Writing poetry is my weak point. That’s why I was excited but nervous to hear that my creative writing class had a ten-page poetry requirement. I considered my subject as I walked to work at the Herbarium that afternoon– the topic that came to my mind was dirt: I had just come from a soil science class. But something was missing… the poem had no life, literally. Writing a poem about sand particles wasn’t cutting it.

That was when I thought of the cicada. Every summer at home in South Carolina, the evening air was alive with their calls. My black Labrador, Molly, loves to eat them, and she especially enjoys digging up their soil-dwelling nymphs. The cicadas I knew then were “annual” cicadas: an individual nymph takes 1-4 years to mature underground, but there is a hatch every year. The nymphs feed on the sap of tree roots, and somehow all those ready to hatch in a given year do so at nearly the same time.

That was about the extent of my knowledge of cicadas, so I did a little more research on their life cycles. As it turns out, the annual cicadas are not alone. Several other species—the periodical cicadas— have 13 or 17-year life cycles, emerging en masse in overwhelming numbers, presumably to reduce the impacts of predators. But one predator, the fungus Massospora, has evolved to wait with them for all those years.

The State Mycologist for New York, Charles Horton Peck, published the first official description of this fungus in 1879. “This is a peculiar genus,” he was quick to point out. “In its early stage it is wholly concealed in the body of the insect, but just before, or soon after the death of the insect, the terminal rings of the abdomen fall away, revealing the pulverulent mass of spores within…” That’s right, this little white fungus eats the cicada alive until nothing is left in its abdomen but spores. Then it ruptures the tissues holding the abdomen together, breaking the end off, and thereby turning the still-alive-and-flying cicada into a salt shaker of death for others below.

How did this genus of fungi evolve? How did it learn to rest for years in the soil, and how does it know to emerge with the cicadas? I couldn’t find any answers. Very little research has been done on this fungus and its unwilling partners, so I set out to do my own. In the Cornell Plant Pathology Herbarium, I found twelve species of Massospora infecting sixteen species of cicada, from at least eight different countries scattered around the globe. One was found in Honduras in 1923, another in the US some years later, and then many more, in places like Colorado, Afghanistan, Argentina, and Australia. Based on this range of locations, I believe that Massospora can be found wherever cicadas are (which is pretty much everywhere). It may have evolved alongside the insects, with the cicada trying to outsmart the fungus by developing its lengthy life cycle. Then, the fungus may have followed suit, learning the signals the cicadas used to choose when to emerge. Or perhaps the cicadas developed their life cycle to fight off some other threat, like the muscoid flies that parasitize some species, and the fungus simply took advantage of the opportunity. No one is sure.

Richard Soper studied Massospora here at Cornell, completing his PhD in 1974 and moving on to a productive career with the USDA’s Agricultural Research Service. His exacting work sheds light on Massospora life cycles. He examined over 8000 underground nymphs of an annual cicada species, and found none infected. His work suggests cicada nymphs are first infected as they dig tunnels to the surface some days before emerging for their transformation into adults. This first group of cicadas, infected in their tunnels, will die during the time they’d normally mate, while producing spores than can directly infect other cicadas. But the second group of cicadas—those infected on the wing—will die filled with thick-walled resting spores. Resting spores are entrusted with the long wait in the soil til the next generation emerges, a year or perhaps 17 years down the road.

Lots of people hate cicadas for the racket they make in summertime, but we stand to learn a lot about biological clocks and environmental signaling from them and their fungal enemies. The fungus could bring economic benefits as well: cicadas cause significant damage to small trees with their egg-laying habits. Nearly all of the specimens I found in the herbarium were type specimens (the original one used to define a species), so I’m afraid that so far the scientific interest in them seems to be only in the naming.

When I go home this summer, I’m going to test the patience of my parents a little more by not only bringing the usual handfuls of mushrooms into the house, but handfuls of dead cicadas as well. I might get lucky and find one with a Massospora infection, and if I do, I’m going to study it well and send it back to Cornell for safekeeping. Maybe when I can get a really good look with a microscope, I’ll learn something new about this murderous little fungus to enliven my poem.

Angie Macias is a student worker at the Cornell Plant Pathology Herbarium. She’s worked on two of our NSF-funded projects: first, to digitize the voluminous fungal collection of George F. Atkinson, and lately, to photograph our type specimens (over 7000 of them!). She’s also a big fan of fungi and has a nice crop of oyster mushrooms growing in her room.

Editor’s Note: You can read about Massospora’s insectivorous kin elsewhere on this blog–they will make you glad you are not a bug.

By Miwa Oseki Robbins, who enlivened my Mushrooms Class in Fall 2012.

