Mycologists love to put the fun in fungi. Dr. Dennis Desjardin is definitely up there in my book of the funniest mycologists I've never met. He named a species of Phallus after a colleague (noting "with permission" in the manuscript), and now, he's added another species description to his credit, which he's named after Spongebob Squarepants, Spongiforma squarepantsii. Desjardin participated in the description of the genus in a previous paper, which indicates just strange this group is. At first glance, even the expert mycologists could not tell if the specimens were ascomycetes or basidiomycetes! Closer inspection by microscopy and even closer via DNA sequence analysis revealed Spongiforma to be basidiomycetes, actually gasteroid (truffle-like) boletes. The basidiocarps are sponge-like in appearance, and the authors thought the photomicrographs resembled Bikini Bottom, thus the new species was named for the world's most famous marine fry-cook.
So far, the group has only been found in southeastern Asia and the adjacent super-archipelago. S. squarepantsii was found in a dipterocarp forest on the island of Borneo.
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