Been studying plant-fungal interactions for about 10 years, including a master's degree I dropped out of and never actually finished* so I'm full of fungus facts i don't really get to use ever.

*Actually did all the course work and lab work but didn't finish my thesis in time

    • notwikinotbot [comrade/them]
      ·
      4 years ago

      Fusariums because they're so pretty. Actually because they're mostly seen as plant parasites because academic mycology is mostly a subfield of plant pathology, meaning crop plant pathology, but if you look at them in nature there are plants (such as pines) where they act as mycorrhizae. Learning about how context defines their role really opened my eyes to how biased a lot of science is towards economic impact so it will forever have a place in my heart.

      And because if you grow them in petri dishes there's s good chance they'll make nice pink fluffy clouds.

        • notwikinotbot [comrade/them]
          ·
          4 years ago

          Yeah no till has that problem. That's when it's really important to do crop rotation and companion planting and stuff.... Can't do crop rotation if you don't know what was there last year though. Solarization, where you try to kill soil shit by putting a black tarp over the soil and letting it sun bake, might help, but it doesn't solve the problem of you have a lot of nice rotting organic matter in there, and some of it might have some shit that wants to eat live plants too. People doing no till on an industrial scale can do stuff like use massive machines to steam the soil. But that kind of feels like a solving one problem by creating another one kind of thing to me.

          Community garden plots are cesspools, though. You find out what the real strong varieties are........

      • Multihedra [he/him]
        ·
        4 years ago

        I work as a plant healthcare tech so this makes a ton of sense to me, and is pretty sad.

        Also, as someone who also nearly went into academia (not for plants) but was repulsed by the postdoc mill etc, I can very much relate.