The farmers of Japan say thunderstorms are good luck– they make the mushrooms grow.¹ And mushrooms and thunderstorms are partners in folklore all over the world. The ancient god Soma may even have been a mushroom himself. In the book, Soma: Divine Mushroom of Immortality, Gordon Wasson² argues that Amanita muscaria, the classic red or yellow fly agaric, is the identity of the mysterious Soma, god of the RgVeda, a sacred collection of ancient Vedic Sanskrit hymns. These hymns are some of the world’s oldest religious texts, and from them we know Soma is “the child of the thunderstorm”. Is Soma really a mushroom? Are mushrooms the children of thunderstorms? Read on.

Science, alas, has had little to say about mushrooms and thunderstorms. Until now. Recently, scientists in Japan have demonstrated a link between lightning and prolific mushroom fruiting.¹ Although their interest in lightning and mushrooms is not driven by a religious quest, their research may inadvertently shed light on an ethnographic mystery.

In Japan, mushrooms are particularly coveted for their delicious, nutritional, and medicinal qualities and demand is outstripping supply. But now scientists are finding ways to harness the power of electricity to increase mushroom production. Can you imagine farms where man-made lightning bolts strike the ground and induce large flushes of mushrooms? Well, this is what scientists in Japan are doing.³

Today, shiitake (Lentinula edodes), buna-shimeji (Hypsizygus marmoreus), eryngii (Pleurotus eryngii), and matsutake (Tricholoma matsutake) mushrooms are high value health foods in Japan.^1,3 Matsutakes now sell for $439 U.S. dollars a pound.³ Before you think you might get rich by growing some, you must consider that these are ectomycorrhizal mushrooms that only grow symbiotically with their pine tree hosts, so the world’s harvest is entirely collected from the wild. Although harvest of these mushrooms in Japan peaked at 12,000 metric tons in 1941, harvest declined to 34 metric tons in 2005, not due to lack of demand but due to many threats to these red pine forests, including a pine wood nematode infestation that has been wreaking havoc in these ecosystems.³ People want more mushrooms. Let’s harness the power of lightning.

The use of direct current (DC) electric fields on living tissue is not a new idea, but has a long and contentious history. Even back in 1985, when Robinson ⁴ wrote a review of the topic, he was able to find 8 reliable reports involving plant cells and 4 on animal cells responding to DC fields. The reports ranged from growth of neurons towards the negative electrode to a “healing” response of wounds. Many of these observations seem to have been dismissed as “laboratory curiosities,” unlikely to have much real world application. In Japan, though, electrical stimulation has been used in the production of Shiitake, Buna-shimejo, and eryngii mushrooms for almost half a decade. And this technology doesn’t seem to be limited to mushrooms, as farmers are also using electromagnetic field technology in the production of tomato, lettuce, strawberry, and some ornamental plants.

Lightning is notoriously disobedient, so Islam and Ohga built a “Small Population Lightning Generator” (SPLG), conveniently powered by rechargeable AA batteries.³ This device can be wheeled through the forest, and administers 50kV electric pulses to the ground through its electrode wheels. No, it isn’t exactly like lightning—it’s more like the shock you get from a metal doorknob after dancing in your polyester leisure suit. The SPLG delivers maybe 500 milliJoules of energy per zap; a bolt of lightning might deliver one billion times more than that. Other studies have delivered shocks as low as 30kV and shown increases in mushroom yields.¹ One Fall day in a Japanese forest, Islam and Ohga trundled the SPLG across their 2 by 3 meter experimental plots in parallel passes that were each 0.10 meters apart.³

The results were yields of matsutake mushrooms just about double the yields in unzapped control plots. A monstrous flush came two weeks after the pulse and a second one nearly as large 3 weeks after. But it wasn’t just the quantity that increased, the quality, as measured by weight and size of individual matustake mushrooms also showed dramatic increases: Harvests from the zapped plots were, on average, almost 70% heavier then controls.³ If you thought mushrooms were magical all on their own, the combination of mushrooms and electricity might knock your socks off.

Fungi are mysterious things and the mechanism by which electrical stimulation promotes mushroom fruiting is still not much understood. Perhaps the mushroom mycelium is responding to an apparent threat of death by redoubling its reproductive efforts? Many electrifying questions remain. Like: how does the zapping affect forest trees? Can the high fruiting rates be sustained without damaging the mushroom-tree symbiosis? When’s the next thunderstorm due in my neighborhood?

In the meantime, if you feel like experimenting (safely, of course) with mushrooms and electricity, you might want to check out this intriguing post about a New York City mycophile who grew his mushrooms amid Jazz music, artificial fog, and static electricity. Or, next time you go in the woods foraging for mushrooms, look for trees recently struck by lightning. Who knows what you will find. Maybe you will even have an encounter with the god Soma, child of the thunderstorm.

