Organism of the Day: Armillaria mellea

Yesterday I presented the Organism of the Day to my Biology class, and selected one of my favorites, Armillaria mellea. First, the complete classification.

Armillaria mellea (Vahl.:Fr.) Kummer (common names include: oak root fungus, honey mushroom)

Armillaria

Physalacriaceae (it was Tricholomataceae when I first learned it, but we all knew Tricholomataceae was a dumping ground for white-spored mushrooms)

Agaricales

Agaricomycetes

Basidiomycota

Fungi

Eukarya

Why should you care about A. mellea? Well, first it's an important plant pathogen, infecting hundreds of plant species, though mostly noticeable on woody species. Even though it's called oak root fungus, this is clearly a misnomer. It can also survive on dead plant material, as a saprobe.

It does produce mushrooms, being an agaric, but these are analogous to the apples on the tree, they are just a way of getting around. The mushrooms are fairly typical, with a pileus, a stipe, and a partial veil. Like most common mushrooms, the fertile part or hymenium takes the form of gills, or lamellae. The spores produced rain down and you can see deposits of them on the caps of some of the other mushrooms. Notice that it’s white, the color is an important diagnostic feature as well.It also produces structures called mycelial fans, under the bark of trees that it’s infecting, which is an important structure for feeding the organism.

But another interesting feature is the bioluminescence. This is present in many species of mushrooms (at least 70 species) and other organisms, many animals. The glow of Armillaria mellea has been observed since ancient times, and has the common name foxfire. There’s a town called Foxfire in North Carolina, and Mark Twain in mentions the boys using it in Huckleberry Finn. In some fungi, the mushrooms glow, but in Armillaria, it’s the mycelium and rhizomorphs.

Perhaps the neatest thing about Armillaria is this item. In 1992 it was reported that a single clone of Armillaria gallica was estimated to cover an area of 15 hectares (or about 37 acres), weigh over 10,000 kg (about as much as a blue whale), and be over 1500 years old. And you would have never known it, because it was underground and under bark, and much of it was made up of microscopic threads.

The researchs who discovered the humongous fungus baited for the fungus using poplar sticks, buried under ground, and tested for somatic incompatibility. Basically, if the fungal isolates were genetically distinct, they would repel each other. If they fused, the isolates recognized each other part of the same whole. Comparison of genes further demonstrated that it’s all one big thing. The folks in Michigan are proud of their humongous fungus and celebrate it every year.

But the story doesn’t end there. Later that year, another humungous fungus was claimed near Glenwood, Washington, that was supposed to be 600 hectares, 40 times bigger than the one in the upper peninsula. Though the evidence wasn’t as strong, the question arose. How big can these things get?

In 2003, a paper was published demonstrating an even larger Armillaria clone, in the Blue Mountains of northeastern Oregon. This one was found to be even bigger than the purported thallus of Glenwood, 965 hectares, or 2385 acres. Though the estimates of the age are variable, it's thought that the Oregon Armillaria clone (actually A. ostoyae) could be as old as 8650 years. Can you imagine? An individual organism that might predate the Egyptian pyramids?

Does this seem like deja vu? I just realized that I blogged about this before, and not too long ago. But not as a prestigious Organism of the Day. That part is new. I still think it's one of the coolest stories in mycology. I also think Tom Volk tells the story better, but there it is.

Another fungi in Alabama story

While waiting for the white nose fungus to come flying in from the north, Alabama has been hit by another newsworthy fungus in the south. This one has been around for a while, but is approaching epidemic proportions in the marshes near Mobile and adjacent Mississippi. Claviceps purpurea, which is better known as ergot, affects many grasses, and was the original source of lysergic acid, a precursor of LSD. Now it is hitting Spartina alternifolia, one of the two main grass species in the area.

The fungus doesn't kill the plants though it does render them sterile, which in an evolutionary context is just as bad. Many questions remain unanswered. For example, was the Gulf oil spill an important predisposing factor? Also, is it from the G3 group, considered a different variety of the fungus, which seems to affect Spartina more frequently than other grasses? Probably so, which would be good seeing as the G1 and G2 groups affect some of our economically important grasses. Clearly, this story is developing, and it is far to early to consider what the impact is or may become.

Bear eating fly agaric

Came across this video depicting a bear cub eating fly agaric and having a little trip. I do not endorse the feeding of fly agaric to animals, but this is interesting and I haven't posted in a while, so there it is.

