Journal Entry 15

5/10/12

Fungi Day 2!

Location: Inside for lecture part, but then moved outside to the UW farms and greenhouse to look at some examples of other fungi.

Weather: Very sunny and moderately warm. There is about 50% cloud cover, and relatively dry.

Fungi are consumers and rely on producers for carbon sources. Decomposition fungi consist of soft rot, brown rot, and white rot, as we learned about on Tuesday. White and brown rot is the decomposition of wood. As it gets warmer, it will be easier to find many more decomposers. We learned about biotrophs and armillaria as well as fusarium. These completely kill that cells of the host and absorbs all the nutrition. These are aggressive fungi or parasites. However, there are mutualistic fungal relationships where both the host and the fungus of the host are at a balance. There could be a change to a negative affect where the fungi becomes parasitic, but doing so would destroy food source. Most common relationships are mutual ones. Fungi do not fix nitrogen, however the roots for plants do and so plants provide the fungi with carbon and other important mineral nutrients. Lichens and fungi form a mutual relationship and green algae or cynobacteria. Cynobacteria can fix nitrogen and both can perform photosynthesis. For a picture of lichen structure,: see physical journal. Most lichens that would live here are dead due to high air pollution. The farther you go from air pollution towards better air quality, the more lichen you will see. There are powdery mildews that can be plant parasites because they go into the cells and take the nutrients of the living cells. This has a detrimental affect of the host plant.

Outside at UW farms we found the white powdery mildew. The white patches we see on the plants are hyphae and will ultimately kill the plant. The white will really show and become more prevalent at the end of the summer. It is energy cheap to produce a lot of spores to reproduce. They are asexual spores over winter and produce a more sexual structure toward the end of winter. The orchid we saw acts like a fungi and attracts gnats and aphids to help with pollination and has little gills that produce pollen that fool the flies and aphids. We also saw rust fungus that has little black dots as well as orange spots that are a structure to produce spores. Birch trees need mycorrhizal fungi and have a mutual relationship with it. They grow outside of the birch root and are short. However, if a birch tree is given a lot of fertilizer, the tree can “kick” the mycorrhizae out.

Posted on June 5, 2012 07:08 AM by lmiyamoto