Many fungi are not known. Maybe they’ve never been seen before; maybe they got lumped in with something they resemble. We think there are a lot of them, and that we’ve recognized and named only 5% of the species that exist. It’s not hard at all to find an undescribed fungal species, though it is very hard to be sure you’ve got one. To do so requires you to know that it’s different from all the fungi we DO know, and this is a surprisingly difficult task.

There are known knowns; there are things we know we know.
We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say, we know there are some things we do not know.
But there are also unknown unknowns – the ones we don’t know we don’t know.

United States Secretary of Defense, Donald Rumsfeld, 2002

We tend to think that if a fungus has a name, it is known. But many fungi that have names are hardly known at all. Take Inocybe olpidiocystis, a fungus that has a name, but about which we know very little indeed. In fact hardly anyone has even mentioned this mushroom since it was described in 1918.

My predecessor George F. Atkinson was the first to describe this fungus, so it bears the name he gave it, along with Atkinson’s own name: Inocybe olpidiocystis G.F. Atk. The mushrooms grew in 1902 on Andrew D. White’s lawn– he was the first President of Cornell University. His house still stands in the center of Cornell’s handsome campus.

The grounds of the President’s house in 1902 looked much like the grounds today. Might these mushrooms still grow there, after more than a century? Are those mycologists lolling on the lawn? Our president doesn’t live there anymore, but the A.D. White House is host to meetings and galas; visiting scholars worry their palimpsests upstairs. In the parlor recently, I stood in the footsteps of Yankee Civil War General and 18th President of the United States, Ulysses S. Grant. Oaks and gardens still grace the grassy grounds atop Breezy Knoll. Those grounds haven’t been unmolested: Gardens and trees have come and gone, and a busy campus has risen up around this small oasis. In 1969 a crew of avant garde Earth Artists dug up the place and sculpted soil artistically in the downstairs rooms of the house–soil that might have hosted the mycelium of a known but unknown species.

Inocybe olpidiocystis was formally described in 1918, in a terse paper presumably completed by a friend after Atkinson’s unexpected death. The dried specimen in our herbarium is complemented by his notes describing the freshly picked mushrooms, but he did not photograph them, as he did so many others. To me its habit of growing low in grass, its sticky caps, and its fat stems recall Hebeloma crustuliniforme, a mushroom known as Poison Pie. And look at Atkinson’s charming drawing: this mushroom, like many Inocybes, has smooth ellipsoid spores and stout microscopic cystidia that bristle among the basidia on gill faces and gill edges. Each cystidium wears a crown of delicate crystals.

I’m no Inocybe taxonomist, so I wrote Dr. Brandon Matheny, North America’s foremost expert on Inocybe, a whole genus of abominable LBMs with a sprinkling of pretty and colorful things thrown in as balm to the beleaguered taxonomist. Brandon had never found this species, but he told me of a possible record of it from Florida, and a color photo of it in the 1985 Field Guide to Southern Mushrooms. I have reproduced that photo here, because I know you’re scribbling this fungus onto your wishlist and you need a search image. However, whether this photo actually represents Atkinson’s I. olpidiocystis or some other damnably similar Inocybe is an open question.

It is tempting to post WANTED signs on the walls of the A.D. White House, hoping someone will stumble across this elusive mushroom so we can rediscover it, and learn how it lives. Alas, the mushroom is what is known in mycological parlance as a Little Brown Mushroom, or LBM. Many otherwise courageous mycologists are afraid of LBMs, knowing they will likely struggle mightily to identify them, only to get stuck. In fact, this LBM no-man’s-land is likely home to many known unknown species. Our friend Inocybe olpidiocystis has been known for a century, and yet it’s still little more than a known unknown.

As for the unknown unknowns of fungi, I can only say that I feel sure there are many of them. The pace at which we are currently converting unknown unknowns to known knowns is delightfully staggering, yet we still have so far to go. That makes the study of fungi a fascinating and satisfying pursuit.

Lawrence Millman wrote this post, drawing info and inspiration from Student X, who explored the issue in my Medical and Veterinary Mycology class last year.

Welcome to Tasmania, an island that’s part temperate rainforest, part high country wilderness, and part gentle English countryside. In keeping with the theory of topographic resonance, which proposes that the inhabitants of a place somehow reflect that place’s geography, the island’s most iconic resident, the platypus, is also a surreal mingling of parts. With its duck-like beak, its beaver-like tail, its otter-shaped body, and (in males) its venom glands, the platypus would seem to have stolen parts from other mammals, not to mention reptiles. Perhaps birds too: female platypuses lay eggs.