I am a mushroom...

From: Je suis un champignon... / ALT-TAB.ORG
Here's a lovely little mushroom related humor. Perhaps I'm retrotranslating from the French, but the broccoli says "I'm a broccoli, I look like a tree", the nut is saying "I'm a nut, and I look like a brain", and the mushroom says "I'm a mushroom, and I hate this game".

Okazaki fragments

Sorry I've been remiss in posting for a while. I've been busy with my new job, teaching biology. This post isn't about fungi or Alabama, but about what I perceive to be an injustice of sorts. The textbook I'm using makes a big deal about highlighting scientists and their famous experiments; Mendel, Darwin, Watson and Crick (and Rosalind Franklin, of course), Hershey and Chase, Meselson and Stahl, but they just mentioned Okazaki fragments, and glossed over the fact that they were named for the scientist (sic) who discovered them. Okazaki fragments are the short, punctuated stretches of DNA that are produced on the lagging strand when the molecule is being copied.

My curiosity piqued by this oversight, I decided to find out who Okazaki is or was. As it turns out, Okazaki is and was. The eponymous fragments were discovered by a husband and wife team, Reiji and Tsuneko Okazaki, in 1968. Reiji died from leukemia in 1975. He was a native of Hiroshima, and survived the immediate effects of the bombing that ended the Second World War. Tsuneko, as far as my research can tell, survives still, and is a prominent figure in the promotion of science in Japan.

They were able to discover the key to the mystery of the lagging strand by using a chased pulse technique, feeding E. coli irradiated nucleotides followed by non-irradiated nucleotides.

Sorry for using this space as a bully pulpit to vent my impotent rage and righteous indignation, but at least you know I still have plenty to say.

More Alabama fungus news!

Probably my favorite Alabama brewery, Good People Brewing Company, has announced they are brewing a batch of IPA using a different type of yeast, Brettanomyces. This yeast (which I admit I'd never heard of before) is a bit different from good ol' Saccharomyces cerevisiae, in that it has been frequently construed as a contaminant, but is used in some instances for brewing as it produced different sensory compounds. We'll see how it turns out!

WANT!

Here's an item I'd like to get, a Mario mushroom design iPhone cozy. You can also get them for your iPad!

Perils of the Interwebs, perilous collecting

I do love the internet, obviously from my participation in it, but do find some faults in it occasionally. For one, as a mycologist, it is evident how much more there is to be explored and documented. Species list for Alabama mushrooms? Or anywhere else for that matter? This isn't solely the fault of the Internet, of course, as the direction of human curiosity and endeavor hasn't led to many attempts at species lists for macroscopic fungi such as it has for flora and fauna. And I am not up to the task myself, so I do accept some blame as well.

But I received a link to an article about a fungus that is expanding its range northward from Florida, to find that I can't tell what the thing is. It is described as "brown roy", which I do believe is a typo, and that the original intent was "brown rot". In looking up this fungus, I find that all the other news outlets picking up the story and posting it on their websites mirror this apparent error. The other name given, "Korean fungus", is also not helpful. The original article mention a photograph of the damage, but they don't SHOW the image.

What will this mean for Alabamians and their wood in service? Alas, I cannot say, for garbage in does equal garbage out, as the old computing axiom states.


In other mushroom news, fungi have been killing in an unexpected way in Italy. Not by nasty infection, not by inadvertent poisoning, not by taking advantage of the intoxicated, but by preying upon the cupidity of mushroom collectors. I would have been surprised to find Italians, with a long history of mycophagy, being killed by collecting and eating poisonous mushrooms, but this is not the case. Eighteen Italians have been killed by their secretive protection of fruiting sites, falling off trails down steep slopes or getting lost. I know many mycophiles have nearly gotten quite lost, staring at the ground instead of focusing on their position in the landscape, myself included.

Alabamians gone viral again

This was in Huntsville!


While I feel for the poor lady who was the victim of the attack, her brother is quite charismatic, especially under the influence of Auto-tune.

The End of History

This has been in the news quite a bit recently as an "odd story". The Brew Dog Brewery in Scotland has produced the strongest beer in the world, The End of History. At a whopping 55% alcohol by volume (ABV), I (and others) ask, how is that even possible?

