Damn you, faint praise!

I received this in my news alerts. And now I know what I'd like Santa to put under the tree for me. It's certainly not the review, but the item being reviewed.

Frankly, I take offense at some of Scicurious' comments. And I will tell you that I am refraining from expressing many of my true sentiments. My hope is that she someday learns that her fellow scientists share her passion for their own subject, and that most of us have the courtesy not to malign the research interests of other scientists.

Speaking of respect for scientists working in different areas, I recently got sucked into History's documentary series, "How The Earth Was Made". It brought back a lot of memories of my foray into geology, which mainly involved a textbook and some spare time back when I had some. I highly recommend it, and it made me think about some interesting directions for my own research. Details to come, perhaps?

New era in mycoblogging for me

Wow. So with the new iPhone I can talk and it will write down what I am saying to put on my blog. That is super cool but can I say fungal terms like coronaria send (NB. Cortinarius) basidiospore and have it understand? Okay, not quite. Quarts in the area's courts in areas CEO RTI and ARI US. How about amanita? (Doesn't capitalize) How about Armillaria? Hi pozzolana (Hypoxylon) crepitus (Crepidotus) try Caloma (Tricholoma) them out Aloma (Naematoloma) Agaricus boletus from a Topsys (Fomitopsis). Oh okay not perfect but still a pretty funny thing. (And it doesn't punctuate very well, either. Parenthetical remarks are my edits)

Long time no posts!

I now see that my last post was on August 8th?  Crikey! It's been a while.  Not that I haven't been out and about looking for mushrooms and other fungal pursuits,  I've just been busy busy busy.  I'm teaching a Principles of Biology course and it's taking a lot of my time.  I try to use a few fungal examples every now and again, but for these folks fungi are just something that you put on pizza or perhaps something that spurs you to throw your bread away.  

I've been adding a few things to my bookshelf as well, including Bessette et al.'s North American Boletes, and the How To Identify Mushrooms series.  But to be honest, I haven't been able to look at them much yet.  Also, I got my compound microscope fixed up, so I'm able to look at some fungi on the scale at which they typically operate (remember, fungi are fundamentally microorganisms!).  Hopefully, I'll be able to put some of my photomicrographs up soon enough.  Okay, back to the lecture writing.  Holler at ya, later, Blogosphere.

Zora Neale Hurston, author, secret Alabamian, zombie hunter; PvZ

I apologize for the hiatus.  Actually, there have been lots of mushrooms coming up gangbusters all over, with the passing rainstorms we've been getting, and I've been meaning to post pictures and comments.  So what shook me out of my quiescent period?  It was this YouTube video I stumbled upon, an interview with the author Zora Neale Hurston about her experiences with zombies (yes, real zombies from Haiti).  Though she claimed to be from Florida, Ms. Hurston was actually from just down the road in Notasulga, Alabama.

On rather tangentially related topic, I've become quite enamored of the video game Plants vs. Zombies, which features both zombies (not the real but the fictionalized type) and mushrooms! I know I'm rather late to the party with this.  The designers are quite creative in ascribing zombie-killing powers to an array of plants and mushrooms. In the iPhone version, you can cultivate a Zen garden, including a special section just for your mushrooms.  And it's got a catchy theme song you can hear when you defeat the game.

I'm okay, lots of other Alabamians are not.

While I tend to focus more on fungi than the state where I live and blog, we've just faced a terrible tragedy here in Alabama.  Myself and the area immediately around me were spared, but there are many people in Alabama who were not so fortunate.  Please consider those impacted by the tornadoes, and give whatever you can to help.

Thank you.

Old Fisheries Pond

I went out after a wet weekend to see if anything had come up. I did find a few things, like this lovely little Scutellinia scutellata, the eyelash fungus. This cute little asco is not in Bessette et al. or Weber and Smith, for some odd reason.  But it's here, for sure. 

Scutellinia scutellata, Pyronemataceae, Pezizales, Ascomycota

It seems as though Monday has been giant storm day over the past few weeks, with storms rolling in overnight and taking down trees.  All the moisture has had the cedar apple rust going gangbusters as well.

Telial horns out the wazoo! I did get a peak under a compound scope and saw the two-celled teliospores, which look like two cones facing each other.  I didn't see any basidia or basidiospores that I could discern, though.  I'll take another look later today.

Looky here!