Sometimes the platypus will even have a pinkish coloration on its legs or tail. Might this be a theft from a flamingo? Not at all. The pink color may indicate that the animal is suffering from a fungal infection called mucormycosis. Specifically, it has one or more lesions caused by Mucor amphibiorum, a fungus that typically targets (as its name suggests) amphibians.

Fact: Mucor is a genus of molds (zygomycetes) mostly found in the ground, on plant surfaces, rotting vegetables, and — since 1982 — on platypuses.

Mucor amphibiorum isn’t native to Tasmania, but if you’re a fungus, you’re happy to go non-native. All you need is someone or something to vector your spores, and off those spores go. Quite a few European and Asian species, including the Death Cap (Amanita phalloides) and Radulomyces copelandii, have traveled to North America in the last century. Mucor amphibiorum itself probably came over from mainland Australia with infected frogs, and having arrived, doubtless bided its time until an unsuspecting platypus happened to saunter along…

Curiously, the fungus does not seem to affect mainland animals. Perhaps the cooler body temperatures of Tasmanian platypuses, a response to the island’s own cooler temperatures, encourages its growth on a local host. Perhaps the fact that Tasmania is an island refuge limits that host’s genetic diversity, thus making it more susceptible to M. amphibiorum. Indeed, island biogeography is probably the reason the Tasmanian devil is so vulnerable to the so-called Devil Facial Tumor Disease (which is caused by a cancer, not a fungus).

Note: Mycology is a science of perhapses. That’s one of the reasons why it’s so interesting.

Some platypuses have dermal lesions all over their bodies. The fungus can form small round cells that travel in-platypus to start new lesions in new places. You can’t help but feel pity for the poor animals. At the same time, it’s hard not to admire the opportunistic nature of the fungus that’s causing all the trouble: a new island, a new host, and there’s more of me, its presence seems to say.

So we’ve got an infected platypus: will it survive, or will it succumb? If the lesions aren’t severe and don’t spread, the animal might return to a healthy state. But if the lesions are invaded by bacteria, or new lesions impair internal organs, the platypus could become so debilitated that it can’t forage for food or maintain its body temperature. Whereupon pneumonitis, a secondary infection, or starvation could deliver the coup de grâce.

I know what you’re thinking: can I, a somewhat more advanced creature than a platypus, be infected by a Mucor species? The answer is yes…if you have a badly compromised immune system or an extensive flesh injury. If you inhale the spores of certain Mucor species, you might develop a potentially fatal, but extremely uncommon disease called rhinocerebral mucormycosis. But you’re ten thousand times, no, a hundred thousand times more likely to have a mucor infection on your bread — i.e., “black bread mold” (Rhizopus stolonifer) — than you are to have one in your body.

Query: Tasmania seems to specialize in extinctions. Its last full-blood aboriginal native, Truganini died in 1876; the last Tasmanian wolf probably died in 1936; and the Tasmanian devil is currently at risk because of Devil Facial Tumor Disease. Will the platypus be next?

Here’s an animal that’s secretive, nocturnal, semi-aquatic, and burrow-dwelling, so it’s difficult to determine what percentage of the island’s population is might be affected by mucormycosis. Two recent (2009) studies suggest that far fewer platypuses are suffering from the disease now than twenty years ago. Thus it would seem that Tasmanian platypuses, like their mainland brethren, have developed some sort of immunity to the fungus. Still, the abstract of one of the studies concludes with this statement of uncertainty: “…the individual consequences of infestion are poorly understood and require further investigation.” Welcome to Kingdom Fungi!

Finally! An update from Kathie Hodge on the state of the blog, and on Homer Simpson’s hair.

Things have been quiet here since March–that’s when everything went haywire behind the scenes. Doh!!! I was unable to create new blog posts (with one minty exception) and got a surprise dunking in the dunk tank of university bureaucracy, here represented by the metaphor of Homer Simpson’s head. In recent months, I had simple goals: 1. Fix the blog. And 2. Grow some hair on Homer’s head. I was unprepared for the hours, patience, and sheer grit these modest goals would demand.

We began with a Chia Pet.™ If you were not alive in 1980s North America, you need a Chia Pet primer. You might wish to watch the original Chia Pet advertisement so that the Chia earworm gets stuck in your head: ch-ch-ch-chia! Perfectly normal people buy these terra cotta statuettes, fill them with water, and smear them with the sticky seeds of the Chia plant. Over the next week or so the Chia Pet grows a sprouty green coat. We are not perfectly normal. We thought our Homer Simpson Chia Pet would be better with actual hair that would grow on its own. Since this hasn’t been invented yet, we used a handy fungus.

