5/24 - Tour of campus fungi

In the Union Bay Natural Area, we were lead on a tour by classmates who showed various fungi and stories behind them. My classmates and I learned that fungus grows both in terrestrial environments and in water. We have 1.4 billion year old fossils that show fungi remained aquatic until the Cambrian period. There used to be huge mushrooms, reaching 6 feet tall but these died out with flowering plants. Microrisal fungi are a type of fungus that grow along with the roots of the tree. This causes trees to become more resistant to disease, while the fungus is able to take carbon from the tree. We saw a fiberhead which is a brown spore mushroom. Fungus also indicates the return of a habitat to its natural state, as we saw with Union Bay Natural Area. One tour guide showed us huge artist conks, which we learned we not even close to the maximum size (3 feet). On closer inspection of the fungus, we saw small pores in the white flesh, which are where the spores are released from. Artist conks produce a huge amount of spores, up to 5 trillion annually. Fallen logs are a great place to find fungi is on fallen logs. We were able to tell ages of turkey tail fungi due to the fact that it only grows parallel with the ground. A fallen log had turkey tails that were perpendicular to each other. This means that some were growing on the tree when it was upright and may have cause it to die, which is when the second ones began to grow. Turkey tails are a type of white rot fungi, commonly used to make teas. One assumption I learned was wrong that all brown rot is not dry rot. Some mushrooms have incrediblely short lifetimes, such as the Japanese parasol mushroom, which grow and decay within 24 hours.

We learned of the many benefits fungi offer, such as being used to clean up oil and use in medicine and teas. It seems to me like there is a lot we can use mushrooms for, and I wonder to what extent scientists have explored there potential? Would it be possible to genetically modify fungus such as we have with our crops? I hope in my lifetime I will see this progression.

Posted on June 3, 2012 02:44 AM by beardendb