Tomorrow is, of course, Saint Patrick's Day, and while I don't have any Irish blood that I know of, I do like to look twice at clover patches for items such as those seen in the picture above.  I know it's not related to fungi at all, unless I start blathering on about the various fungi you might find on clovers, and there are a lot. A search just for rusts on genus Trifolium yields about 1200 records in the SMML Fungus-Host Distribution Database. Anyway, perhaps it's because I spend quite a bit of time looking down at the ground for fungi that I also like to look at clovers.  Observe that there are at least 2 four-leaf clovers in this picture.  Where are they, you may ask?  Do you think I'd tell?

Busy busy busy

A nice little Pluteus cervinus on an old rotten log

It's been raining, so I've been out hunting mushrooms.  As I mentioned previously, I went out on the Tuskegee National Forest with some of my students, out on the Bartram Trail (or Bertram Trail, if you believe the sign, which you shouldn't).  That was a couple of weeks ago, now, and already I've been at it again.  Last week I gave a talk to my new friends in the East Alabama Orchid Society about mycorrhizal fungi and orchids (a very cool story I'll elaborate on later, I promise).  Earlier this week I gave a talk to my daughter's kindergarten class about mushrooms, and this morning I went out to the Alabama Nature Center in Millbrook, AL to talk to some of their nature educators about identifying mushrooms and other macrofungi.  They do have a beautiful site out there, so I'll be sure to head back, and I suggest you do too.  After me flapping my lips for close to two hours, we got to go looking for some mushrooms.  Even though it had only rained yesterday (and some last week) we saw some neat stuff out there: Cortinarius (pictured, species?  not sure I even want to go there), Hygrocybe chlorophana (I called it Hygrophorus, which it used to be, same family, still a waxy cap, nice yellow thing) Hypholoma fasciculare (sulfur tuft, formerly known as Naematoloma), and lots of polypores and what-not.  It looks like we're getting more rain, which is good news!  And to top it off, I just got a copy of Taylor Lockwood's Mushroom Identification Trilogy in the mail.   I'll let you know what I think of it by and by.  Good times!

Cortinarius sp., with fresh cortina!

10,000!

A modest milestone finally met
For mushrooms on the internet
Thanks to all y'all who visit
To read of a Kingdom, exquisite
Passing through, or for many a year
Y'all come back, now, y'hear?

George Washington Carver Museum

Bust of George Washington Carver outside the museum

 Yesterday my daughter's second grade class went on a field trip to the Tuskegee Institute National Historic Site just a bit down the road from here.  Even though I had a field trip of my own to contend with in the afternoon (keep posted, details after the second trip today), I had to go for at least part of the trip, as George Washington Carver is a hero of mine.

Peephole into pictures of mushroom!

 I was pleasantly surprised to find a lovely display of mushrooms and other fungi displayed prominently near the entrance.  Fungi were one of Dr. Carver's many interests, and his Master's of Agriculture from what is now Iowa State University was in Plant Pathology.

Another peephole

Ascomycetes

 I especially appreciate that the macrofungi were separated into their proper divisions,

Basidiomycetes

 And I also liked this illustration of a powdery mildew cleistothecium.  As well as being a botanist, agricultural chemist, philanthropist (within his means), and inventor, he was also something of an artist. 

One of Dr. Carver's illustrations of a powdery mildew ascoma.

  I didn't remember the fungal display from my last visit, which was many years ago, but it just reinforced my fondness for this great man. 

For Valentine's Day, poetry

Not so long ago, I mentioned my blog to a friend who is in the humanities.  She noted that Sylvia Plath wrote a poem called "Mushrooms" (1959), which I would share here, but it is easy enough for you to click the link and read it for yourself without me risking copyright violation.  I have seen where some have interpreted this poem as a metaphor for feminism, and I can see that being an underlying theme.  I, being admittedly male, don't believe I can speak to this interpretation of the poem.  As a mycologist, however, I appreciate the tone of the poem, especially when juxtaposed with another mushroom-themed poem

Let us consider the work of another great American poet, Emily Dickinson. She too penned a poem about basidiocarps, posthumously titled "The Mushroom is the elf of plants" (published in 1924 many years after her death in 1886).  You'll not be surprised to hear that I do not like this poem so well.  Though Ms. Dickinson was a student of botany, she much maligns the fungi. I am stung by the final lines "Had nature any outcast face, Could she a son contemn, Had nature an Iscariot, That mushroom, -it is him".  To be fair, this was the prevailing attitude of the 19th century.  For one, mushrooms and other fungi were considered to be plants, and it was also thought that their only role in nature was as agents of disease and decay.  What a difference the better part of a century makes!