Phycomyces blakesleeanus is a fantastic fungus. It doesn’t do much except grow on poop and other rotting stuff, but it is a staple in most Intro Mycology classes for a few reasons. It is harmless, and it is big and tall, as required for a good toupee. It’s had its genome sequenced, which imparts a certain nobility. It can sense and respond to light, touch, gravity, and other stuff. And it will have kissy, spiky sex in the lab when introduced to a compatible partner (!). Those hairs it makes are its sporangiophores, each of which holds aloft a tiny sphere full of spores.

Just as fixing a blog in the heady atmosphere of academia isn’t quick, so went our hairy Homer project. First, unlike Chia plants, which make their own food from thin air and light, a fungus needs something for lunch. We made it a lunch of potato dextrose broth with a heavy dose of agar, and the indefatigable Dave Kalb applied it to Homer’s bald pate while still warm. Dave says, “I held the base of Homer with my hand to accomplish this. He was situated and turned as needed to cover his head with agar where we wanted “hair” but not to allow drips where we did not want “hair”, like his eyes and nose… Next, chunks of agar from a plate containing actively growing Phycomyces blakesleeanus were blotted onto the agar on Homer’s head. This was repeated several times to ensure all areas were covered.” Then we filled Homer up with water and filmed him patiently while various things went wrong.

We’ve re-haired Homer 6 times now. People got used to us carrying Hairy Homer down the hall, his semi-luxuriant hair waving in the breeze. Nothing surprises a plant pathologist! You can see the things that went wrong in our hirsute bloopers gallery below. We think our final video looks pretty good but people, we are so DONE with this now. We are considering marketing our Practically Instant Hair Growth Potion. It might itch a bit.

The blog is fixed now too, and hopefully it looks about the same to you, but under the hood it has been spiffed up– ta da! Meanwhile, photographer Kent Loeffler and his intern Claire Smith have been moving our popular quicktime video collection over to YouTube. Now you can see our funky fungal time lapse movies on the new Cornell Plant Pathology Photo Lab channel.

It’s been six years since my first post. I like this blog, and I hope you do too. I’ll post more fungusy stuff soon. Send me a note so I know you’re out there; tell your friends; correct my mistakes. Buy our new hair product… New blog. New hairdo. It’s a good day.

Hairy Hairy Homer Outtake Gallery
Recall, each time we tried this, we had to scrub and sterilize Homer’s head. Dave had to prepare the magic hair-growing goop and coat Homer’s scalp, then inoculate him with Phycomyces–you’d pay hundreds for this in a good salon. We had to set Homer up in a humid tank and take photos of him behaving badly over a week or so. Sooooo, all these bloopers were a bit of a bummer:

• 1. Homer dried up: unhappy fungus.
• 2. Homer got too wet: he dripped and grew a moldy brow.
• 3. Homer’s looking pretty good! But now that we’ve mastered this, we thought, we could improve the lighting…
• 4. Homer had a bad hair day (week). It happens.
• 5. An evil green parasitic mold called Trichoderma ate our fungus! Sigh.
• 6. Against his scalp, we found the less luxuriant microsporangia of Phycomyces.

Yes, Kathie Hodge has eaten fungus slime. And she’s not much weirder than you.

Aside from the few of us who get paid to think about these things, not many realize how commonly fungi intersect our lives. Most people eat some fungus daily: yeast, sure, but lots of others too. I think you should know about this, not to gross you out, but so you can appreciate the contributions of fungi to your ordinary-seeming life.

Today’s lesson in fungal utility covers pullulan, a useful polysaccharide made from fungus slime. That’s right, FUNGUS SLIME.

Pullulan is neat stuff. It’s made of long chains of modified glucose molecules. It tastes inoffensive and dissolves easily. Because of its low digestibility, it has a low glycemic index–eating it doesn’t cause a big insulin spike like sucrose. Early reports claimed pullulan was completely indigestible, but later research showed that it is slowly broken down in our bodies. Alas, a generous dose of it “increases the incidence and frequency of flatulence,” according to the hardy volunteers recruited by Dr. Wolf and colleagues. But those folks drank 50 grams of it in 2 cups of viscous, sugar-free lemonade–more than I’d recommend.

Pfizer introduced Listerine PocketPaks™ in 2001, and they took off like a rocket. Inside the package we find flat squares of what appears to be plastic. It’s not plastic– it’s pullulan. Put one on your tongue and it quickly melts, releasing its minty flavor. Refreshing! Since then pullulan has shown up in a variety other products: children’s medicines, which my son prefers to icky syrups, doggie breath strips and marijuana-laced medi-strips (both sadly discontinued in the US), gelatin-like capsules for medicines that don’t offend vegetarians, and as an edible coating that protects foods from drying.

