fungi
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.
The elusive dog’s nose fungus
An encounter with a fungus that looks like a glistening dog’s nose, except it’s attached to a log and shoots out black spores. It’s rare in my personal experience, but is it really rare? How do we know which fungi are rare? Short answer: we don’t.
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.
Furia ithacensis
Well now, everyone likes a dead fly, but I’m here to tell you that some dead flies are more spectacular than others. Like these gloriously dead snipe flies, exploded by a fungus that is named after my home town. If I were a birder, I’d call this find a “good bird,” and tick it off on my life list. Do you have a life list?
The Dancing Nematode and the Helicospore
Lots of small twisty things, entwined. Some of them are moving. What the heck is going on here?
Bioblitz Final Report
Back in 2007 I hosted a Bioblitz. Bioblitzes aim to inventory the organisms living on a patch of the planet. For fungi, this is frustratingly impossible.
A requiem for the reprint
Here the FAM recounts the history of the scientific reprint, recalls past joys requesting and receiving reprints in the mail, and issues an appeal for a new invention–a tool to aid in inserting more papers to an already full filing cabinet. Luckily for him, the time of the PDF reprint is upon us.