video
Fungi on Science Friday!
Eyes tired from too much reading? Use your ears for a change to listen to Science Friday do fungi in a radio show called “Fungi: the good, the bad, and the edible.” The show features your humble editor, Kathie Hodge, along with mycologist and author David Fischer, and guests Kelli Hoover and Arturo Casadevall. We field calls about everything from foxfire to species concepts and the extraterrestrial origins of fungi(!).
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.
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.
The Perfect Pitch
This delightful guest post by Moselio Schaechter and Merry Youle explains the mechanism by which mushrooms discharge their spores. You always wanted to know why mushrooms are associated with dank and humid places–this clever water-assisted mechanism is the explanation.
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.
Supermarket Mycology. Flyspeck disease of apples
People get fussy about their apples, and tend to reject them if they’re bruised, or have nasty fungal lesions on them. But flyspeck is a subtle disease, and you’ve probably eaten it many times. I have, and I’m none the worse for it. Here we visit two different apple diseases, flyspeck and sooty blotch, in full rotating glory.
The Friday Afternoon Mycologist: The Dancing Nematode and the Helicospore
Lots of small twisty things, entwined. Some of them are moving. What the heck is going on here?
When strawberries go bad
What could be better than succulent fruit, rotting in time lapse? And doesn’t everyone want to know more about the fungi that rot strawberries? These are rhetorical questions.
Protein synthesis in 1971
A video digression from Kathie Hodge, your Editor.
We of the Mushroom Blog are fervent about learning, and we especially admire pedagogical contributions that are bizarre or silly. In that spirit, we offer you this spectacular video interpretation of protein synthesis. You might be thinking I’m off-topic, so let me explain.
Every time we here at [...]
Pilobolus and the lungworm
Jack, a student in PLPA 309 wrote this, and isolated the fungus in the time lapse, too.
Innocently spreading by mycelial growth, Pilobolus species faithfully secrete their extracellular enzymes, breaking down herbivore dung and recycling its nutrients. Upon maturation, Pilobolus species produce tiny fluid-filled vesicles, atop each of which a spore packet called a sporangium is [...]
Shaggy Mane Time Lapse
Post and video by the talented Dawn Dailey O’Brien, Plant Pathologist and co-editor of Branching Out
Shaggy mane mushrooms are also known as Lawyer’s Wigs. They are white with a cylindrical cap 1-1/4 to 2 inches wide and 1-5/8 to 6 inches high. They get their name from the flat, white scales on the cap which [...]
A spider’s nightmare
From your editor, Kathie Hodge
In the contest for Ickiest Thing, spiders and molds are about neck and neck. Personally, I’m rooting for molds. To demonstrate their clear superiority over spiders, I now present these two tableaux of death, captured in glorious detail by photographer Kent Loeffler.
This first little fungus, a mold called Nomuraea atypicola, [...]