Pullulan was approved for food use in Japan in 1976, but it took til 2002 for the American FDA to recognize it as a GRAS food additive (Generally Regarded as Safe, E1204). That’s why it’s just been in the last little while that pullulan’s been popping up all over. It can be used as a film or thickener or to encapsulate just about anything, and now that you know about it, you can seek it eagerly in ingredient lists. Not every melt-in-your-mouth strip is pullulan-based, though. There are other food-grade films, including hypromellose, pectin, xanthan gum (a bacterial product), gellan (from algae), and others. But this is a fungus blog.

Aureobasidium is an interesting, sticky, goopy, ubiquitous thing. You can admire its slimy brown mugshot here. It’s really, really good at growing superficially (like many politicians it is impressive, but lacks depth). It is easy to find, for example, on the surfaces of apple leaves, or on apple fruit, where it is can lead to russetting. It likes just about any plant surface, really, where it degrades the cutin layer that protects the plant, opening the door for pathogens. Perversely, it sometimes fights off pathogens– some strains have been deployed as biological controls of plant disease. You might also find it flaking the paint off your house, which it does by growing under and in the paint, and nibbling at the lignin of the wood surface. You can imagine that paint doesn’t stick too well atop a mucusy layer of pullulan. Aureobasidium is growing on the wreckage of the Chernonbyl nuclear plant. If you’re really unlucky, Aureobasidium might grow on your eyeball, but it much prefers plants. Oh, and it might just be the fungus that’s growing on your shower curtain and making your cheap white lawn chairs look like cheap trash.

So you see, Aureobasidium was already common in your life. And now you’re eating it.

On November 14th, 1918, Cornell’s first mycologist, George Francis Atkinson, preferring wind and rain over the comforts of home, died of pneumonia after collecting mushrooms near Mount Rainier in Washington State. At 64 years old he was one of the nation’s preeminent mycologists, working on what might have been his greatest work. His passion for collecting, photography, and research quickly and quietly evaporated at the height of his career.

Mycophiles are a unique lot, often identifiable by the baskets they carry in the woods and a passion for certain edibles. G.F. Atkinson took his passion for mycology to another level. He certainly had an interest in edibles as his book Studies of American Fungi: Mushrooms, Edible, Poisonous, etc. implies. He was also a pioneer in mycological photography, and had a thirst for research. His unique focus, which led him to describe nearly 300 species and to accumulate over 90,000 specimens, leaves him with few peers. There are sparse clues to his mindset; little is known beyond Atkinson the mycologist. He ran away from home at the young age of 13, worked in the Black Hills of the Dakota Territories driving a stagecoach and fending off highway robbers, and worked a brief stint on a Mississippi river boat. He was a man forged of pure physical labor and stood just over six feet tall with large strong hands. Yet he was brilliant and, realizing he wanted more out of life, went back to school to make his way, putting physical labor behind him to pursue more intellectual endeavors. Atkinson was a student of Botany at Cornell and after graduating he kept to his nomadic ways, working in the southeast as he refined his interests. Studies in diseases of agricultural crops led to mycology, and the knowledge he brought back to Cornell as a well-rounded mycologist led to a new vision that influences how mycologists think today.

Atkinson was a pioneer in mycology. He helped standardize the study and documentation of fungi at major collections in Europe and the U.S., produced nearly 200 published works, and, as a Cornell Professor, founded a major lineage of outstanding North American mycologists.* His award-winning photography was legendary and a key step in standardizing fungal taxonomy. He took photomicrographs and measurements of spores, and photographs of fruiting bodies in various stages of development. His photographs were key in standardizing fungal taxonomy. Some of the species he was the first to photograph and name include Amanita bisporigera, Amanita flavoconia and Stropharia hardii. Today Atkinson’s name is not well known, but his knowledge and contributions are “mycorrhizal” — woven within and about the roots of modern science and mycology, nourishing and helping mycologists and mycological understanding grow.

Ninety years after Atkinson’s death, his collection was in trouble. The collection, held at the Cornell Plant Pathology Herbarium, had never been indexed. Acidic paper sleeves endangered his glass and nitrocellulose negatives; some specimens were housed in damaged packets; his field journals and notes were fading. Work to restore and digitize Atkinson’s collection started in Summer 2010 with support from the National Science Foundation. Two students were quickly hired to start entering data and scanning photographs. I was hired shortly thereafter to lead the project. To date we’ve employed over 20 students, and refined and streamlined our methods. Now, thousands of photographs and data for tens of thousands of specimens have been digitized in a bustling lab with five data-entry stations. With the help of CUP’s Curator Scott LaGreca, students are learning to spot which specimens need repair and how to do it. Data entry for fungi that Atkinson collected close to home in upstate New York is now complete, and roughly half of his other collections are finished. Thousands of Atkinson’s photographs are a work in progress. New sleeves and labels must be made for his ancient glass negatives, Atkinson’s notes will be digitized, and repairs are ongoing, but the students, our most valuable resource, are making great headway. Specimens, notes, and photographs will be linked in exciting new ways and our data will be made available online. By the end of the project we will have secured Atkinson’s legacy for future generations.

