WOW! Cool fungus-orchid news

In my inbox, I found an article from PNAS via Discover's blog.  I've currently having a bit of a nergasm, this is so cool.  I've recently started collecting orchids, which are about as strange as fungi (and intimately associated with fungi, by the way), so this really caught my eye.  A rare orchid's leaves look like they're infected with a fungus, both macroscopically and microscopically, attracting flat-footed flies to pollinate them.  The flies are attracted to sick and rotting vegetation feeding on the spores, so the orchid has evolved to look just like an infected plant, even when healthy.  The flies visit, pick up pollen, and move on to the next orchid, effectively transferring pollen.  The orchid's leaf hairs even look like spores of a fungus, and the scent produced by the flower is similar to that of the fungus, further developing the ruse.

Part of me thinks this may be an April Fool's Day joke, though that would be highly irregular for a journal such as PNAS.  Orchids are notorious for their ability to mimic other organism's for the purpose of achieving cross-pollination, here's a video of some bee-mimic orchids.

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.

Red bay wilt reported on Gulf Coast

It was only a matter of time before this little ambrosia beetle brought its deadly cargo with it to Alabama and the Gulf coast. The ambrosia beetle Xyleborus glabratus is an exotic species, as is the fungus it carries, Raffaelea lauricola. The two work together to infest and infect red bay trees, which kills them in alarming fashion akin to other exotic organisms such as those causing Dutch elm disease and chestnut blight. It had been previously found along the southern Atlantic coast, and now this.

Paul Stamets says Fungi can save the world

Here's an interesting TED lecture (warning, 18 minutes long) by Paul Stamets, which outlines several ways in which fungi are very, very cool. He shows how fungi can bioremediate toxic spills, provide anti-viral pharmaceuticals, control pest insects, produce ethanol, and solve world hunger. See for yourself:



Thanks to my good buddy Dave for forwarding this along to me!

Fungal Entomophagy vs Insect Mycetophagy: a lesson from Butch

Here's a link to a flash game featuring an insect-eating mushroom named Butch, as opposed to an insect eating mushrooms. The war of the creepy crawlies goes both ways, with lots of insect groups reliant on fungi for food and shelter, and fungal taxa reliant upon insects. I work with ophiostomatoid fungi, which includes things like the causal agents of Dutch elm disease, Ophiostoma ulmi and O. novo-ulmi. These fungi rely upon their insect vectors for transportation, and have sticky spores on long appendages to "paint" their beetles with spores as they leave the tree they were born and raised in to move on to their next victim. Ambrosia beetles possess mycangia, which are pockets on their exoskeletons, specifically for carrying the spores of their fungi, which are what the larvae eat. Some mycangia even have glands to feed the fungi while in transit!
There are other mycetophagous families of beetles, such as the pleasing fungus beetles (Erotylidae), hairy fungus beetles (Mycetophagidae), handsome fungus beetles (Endomychidae), tooth necked fungus beetles (Derodontidae), silken fungus beetles (Cryptophagidae), round fungus beetles (Leioidae). The list goes on and on. What do you expect? They're BEETLES.
Anyone who has hunted for wild edible mushrooms knows how much little creepy crawlies are also enamored of tasty basidiocarps. Springtails, fungus gnats, and other arthropods are often the first on the scene, and can protein-enhance an unwary mycotroph.
One of the best seminars I've ever witnessed was about leaf-cutting ants in the tropics. Leaf cutters don't eat the leaves, they feed them to their fungus gardens underground in vast colonies. It turns out that the fungus they eat is susceptible to a mycoparasite, which is inedible to the ants. How do the ants tend there gardens? The first thing they do is to try and weed their garden physically. When that doesn't work, they use another symbiont, a bacterium that produces and antibiotic, to treat the infestation.


As for insect-eating mushrooms, there's nothing quite like Butch out there, but there are some pretty neat entomoparasites, like the zygomycetous Entomophthorales. When Entomophthora muscae infects a fly, it will hijack its nervous system, making it crawl upwards until it explodes, thus serving as a great vector for the wind-blown spores.
Beauveria bassiana (Hyphomycetes) will attack just about anything with an exoskeleton, I am told, and is being studied as a potential biological control agent for many insect pests.
And there's also the nematode killing fungi, which can catch the tiny worms in loops of hyphae, or inject spores into their prey, or release swimming spores after their quarry, or just stick them on their bodies. But nematodes are not insects, of course, so let's not get too excited.

Highlights of the root dig

Spent a good part of last week digging roots over in Georgia. My dissertation is a study of the decline of longleaf pine (Pinus palustris) and the role of Leptographium spp. and their insect vectors. What that means is I spend a lot of time collecting small beetles and "rolling" them to find out what fungi they're carrying. And it also means I go out and occasionally dig up some pine roots to see what fungi the insects may have introduced into the trees.

When digging roots, we also collect soil to see if the fungi may be just hanging out in the soil next to the roots (they usually aren't), and a few other things to try and figure out how the trees have been affected by the fungi and insects. This particular root, above, is notably munched up by insects. All those little white bits are where the insects chewed in and pitch came running out.

Another highlight of the root dig was coming upon this critter, a pine snake.
What do pine snakes have to do with fungi? If you'll indulge...
Red Cockaded Woodpeckers are an endangered species. Lots of folks around here hate the little bird because it ties 'em up in lots of "green tape". They are endangered because their preferred habitat is longleaf pine forest, which used to be all over and is now quite rare. This is the only woodpecker, so far as I know, that makes its nesting cavities in live trees. Why make your house in a live tree? Because of these pine snakes, which can climb a pine tree and raid your eggs. The woodpecker pecks holes around the entrance to the cavity to release the resin which acts as a deterrent to the snake. Eww! Sticky snake!
But where do the fungi come in? So the woodpeckers also prefers trees that are infected with Phellinus pini, which is a wood decay fungus causing a disease called red heart, which breaks down some of the cellulose in the wood which makes it easier to excavate. Hey, if you had to dig your house out of a live tree with your face, wouldn't you want the softest tree possible?

Then I had to head back out to the woods on Monday, to collect insects, and I came across this little guy. Not sure, but I think it's a baby cottonmouth. I'll get back to you on that.