I feel as though Plath must have been intending to author a revised view of Dickinson.  Both poems are relatively short works; five stanzas of four lines for Dickinson, eleven stanzas of three lines for Plath. In Dickinson's poem, the protagonist is addressed it the third person.  Dickinson refers to a single male mushroom.  "That mushroom, it is him".  As if referring to the mushroom as nature's Iscariot wasn't enough of a display of enmity, this poetic relationship only reinforces her disdain.  Plath, by contrast, refers to mushrooms in the first person plural ("We shall by morning/Inherit the earth/Our foot's in the door").  I especially admire the phrase 'our foot', suggesting many individuals sharing a single member.  To me, it symbolizes simultaneous unity and multitude, another fungal oddity. 

I apologize to any devotees of the humanities who may feel that I am blindly making a foray into comparative literature and sounding like a novice at best.  I am the first to admit that I am not a poet nor an experienced literary critic.   As a mycologist, though, I definitely prefer Plath's sympathetic treatment of fungi to Dickinson's unsympathetic treatment.

Ironically, on the cover of this book of Dickinson's poems is a flower that appears to me to be Indian pipe (Monotropa uniflora), which is an achlorophyllous plant that is absolutely dependent upon fungi for its nutrition.  Monotropoid plants take mycorrhizas to the next level, in that they don't provide the fungus with, well, as far as we currently know, anything.  They somehow "convince" the fungi to provision them with photosynthate (sugar) from other plants, as well as other nutrients.

 Follow up: 2/15/11.  I just found this anthology of mushroom-inspired poems entitled "Decomposition".  Clever title, that.  I just hope it's better than this album of mushroom-inspired songs.  I haven't actually listened to the whole album, to be fair, but the style is not my cup of tea.  Perhaps, as Mark Twain said about Wagner's music, it's better than it sounds.

Kingdom for a day

I received command of the lectern yesterday, to present the Organism of the Day (Exidia recisa, pictured above) and to lecture on the biology of my favorite Kingdom, the Fungi.  It was certainly a fevered race to present information about five phyla in about 40 minutes (minus the spiel on E. recisa).  In the earlier section, I did manage to get time at the end to discuss two grades of fungi (grades being groups that are share similarity but not by recent common ancestry, e.g. winged things), the lichens and the imperfect fungi.  The latter section was much more hurried, and I think many student hands were strained by furious notetaking, and my own vocal cords by the shear tumult of words such as ascocarp and basidiospore and dikaryon.  While I loved the opportunity to share information about the Fifth Kingdom, it would have been nice to slow down and languish on the finer details.  The students have an exam tomorrow, and in order to keep up with our semester-long march through life's rich tapestry, we needed to soldier on. 

Site Redesign

Yes, I've been quite active in the blogosphere recently, and have just redesigned this site. Prominently featured are: a new background featuring some nice LBMs I found here in a lawn, and a new masthead featuring an anomalous mushroom, Phylloporus rhodoxanthus, the gilled bolete. Boletes typically have tubes, but the trait of having a lamellate hymenium (a.k.a. gills) is polyphyletic, which means that not all things with the trait have it by common descent. A familiar animal example of this would be wings, a character shared by birds, bats, and insects; the three groups are only distantly related, with lots of unwinged taxa in between.

Gills are found in the traditional Agaricoid fungi (with some losses of gills), and in many (but not all) Russuloid fungi (which look like agarics to most folks). Gills are also found in some polypores, like Lenzites and Daedalea (the latter really being an in-betweener), as well as the split gill fungus, Schizophyllum commune (below). Interestingly, none of the Ascomycota have gills.

Back to P. rhodoxanthus, you can see in the picture that the gills are a bit different, in that they have little stubs, like they want to fork or form tubes, but then they don't. Paxillus spp., also in the order Boletales, tend to have forked gills too.

Anyway, I hope you, dear reader, appreciate the new look. Hopefully I'll keep posting new stuff with some frequency. We've been getting a lot of rain here, so perhaps if it warms up a bit I'll be posting some of my discoveries along the way.

