Smut! The name may be the problem.

A long time ago TPP and his friends got in trouble with the ex-Marine who was our high school assistant principal, i.e., disciplinarian.  Not the brightest bulb, so after cracking down on profanity, we sought out all the words we could find that sounded "profane" but weren't.  Our favorite was "scud".  And upon hearing this exclamation, our drill sergeant would pin you against your locker and ask, "And just what does that mean?"  And we'd give him the definition, where upon he'd haul you down to his office and check his dictionary (probably a secretary's).  With a puzzled look he'd let you go to class.  We were later scolded by the principle for baiting him, but he gave it away with a smile.
So the way a word sounds certainly has some significance.  SMUT!  This one is even worse because it actually has two really different meanings, the one everyone will be seeking when Google brings them to this blog.  But it's also the common name of a fungus that infects maize and replaces its fruits (corn kernels) with fleshy reproductive bodies that upon maturity turns black and releases innumerable spores.   In Mexico corn smut is called huitlacoche supposedly meaning excrement of the gods in Mayan, which is sort of smutty. These are the truffles of Central America and actually cultivated.  So what is needed here is some creative re-labeling.  So rather than smut or excrement, how about Mexican truffles?  Ah, that has a nice sound to it. Hmm, not even a recipe in my Frida Kahlo cookbook, and this has never appeared in a market in this part of the USA and we do have some pretty good Latin American groceries.  Mexican truffles probably don't travel well. Anyone out there with some recipe examples? 

Styrofungus, mycolastic - saving us from styrofoam

To interplanetary archeologists our particular civilization will probably be know as the "styrofoam makers".  Styrofoam and its cousin polystrene (those white coffee cups, packing "peanuts", and fast-food clam-shell containers) are for all their convenience almost forever because nothing out there has the enzymes needed to decompose this stuff, so it tends to last, and accumulate.  Worse, when it does eventually breakdown, polystrene breaks down into its monomers, styrene, a know carcinogen.  On one hand you have to admire our bravery in drinking and eating out of these containers, but ignorance is bliss, so pass the asbestos platter and let's eat!  These foamy plasticy things are great because of their strength and very light weight, so each and every one of us has unpacked something we bought that had those foamy form-fitting inserts to hold the object in place in the center of a carton.  While excellent for this particular use, this is stuff has to be on the top 10 list of least green products.  Wouldn't it be nice if someone found a substitute product?  Well, a couple of guys out of RPI (Rensslaer Polytechnic Institute) are growing a fungal based alternative.  The basic recipe is plant waste material (think shredded corn stalks) and a fungal mycelium, a bit of the filamentous body of a fungus that you typically don't see because it's growing under ground or in dead wood.  Add water put into a form and the mycelium grows until it fills the space.  Dry it out and voila, you've got a tough, light packing material custom-made to pack that Italian espresso maker you've ordered online.  The best thing is that this biomaterial will break down quickly.  The product is being made by Ecovative Design, sort of a nifty name.  TPP learned of this via an article in the New Yorker published about 2 weeks ago.  Wonder if it would make a good soil additive because if so we could begin to solve the peat moss problem at the same time.  Remember this slogan, "Better living through fungus."
 

Thursday Fabulous Fungus

No regular fungus feature is planned, but this was just too fine to not share. Found this very attractive fungus while exploring a prairie glade high on a river bluff. The common name is jack-0-lantern because it is a big pumpkin orange mushroom (Omphalotus illudens) and because at night the gills glow with a green luminescence; really spooky the first time you see it. Be careful mushroomers because people mistake this quite poisonous mushroom for Cantharellus cibarius, the golden chantarelle, which is choice eating. This is a good test for your recognition abilities.

What was Prototaxites?

Prototaxites has been a classic enigmatic fossil, which means no one knew what it was other than it appeared to be really big when nothing else really was. Prototaxites appeared to be some type of cylindrical axis , which when stood upright would have looked like telephone poles on a landscape of plants standing little taller than your living room carpet. That’s because Prototaxites existed during the Late Silurian and Devonian, a period of time when vascular plants were just getting their rhizomes under themselves. Prototaxites fossils display a strange spiral inner organization and a filamentous composition.

Not too long ago, the filamentous organization of Prototaxites led to its identification as a fungus, the “humongous fungus” and this is the actual cover of the journal this research was published in.

But a team of my ever creative colleagues lead by Dr. Graham (no, not the one of cracker fame) have just published their reinterpretation of these fossils by actually recreating plant remains that have the same appearance as Prototaxites. Dr. Graham is well known for torturing liverworts to see if any of the degraded remains bear similarities to enigmatic fossils of early land plants. The evidence they present suggests Prototaxites formed a helical cylinder when a large mat of liverworts was rolled up probably by the winds that would have howled across a treeless landscape. This further reinforces the hypothesis that plants with a bryophyte level of organization (mosses and liverworts) were pioneers on land long before vascular plants appeared. The Phactor hopes that PATL (People Against the Torture of Liverworts) doesn’t begin picketing her lab.