fungi
Tree slime, stump flux and microbial consortia
It’s Spring in the northern woods, so other-worldly orange and pink slime is oozing out of hardwood stumps. What could this possibly be? Let’s ask the Friday Afternoon Mycologist! Today he explores some of these weeping trees, and finds a thriving yeast jamboree. He teams up with Molecule Man to identify the suspects, and together they shed light on a neglected bit of forest ecology.
This bark glows in the dark! Bioluminescence in mushrooms
The very coolest mushrooms of all are the ones that glow, don’t you think? We don’t know, yet, how they do it, but perhaps there are a few different mechanisms, because we infer that bioluminescence has arisen multiple times over the course of evolution. Why? Well, we have some ideas. These mushrooms remain mysterious though: we don’t know exactly why or how they glow, but they do glow, and that is excellent.
Mushrooms as Sacred Objects in North America
Although surely many Native American peoples were experts on fungi, we have little knowledge of how they used them, particularly the more ephemeral mushrooms. Here’s a primer on three different bracket fungi (conks) used by some native peoples.
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.