Students
Taming The Fungus
Many tasty mushrooms aren’t hard to culture, if you know the tricks. Here is our illustrated primer on making a clean tissue culture of a wild or cultivated mushroom. Later you can try to get it to fruit in your basement or backyard!
Lactarius helvus, the maple syrup milky cap
Milky caps are distinctive mushrooms that “bleed” milk when you break them. So it’s easy to recognize the genus, Lactarius, but it’s often tricky to identify the drab ones to species. Here’s one that smells like maple syrup, or fenugreek. But although it smells like things you can eat, don’t eat it, or you’ll be sorry.
How to eat a bolete
King boletes are among the most delicious of mushrooms, so why is it that I am so bad at finding them? Some of their sisters are also delicious edibles; a few are not so good. This piece is not so much a guide to boletes, but rather an account of how to eat them.
Paleomycology: Discovering the fungal contemporaries of dinosaurs
Fungi tend to be small, soft, and ephemeral — properties that don’t exactly help establish a strong presence in the fossil record. But they certainly have been around for a long time (perhaps 4 billion years?). Here we explore some of the fungi of the distant past, including some molds preserved perfectly in amber for tens of millions of years.
Entomophaga maimaiga – The caterpillar killer
Since we’d rather not let gypsy moth caterpillars eat the leaves off entire forests, we’re pretty happy about Entomophaga maimaiga, a fungus that attacks them. In this post we take a close-up, time lapse look at the devouring of a caterpillar by a fungus that is an effective agent of biological control.
Fungi in streams: a leaf nightmare
The fungi that live in burbling streams are full of surprises. They’re shockingly pronged and elegant–not the kind of thing you’d expect to find in a spoonful of filthy-looking foam. And they’re surprisingly important as foundation members of aquatic ecosystems.
The Dish on Deliquescence in Coprinus Species
Inky caps are mushrooms that’re stately when they first appear, but dissolve into embarrassing black ink upon maturity. Why do they do that, and how? You can actually write in their stinky ink! How do I know the ink stinks? I don’t want to talk about it.
So you want to be a truffle-farmer…? (Part 2)
Our trufficulture adventure continues with a short history of black truffle cultivation in France, with a note on the unreasonable expense of synthetically truffle-scented olive oil.
The Future of Fungal Freshness?
What if mushrooms weren’t grown in dank grow rooms by gnomes and elves, but instead grew right in their clever packaging on the way to market? Our student reporter interviews designer Agata Jaworska about her concept ‘Made in Transit,’ presented as her MS thesis at the renowned Dutch nexus, Design Academy Eindhoven.
A simple way to preserve fungal cultures
In this post, PhD student Anuar Morales Rodriguez shares a cheap and easy method for maintaining collections of fungal cultures. If you don’t have access to a vat of liquid nitrogen or a lyophilizer, this method (first developed in Brazil at CIAT) allows you to store your favorite fungi over the long term as dried cultures on filter paper.
Beware! The Slime Mold!
Our intrepid reporter studies the science behind the movie, The Blob, debunking Dr. Meddow’s longstanding theory that The Blob is a mutant bacterium from outer space. Warning: this post contains actual ooze, plus a song that, if you get it in your head, will haunt you for days.
An adventure with Omphalotus
I was wandering through the Fall woods near Ithaca, New York when I stumbled upon what looked like a delicious surprise… upon closer inspection (and the observations of a trained mycologist), I realized that I had made the amateur mistake of confusing the tasty Chanterelle with the poisonous Jack O’Lantern mushroom Omphalotus illudens…