I don't usually weigh in on the football thang, but...

Now, I follow SEC football, being an alumnus of Auburn University, but I prefer to leave football talk to the approximately 1 million other sports blogs out there, as a case of nonoverlapping magisteria. They don't talk about fungi, and I usually don't talk about football, even though it is an integral part of the Alabama experience. But I found this too funny to pass up. A video game store in Tuscaloosa replaced the cover photo of tough Tim Tebow with an image of his more sensitive side, crying after losing the SEC Championship to 'Bama.

Trip to the Netherlands

I just got back from a trip to the Netherlands and Belgium, accompanying my wife to one of her professional meetings. Before going I made plans to meet up with some professional contacts of my own. Fortunately, I did get to see Prof. Duur Aanen at Wageningen, and unfortunately I did not get to drop in at CBS to visit with Dr. Pedro Crous. By Friday, I was pretty wiped out from my travels and didn't feel up to getting on another train.

We stayed in Maastricht, in the Limburg region of the Netherlands, and it was quite nice. I got to eat plenty of the 'white gold of Limburg', which is their white asparagus. Though it looks like an achlorophyllous plant, the white color is achieved by etiolation, or deprivation of light. Soil is mounded up around the emerging stalks which then do not produce chlorophyll, yielding stalks that are tender and milder in flavor. Etiolation is part of the process used to produce enoki mushrooms from Flammulina velutipes. I once isolated from a F. velutipes sporocarp (mushroom), which grew in culture but not very happily. It actually produced tiny little mushrooms on the Petri plate, as if to say, "Get me the heck out of here!".

But I did get to meet with Duur Aanen, which was a great pleasure. One of his research foci has been fungus-farming termites. I got to help his students on some mound excavation when I was doing dissertation research in South Africa. I got to see his lab at Wageningen, and chat with some of his students.

Cedar quince rust

Yesterday it rained, which was greatly needed to take some of the yellow out of the air. The pollen has been off the charts. I took my car to the car wash and a few hours later it was dusty yellow again. But another effect of the cool, wet conditions was the fruiting of this fungus on our small juniper trees. At least I think they're junipers, definitely Cupressaceae. Yesterday the fruitings of this fungus looked slimy, like this...
and this...

But today, they've dried up and look more like this...
And this...
What is this strange orange ooze? Spoiler alert! It's in the title of this post. Cedar quince rust is in the same genus of rusts as apple cedar rust, Gymnosporangium. And like G. juniperi-virginianae and most species in the genus they are heteroecious (requiring two hosts to complete the life cycle) and demicyclic (lacking a uredinial stage). The hosts are in the Cupressaceae and Rosaceae. But clearly this is not cedar-apple rust. The telia of G. juniperi-virginianae are formed out of gall-like growths on the stems. When conditions are right, the telial horns project out of orifices, kind of like the eyes and ears of a stress-doll.

THAT up there is cedar apple rust

Cedar-quince rust, on the other hand, isn't associated with complex galls like cedar-apple rust, though it may cause branch swellings and flaky bark. It's the most important Gymnosporangium rust on the rosaceous hosts, quinces and others, according to Sinclair et al. I can't seem to find my newer version right now, oh wait, there it is! The causal fungus is G. clavipes, and it infects far more than just quince, including more than 480 rosaceous species in 11 genera (again, according to Sinclair and Lyon)! As you can see from the photos above, the smaller juniper branches are killed by the fungus, though the basal infections don't appear to be killing the tree in any hurry.

I just went out to check on my cedar apple rust gall on the juniper in my front yard, and it's gone! I thought I'd see if it fruited after yesterday's rain, but it's no longer there. I guess I never posted pictures of it either. They were a little blurry. But I do see some more small infections of G. clavipes on the big tree in the front yard. And here's a link to an even better photo of a G. clavipes infection, as well.

Chanteuse Katy Perry is a fungivore or possibly a mycophage

From some corner of the Internet that I rarely frequent, I find this item. Katy Perry, the British pop singer, eats edible mushrooms as a regular part of her diet, and claims they help her keep in shape. Well, certainly eating mushrooms will help when compared with some of her other favorite menus items, including the infamous In 'n Out double double. I used to love I'nO when I lived in California, but now it's all items that are off my menu (See my post on Statins). So I'm eating more mushrooms as well. Mostly the button variety, good old Agaricus bisporus. Now I'm wishing I'd gotten some of those black trumpets at the Dekalb Farmer's Market. Hmm. Maybe next time.

