plant disease
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)…
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.
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.
Something funny in the herbarium
You never know what you’ll stumble across in the herbarium. It’s a treasure trove of irreplaceable specimens, undescribed species, and occasionally, jokes.
Mystery liverwort fungus, chapter 3
What could it be, this liverwort thing? Has anyone ever seen this before? FAM pursues the fungus through the musty dusty literature and the well-stocked but torturous passageways of his own brain. Finally, the magical powers of Santa Claus are invoked.
Mystery liverwort fungus, chapter two
Part 2 in FAM’s series on the mysterious liverwort fungus. What the heck is this? Mycology is hard.
Cabbage monstrosities
The things that were once called Fungi but aren’t anymore are legion. Here’s one of them, a little swimmy thing that causes clubroot of cabbage. It gives cabbage monstrously clubbed roots, and as a bonus, acts as a vector for other diseases. Although we love its monstrous cruelty, we have banished it from the kingdom of Fungi. Be gone!
Lemon lapse time rot
Moldy lemons aren’t victims of just any mold–they have their own specific pair of evil parasites. Here a lemon succumbs to one of those evil Penicillium twins, in time lapse.
Complementary Colors–Hemlock rust
Poplar and hemlock can together support a happy population of rust fungi. Either one alone? No rust. Rusts are weird.