Another mycophobe

Just saw an article about an air passenger who's allergic to mushrooms, who had a jar of mushroom juice drip on him in the middle of a flight. This forced an emergency landing. What are the chances?
No word on what species of mushrooms was involved, but I'll keep looking into it.

My neighbor, mycophobe

My neighbor, bless her heart, hates mushrooms. She has a lovely fairy ring of mushrooms that sprouts up everytime it rains. She dutifully plucks every single mushroom and chucks them in the street. These pics aren't of her yard, but are nearby.
Tropical Storm Fay came through our corner of Alabama, and now the whole place is bursting forth with succulent basidiocarps, the more technical terms for most mushrooms. We've seen some more boletes coming up too, and I'm still not planning on eating them.

In other news, I've added Wisconsin to the list of States I've visited. WooHoo!

Another interesting use for mushrooms

From Japan, of course.

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.

Nerdsneyland

What are my favorite sections of the library, you probably would never ask? Here they are.

Mushroom torture

Good NIGHT!, people. Don't ever do this to mushrooms, ever. Please. But if you want a laugh, check out this blog of hilarious Weight Watchers recipe cards from the 1970's.

BONUS: How to play Sweet Home Alabama on the guitar!!!