fungi
lately in the public lens
I’m always surprised at how little most people know about fungi. As you know, I love fungi very much, and I also like to teach. So I often find myself giving talks to introduce people to the weird and cool things that fungi do, leading walks in the woods, or (ahem), editing a blog about them. Here is a short compilation of web-accessible popular lectures, interviews, and stuff I’ve done lately. Also, some bonus advice on hand lenses.
Puffballs ate my mulch
In which a prodigious colony of puffballs consumes my pile of mulch. Yesterday I walked by them at the tail end of a downpour. The last raindrops were generating little snorts of spores like dragon smoke. Go ahead, give them a stomp or two, but don’t inhale puffball spores in excess, people, it will not end well.
The fungus you want in your walls
Fungi are good at binding stuff with their filamentous cells. Now a group of New York entrepreneurs at Ecovative is producing sustainable packaging and insulation based on agricultural wastes bound by fungal mycelium. So instead of petroleum-based styrofoam, they can grow us some packing materials in whatever shape we like.
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.
Small friends of fungi
An homage to the Little Things that run the world. Oh how we love them in all their unplumbed diversity! Here is a thoughtful reminder of the roles of the small and oft-overlooked members of the Dead Plants Society, courtesy of our many-legged guest, Bob Mesibov.
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.
Beneath Notice
Our new book is now available! It’s a self-published catalog of our last two years of art shows, which featured the use of a borescope to get up close and personal with small fungi. The borescope gives a fabulous, bug’s eye view of small things in the field, at a scale more fitting to their small majesty than a squinty hand lens or a sober microscope. We think you’ll like the book.
Homeward Bound: Fungi of China
The Fungi of China collection at the Cornell Plant Pathology Herbarium has a poignant history. Rescued from destruction during the Japanese invasion of China in 1937, many of its fragile specimens traveled by oxcart and by ship to the US, where we have been safeguarding them for about 70 years. Now we’ve divided them and will be sending the new duplicates back to the Herbarium of the Chinese Academy of Sciences. It is our gift to the people of China.
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.
Shots from the archive: puffball lad
We’ve got some impressive collections of old photographs here at Cornell. At the Cornell Plant Pathology Herbarium, we have 60,000 or so. Our images are of fungi, plant disease, agricultural methods, plus mycologists and plant pathologists. You can browse a subset of our images online. Some would make good quirky art to hang in your apartment (try an archive search on ginseng, or potato)…