Beer and wine are produced by fermenting their feedstocks, or incubating the ingredients with yeast, which consumes the sugars and converts them to ethanol under anaerobic conditions. Alcohol (specifically ethyl alcohol), is a poison which kills slowly, the old saw goes, though more quickly in the case of yeasts. Most beer yeasts max out at 5-7% ABV, with yeasts used in Belgian strains tolerating 12%. Even so, no yeast can survive and prosper at these higher proportions of alcohol. So the brewers engaged in what some brewing purists have claimed is foul play, freeze distillation. Because water has a higher freezing point than water (which is why the vodka in your freezer remains a liquid), if you freeze the beer and remove the ice crystals, the remaining liquid is enriched in alcohol and the other flavorants. In the case of End of History, that includes juniper berries and highland nettles.

Only 11 bottles have been produced, each within a taxidermied roadkill squirrel or stoat. The price tag is not a trivial matter. Depending on whether you want a stoat or a squirrel, the bottles were 500 or 700 pounds, though now they are sold out. BrewDog still has inventory of their other ultrahigh gravity beers, including Tactical Nuclear Penguin at 32% ABV and Sink The Bismarck, at 41% ABV. These ultrahigh gravity beers are still illegal in Alabama; the Gourmet Beer and Wine Law signed last year increased the accepted ABV content from 6% to only 13.9%. However, this has greatly expanded the inventory of my favorite local wine and beer merchant, Gus.

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.

The cause of Yunnan Sudden Death Syndrome revealed: mushrooms

A friend of mine posted this article from the BBC concerning the lethal poisoning of over 400 Chinese people in Yunnan province. The Yunnan Sudden Death Syndrome had been observed for over 30 years, and the cause has recently come to light. A small mushroom, Trogia sp. (Marasmiaceae), has been found to produce toxic amino acids, which may be acting synergistically with environmental barium. Interestingly, the Yunnan province is known for its wild mushrooms, many of which are exported around the world. This Trogia, however, has been deemed too small to be marketable, and is eaten locally.

Matango! My Review

Matango! (Attack of the Mushroom People)
Color. 1963. 89 minutes, unrated. Directed by Ishiro Honda (famous for Godzilla and other kaiju films). You can watch the whole thing (in Japanese with English subtitles) here.
I recognized Akira Kubo from other Toho films, namely Destroy all Monsters, and Monster Zero. He was also in the Akira Kurosawa classic, Sanjuro. Other stars are also familiar Toho character actors. Also Yoshio Tsuchiya, also a star of several Godzilla films and Kurasawa classics. Kumi Mizuno, one of director Ishiro Honda's favorites.
The film begins like a dramatic version of Gilligan's Island. A ship with a passenger manifest including a professor, a singer, a plain jane, a mystery writer, and a millionaire (as well as a skipper and his flunky. Matango came out a year before Gilligan's Island.
The version I watched was dubbed and had subtitles. There were some interesting differences in the translation and the subtitles.
28 minutes in, we get to the first fungal reference. A derelict oceanographic ship covered in mold. Different colored mold in different parts of the ship. Radiation keeps the mold at bay. Thirty minutes in. We meet Matango, the giant mushroom. If only it were edible...
They are warned by the Captain's Log. DON'T eat the MUSHROOMS! They may contain nerve-damaging agents.
42 minutes in. More mushrooms. apparently growing on wood. "If you were starving, you'd eat them, wouldn't you?"
At 48 minutes, the first monster sighting. The damp! What happened? They seen the first mushroom man and then what happens?
1:09, The rain makes the mushrooms GROW.
1:13. The millionaire eats the mushrooms and starts tripping. The truth is revealed. Eat the mushrooms, become a mushroom. Oh. the laughing voices.
1:21. Apparently mushrooms are polite and knock before trying to ambush you. Is Matango a Russula? It breaks off pretty cleanly.
So how does it end? I don't want to spoil it.

As monster films go, this one wasn't particularly scary. I admit, the mushroom people don't have anything on Godzilla or any of the other kaiju. I do appreciate some of the touchs that I would expect from such a mycophilic culture as the Japanese. I did enjoy this movie more than I expected I would as a film. It tended to follow the Toho formula pretty well, dedicating almost half of the film to character development before the first tease of monster, with more and more monster footage leading up to the climax. It was easy to riff on it as I watched, a la MST3K. If you're a mycophile, it's definitely worth a watch, but over all I'd give it about 3 spores out of 5.

Happy Birthday, America!

It is the Fourth of July, which every red-blooded American knows is Independence Day. Today we commemorate our secession from the United Kingdom, through the ratification of the Declaration of Independence (which you can read here). That's all for today, but I'll have more very soon.