Also, the mushroom ravioli were quite good, as was the tempeh I had this evening for dinner. I attempted an Indonesian tempeh curry, which was also quite good, though I made it a bit too salty. I usually don't care for sweet potatoes all that much, but I liked them in this dish.

So what is the difference between a fungivore and a mycophage? A fungivore is an animal that consumes primarily fungi, as is a mycophage. However, a mycophage can also refer to a virus that infects fungi. I'm not sure if I would limit fungivory to those animals that specialize on fungi. After all, to the fungus being eaten, it's probably of little difference whether it's being eaten as the main course or an appetizer. Fungivory and mycophagy, oddly may be even more nuanced in any differences the two terms may have. According to "Ainsworth and Bisby's Dictionary of the Fungi" (at least the version that I have, not the newest version) this viewpoint is supported, and they also seem to agree that even non-specialists may be considered fungivores/mycophages.

Possibly the cure for vegetarian bacon

Now I'll admit that I've previously dabbled with vegetarianism, mostly on a dare. Where I went into the Peace Corps I was advised to get reacquainted with the eating of meat to avoid cross-cultural misunderstandings, and I did. I like meat. It's tasty. But I also probably need to cut back, given my recent posts on cholesterol and my fight with it. I've cut way back on the amount of meat I eat, and I've quit eating meat for Lent, though I still eat of the cold-water fishes like salmon which are thought to be beneficial. One of the worst offenders is bacon, which besides being greasy is also high in sodium and other things that one shouldn't eat but are delicious nonetheless. The other night I was rolling some of my own sushi rolls, which is a thing I like to do, and I tried something new. By new I mean it's the first time I've tried it, it has undoubtedly been tried before. I soaked some dried shiitake mushrooms, (that's Lentinula edodes, for those who may have forgotten this is a mycology blog), then marinated them in soy sauce and a splash of rice wine vinegar before slicing and sauteing in canola oil. I swear, it tasted just like bacon, at least more than any of the other bacon alternatives foisted upon the people. These days, this is the best I have to blog about.

Statins

I visited a primary care physician for the first time in about four years. The last time I visited one was before coming to Alabama. My blood work came back showing that my previously OK cholesterol levels had gone ballistic. I attribute the jump to getting cozy with the southern diet. Too much BBQ, too many chicken fingers. So the bad news is that the good times of ignorantly eating and drinking to my heart's (dis)content are over. Better to know now than to find out in the emergency room, I suppose. So what does this have to do with fungi? It has to do with the prescription the doctor handed me.

As it turns out, the cholesterol-lowering wonder drugs of the 21st century, statins, were originally derived from fungi. Now mainly synthesized, these drugs work by inhibiting a key enzyme in cholesterol production, HMG-CoA reductase. Some of the first research on statins was performed by Dr. Akira Endo, a biochemist, who found cholesterol-inhibiting compounds in Penicillium citrinum. Penicillium spp., besides being very common mold agents, also gave us the first antibiotic discovery, penicillin.
Endo and Masao Kuroda hypothesized that Fungi could defend themselves from other organisms by inhibiting cholesterol production, and fortunately for millions of people, they were correct.
The ability to produce statins is apparently widespread throughout the true Fungi, even the oyster mushroom is naturally high in lovastatin (link to PDF). Antibiotics and statins, two of the most important medical discoveries of the past 100 years. Thanks, Fungi!


Update-1/19/10. I just found this article, which may help defuse one of the problems with statins, the grapefruit juice contraindication. The answer? more edible fungi, of course!

Montana!

So, if you've visited my blog from stem to stern, you've seen the map of all the states I've visited. It's only there to shamelessly burnish my own glory, I admit. Well, right now I'm in Montana, which means I've added a state to my life list, leaving only Alaska, Delaware, Missouri, North Dakota, and South Dakota. I may have visited Delaware and not remembered it.

I'm planning on starting a post-doc out here in January, at least part-timing between Montana and Alabama, since I've got some roots in Alabama the Beautiful.

Here's a pic taken in Alabama by a friend of mine. I wish I could've seen this in person. That does appear to be a Hericium (coralloides or ramosum?), which is edible and choice.