Atkinson died before his time, without completing the great monographic series he planned on North American mushrooms. Still, he brought us new ways of looking at fungi, through the lens of a camera, through research papers, and through the generations of new mycologists he inspired. Thanks to the NSF and our hard-working team at CUP, Atkinson’s collections will be repaired, highly organized, and digitized. His data may help form a snapshot of mycological diversity 100 years ago, shedding light on the impacts of time and climate change on fungal populations. Atkinson may not have dreamed of his collection being used or shared in such a way, but given his spirit for discovery, I think he would have approved.

When I graduated from Cornell in 1991, I left Ithaca knowing only one lichen: Flavoparmelia caperata (Common Greenshield Lichen), a dead-common species that I’d collected from a tree near my dormitory. I’ve since become a fully-fledged Ph.D. Lichenologist, and have had the privilege of working in some of the biggest and best herbaria in the world. I now know nearly all of our northeastern North American lichens on sight.

The other day, while walking along the main east-west route on central campus (Tower Road), I was pleased to be able to name no fewer than eleven different lichen species on the oak trees that line the north side of the road— ten more than I was able to 20 years ago! Here is my preliminary species list:

• Amandinea punctata (Tiny Button lichen)
• Candelaria concolor (Candleflame lichen)
• Candelariella efflorescens (Powdery Goldspeck lichen)
• Flavoparmelia caperata (Common Greenshield lichen)
• Flavopunctelia soredica (Powder-edged Speckled Greenshield lichen)
• Ochrolechia arborea (Powdery Saucer lichen)
• Parmelia sulcata (Hammered Shield lichen)
• Parmeliopsis capitata? (Powder-tipped Starburst lichen)
• Phaeophyscia pusilloides (Pompom-tipped Shadow lichen)
• Physcia millegrana (Mealy Rosette lichen)
• Punctelia rudecta (Rough Speckled Shield lichen)

My surveying strategy was casual, but similar to the standard survey methods used by lichenologists who use lichen species diversity as a measure of air quality: I assessed the diversity of lichens on various trees of the same species (in this case, red oak: Quercus rubra) and of roughly the same size (dbh, or diameter at breast height). Using lichen species diversity as a measure of air quality is common in Europe (especially the UK), because European lichenologists have developed lists of lichen “indicator species” —i.e., lists of lichen species that are especially sensitive to air pollution vs. lists of lichen species that are especially tolerant. In general, the further the distance from a “point source”of pollution (like a paper mill, or a smelting plant), the higher the lichen diversity, when measured on trees of the same species of tree and roughly the same dbh. Lists of indicator species, of course, are entirely dependent on geography and latitude. In other words, the same lichen species will not be found here in North America, so lists of European lichen indicator species are of no use here. Once somebody on this side of the Atlantic does the necessary work to develop North American lichen bioindicators, we’ll be able to perform the same sorts of air quality assessments here.

Even without well-developed lists of indicator lichen species, however, I can make two general conclusions about the air quality in the vicinity of Tower Road based on my species list:

1. All the lichen species that I found are common street-tree lichens in many cities in the northeast, and some (F. caperata, P. sulcata, P. millegrana, P. rudecta) are known to be pollution-tolerant in Europe. In addition, all of the species are either foliose (flat; leafy) or crustose (crusty; immersed in their substrate)–none are fruticose (shrubby). [Fruticose lichens are, in general, more sensitive to air pollution than foliose and crustose species.] I would conclude, therefore, that the air quality on Tower Road is not very good.
2. Two of the lichens I found, Candelaria concolor and Physcia millegrana, prefer high nitrogen environments, at least in Europe. Both species, in both Europe and North America, are commonly found on roadsides (where they enjoy high emissions of NOx compounds from vehicles) and near agricultural areas (fields, pastures, and barnyards). So I would conclude from this that the air in the vicinity of Tower Road has an above-average concentration of nitrogen-containing compounds.