Matango!

Coming soon! My review of this film!

Humungus Fungus Fest

Coming up 12-15 August 2010, the Humungus Fungus Fest in Crystal Falls, Michigan. The festival pays tribute to the Armillaria bulbosa thallus which lives is the area.

Armillaria spp. are basidiomycete, mushroom-forming fungi which feed off living and dead plant roots and stems, decaying them in the process. There are some situations where Armillaria can be an aggressive pathogen, killing even otherwise healthy individuals, but many are weakly pathogenic, opportunistic, or saprobic. The taxonomy of Armillaria has been rather confused, but is being worked out using molecular (DNA-based) tools. Also using these tools, and also through cultural experiments, it has been shown that single genetic individuals (genets) can be found occupying very large areas. The humongous fungus near Crystal Falls is estimated to cover 38 acres, and be at least 1,500 years old, and may be as much as 10,000 years old. The report was published in the prestigious journal, Nature. An excellent and more accessible summary of the article can be found here.

I think this has to rate as one of the top coolest things about fungi. Because this giant living organism is, most of the time, almost totally invisible. Armillaria does produce mushrooms, but only when conditions are right. The body of an Armillaria (or thallus, in mycospeak) is comprised predominantly of microscopically fine threads of mycelium, though these may coalesce and form rhizomorphs, which are sclerotized (toughened) tubes of hyphae that move resources like water and nutrients around the thallus. Dense mycelial fans can also be found under the bark of some affected trees. And most of it is underground, or hidden under bark. Thus, while invisibility comes in being hidden below ground, and also in being microscopic. And in a third sense it is invisible. In being so large that the eye could not see the entire limit of its body from a single vantage point.

However, the fungal record for largest and oldest living thing, being only the first one to surface, did not last. A 600 hectare thallus was identified in Washington state, and an Armillaria ostoyae thallus in the Blue Mountains of eastern Oregon was ascertained to cover 965 hectares, or about 2,385 acres, and could be as old as 8,650 years. As far as I know, this is the current record holder for Armillaria thalli.

I don't know if I'll make it to the festival in Michigan. It does look like a lot of fun. (I will not type "-gi" next to that, I will not. Because that would be totally corny). Cribbage Tournament!

New rare fungus discovered in England

Multiclavula vernalis (Basidiomycota, Cantharellales, Clavulaceae) was recently discovered and confirmed in England. This fungus is rare, and while reported from more northerly parts of the British Isles, this is a first report for England proper. The genus is odd in that it's members are frequently mycobionts (the fungal partners in lichens) in basidiolichens . The vast majority of lichenized fungi are ascomycetes.

The fruiting body (like most true clavariaceous fungi) is like a fleshy tube. Coral fungi, though similar in morphology, are not closely related, but are considered allied in the "clavarioid" fungi.

Next installment of Mushrooms in the News

Really, I should call it "fungi in the news", because relatively few fungi produce mushrooms. But here's a mushroom article. Not much there, other than the typical mycophobic opening and then the praise for the mushroom. But the underemphasized lede is that you can grow morels, which had long been impossible to grow in cultivation.

The Morgan Hills (California) Times reports that this year's Mushroom Mardi Gras attracted 80,000 people. Wow! That's quite a crowd for fungi!

In other news, fungi once again prove to harbor the best tools against bacteria. Only this time, it appears the compound in question may help defeat some of the most resistant bacteria.

In the bad news department, an MMA fighter who decided to consume mushroom tea with friends had it end in tragedy. His hallucinations led to the grisly murder of his friend, who he thought was possessed by the devil. Once again, I feel I have to say it, "Psychedelic mushrooms are DANGEROUS". But so is MMA fighting.

And finally, another bit of GOOD news, some rare Australian orchids may be have a new lease on life as they've been transplanted WITH THEIR FUNGI.

Bacteria

Bacteria are not fungi, although like fungi they are microorganisms. Jonathan Coulton, a brilliant composer and musician sampled a KFC instruction video to come up with this catchy gem. What I learned as Actinomycetes are actually bacteria, not fungi, and now they are more appropriately labled Actinobacteria. They do exhibit a filamentous form which did cause some confusion among the taxonomists for a while.



I like this video and song, though I'm not a big fan of bacteria like I am of fungi. You can download the mp3 for free! See under Other Experiments

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.