My conclusions may not be entirely accurate; the picture may not be so grim! After all, the Air Quality Act was passed in the United States in 1967, and studies have shown that our air quality in the northeast has increased steadily since that time. Modern emissions controls on motor vehicles have further reduced atmospheric pollutants. It takes many years, however, for precipitated atmospheric pollutants to wash away from tree bark. In other words, it may take a while for the lichen flora to recover, even though air quality has increased dramatically. To be truly sure, we’d need to precisely measure air quality, with a machine, to determine exactly what’s happening with regards to air quality vs. lichen diversity along Tower Road.

Another interesting observation–one not having to do with air quality–is the apparent, gradual replacement of Flavoparmelia caperata by the very similar-looking Flavopunctelia soredica on the Tower Road oak trees (the latter is the main lichen flowing down the trunk in our photo). Former CUP curator Bob Dirig has been tracking this phenomenon throughout the Finger Lakes, and other parts of New York. It’s not clear what may be causing this— but it certainly merits closer inspection.

I look forward to doing more field work, and discovering more about Ithaca’s lichens, once the weather warms up again. Meanwhile, you can find me indoors, in the safety and warmth of my microscope lamp!

Some people put tape on their teeth, hoping to make them pearly white. Others rip tape from their skin, hoping to remove offending blackheads and dead skin cells. A world without tape would be like a world without fungi: a much less sticky place.

This is the true story of how I became the Friday Afternoon Mycologist.

The phone rang, and the caller identified himself as someone with official responsibility for controlling the passage of questionable substances across international borders. The unionized workers responsible for inspecting such items were refusing to inspect an automobile that was covered with mould. Was it safe?

Phone calls like this seem like obvious jokes, especially late in the afternoon. Could it be your old college roommate or that joker down the hall? Once — this is also true — I received a Friday afternoon call from someone claiming to work for ‘The X-Files,’ looking for a culture of mutant wheat rust to use the next day for a scene. I explained that wheat rust did not grow in agar culture, and suggested they should rewrite the script for scientific accuracy. When the program finally aired, Scully pulled a Petri dish from the refrigerator and, without making a slide, looked through her miracle-microscope, revealing that all plants in the San Bernadino Valley had been killed by the spores of an Agaricus mushroom the producers had bought at a grocery store.

The man with the mouldy car needed an answer fast. It was not a matter of the tax value of the mould or the car, just that law required that the car be inspected. The unionists being unwilling, he would enter the car himself. What should he do? I had a vision of him removing the entire seat and hauling it to my lab, and then me trying to flatten it so it could be stored in our herbarium. But instead, I told him:

1. Get some clear cellotape, not the ‘invisible’ present-wrapping kind, but the glassy clear kind.
2. Take a piece of tape 1-2 cm long. Press the sticky side of the tape firmly against the mould colony.
3. Gently place the tape on something clean, something that the tape can be easily removed from, like a credit card or a piece of plexiglass.
4. Bring it to me.

It was Friday afternoon, just after lunch, when he showed up. He had photos of the mouldy automobile. The car was an expensive model with leather seats. It had been enclosed in a shipping container in a warm, humid tropical country, then transported half way around the world to this much colder country, resulting in a lot of condensation and thus a lot of mould. Moulds like condensation. If we were to hold a mycological election, and the main campaign issue was dampness and mist, and moulds were the voters, it would be a landslide.

I took his tape samples and mounted each on a microscope slide, with a drop of 85% lactic acid mounting fluid underneath the tape, and a drop of the same on top, then a cover glass. When I looked through the microscope, here is what I saw:

Any mycologist worth his or her immersion oil would recognize this as an Aspergillus. It can cause some alarm, being the generic home of such horrors as A. fumigatus, a leading fungal killer of immunocompromised hospital patients, and A. flavus, source of the nastiest of all natural toxins, aflatoxin, the bane of turkeys everywhere. But the leather seats, the humidity, the shape of the spores all made a convincing story that this was actually the Aspergillus form of a Eurotium species. Eurotium grows on all kinds of things that get wet and then dry out but stay in a humid place… and it really likes leather. I once found it growing on the webbing of my old lacrosse stick in the less-than-ideal archival conditions of my basement. It is also the target of scorn and disgust from military personnel, who find it growing on their tents and leather boots when they participate in tropical adventures. BUT, it is not terribly dangerous, is not a pathogen, does not make many horrible toxins; at worst, it might lead to a lot of sneezing or some asthma.

My client was happy. The car could be released to its esteemed owner, who could decide for himself how to clean it up.

The moral of this story, however, is that you too can use tape to explore your world. House dust, that suspicious fuzz on the couch, mouldy gnomes, the mildewy haze on the garden plants. You need a microscope, of course. Or a friendly neighbourhood mycologist, who probably won’t mind if you knock on his or her door at about 2 o’clock on a lazy Friday afternoon.