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
*that I wasn't motivated to finish because I'm really not interested in the whole academic life and the years of essentially slave labor that's expected before you can even dream of having your own lab... And then if you do get your own lab you have to spend most of your time getting funding and not with your hands in the dirt.
- Fungi have more than two sexes.
- They can form anastomoses where different fungal "individuals" can fuse hyphae together and merge and become one (so how do you define an individual???).
- There are fungi that can parasitize other fungi.
- They can make a shit ton of weird chemicals.
- They can change a plant's interaction with its environment (for example, some can make their hosts more tolerant to salt, heat, drought, etc).
They can change a plant’s interaction with its environment (for example, some can make their hosts more tolerant to salt, heat, drought, etc).
that's comepletely wild
Annnnd a lot of the endophytes that do that are in the same group as Claviceps purpurea, aka ergot fungus, our friend that makes the ergotamine that we can turn into LSD.
But we (humans) hate them because they can make our cows sick or something.
As a gardener, forager, mushroom enthusiast, etc. this is an interesting topic to me and I'd like to learn a lot more about it. I have a copy of Mycelium Running sitting on my bookshelf, but are there any other good books/resources you'd recommend?
What got me into all this shit in the first place (besides trying to grow some psilocybes) is a book called "Teaming With Microbes," I don't remember if I ever even finished it but it got me into the whole idea of the soil food web, which got me deep into the fungal symbiosis shit. But if I remember correctly it's a really broad overview aimed at non-scientist gardeners, so it's a good starting point, but some of the scientific detail when they try to explain stuff struck me as off.
For getting more into the soil science, I sat in on a bunch of lectures at UC Davis with Kate Scow, it looks like you can find her intro to soil science lectures here: https://video.ucdavis.edu/tag/tagid/ssc%20100 (Honestly I think the whole course was interesting, but she's the one that covers the soil biology stuff and the other lecturer is covering more the physics/chemistry stuff. Not sure which lectures exactly are the ones about the biology, but it's probably more towards the end of the course.) Her lab does a lot of interesting soil biology shit, though it's more focused on bacteria than fungi.
David Arora has a lot of good stuff on fungal ID, and there's also a paper he wrote floating around somewhere on how cultural context defines what fungi are "poisonous," with a focus on Amanita muscaria and how there are some groups (I don't remember exactly who, somewhere broadly in the "Russia" area) that see it as edible but with detoxification steps, and other groups (i.e. most western sources) label it straight up poison.
Thanks for the response! I look forward to checking these out. I've read a little by David Arora (All that the Rain Brings and More) and appreciate his style. One of these days I'll try to get my hands on a copy of Mushrooms Demystified.
Not as good for flipping through than the physical thing, but http://library.lol/main/FB2BBF826E4D1EE294223194DF81B4B5
That depends on how sensitive you are to mushroom spores. Unless you mean "safe" as in, able to grow a culture that's just the mushroom of interest and not some other gross fungus. And the answer to that is definitely, but it's harder if you have carpet or other mold sources. Getting sterile technique down in a house/apartment is pretty tricky but not impossible. If your culture gets contaminated, generally what happens is it turns into a moldy mess, you're not going to accidentally grow a death cap mushroom in your home culture.
Is the internet intelligent? I see symbiotic fungi as something more analogous to the wires of a network, and the fungi along with the plants they're networking are superorganisms. Are superorganisms intelligent?
But dont neurons function the same way?
If you can get enough together....
Yeah, exactly. Is intelligence/sentience an emergent property of networks in general or are animals somehow special in some way we can't measure yet? Maybe if I found some (insert relevant drug) I would be able to understand it.
What is scientifically the tastiest mushroom?
Also is paul stamets like a grifter or something?
Also is paul stamets like a grifter or something?
Yes. Actually I see it as more of the thing where hippies run up against the reality of capitalism, and also have kids and shit they have to support, so they take the thing they love and exploit it for money. I think he is a True Believer in the power of fungi to heal the world, but you gotta fund that somehow so buy my supplements, please.
Scientifically white truffles are supposed to hit some brain receptors that are like orgasming so I guess that's pretty scientifically delicious. I've only tried truffle oil and I'm not sure which truffle it was made from, it was pretty tasty. And according to some professor I had, the chanterelles in Europe taste different and more delicious than the chanterelles on the US west coast but I never got to test that hypothesis myself.
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.
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.
Ooooh Chaetomium. I had so many Chaetomium in my collection. (I was trying to isolate endophytic fungi from plant roots.)
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........
Are mushrooms sentient and are they going to sneak into my room at night and murder me?
Well mushrooms probably not but there are sneakier fungi that are all microscopic and probably living in your carpet and sneaking into your closet so they can get all over you when you put your clothes on........
I'm currently studying Medical Mycology, any tips or resources for someone that's very interested in all things fungal?
I can geek out reading journal articles all day. I tend to find a few reviews on topics that are interesting, then find the papers cited in the reviews that sound the most interesting, then find out what authors tend to put out interesting stuff regularly and e-stalk them.
Medical mycology is gross, though. (coming from someone that took plant anatomy for their required undergrad anatomy course because they didn't want to dissect a cute mammal)
Huh, there were two fungal ecologists at my school. The one specialized in mycorrhizae. He taught general ecology and his belief that symbiosis is probably much more common than we think kinda blew my mind.
Did he make Star Craft references or is that not a fungal ecologist teaching general ecology universal?
Any mushroom foraging tips? :)
Been getting into mushroom foraging and cultivating this year (growing oysters rn) and loving it. So far found and eaten puffballs, porcini, hedgehogs, honey fungus, various agaric, wood ears and probably more I can't remember rn.
Just wondering if you have any tips about the sort of locations that could be good to try mushroom hunting? In UK but I more mean general guidelines etc.
My biggest tips:
- Learn what kinds of trees your favorite mushrooms form symbioses with. Most of the tasty edibles are mycorrhizal, although there are ones that aren't (I think wood ears grow on dead logs, and honey fungus is more of a parasite). And the mycorrhizal ones will make bigger/more mushrooms if they're associated with a more mature tree, because the more mature trees have more carbon to spare for their mushroom friends.
- Watch the weather. You probably won't have as good luck if it's been nice and sunny, a lot of mushrooms will pop up a day or three after a rain because it's wet enough their spores will have a better chance of surviving on something.
And there are some kinds of mushrooms that like very specific conditions. Like morels (at least the west coast USA ones) will grow like crazy the next few years following a forest fire.
It's been 6 hours, it's not even an AMA, he just wanted to tell us about his fungi knowledge :bruh-moment:
Nah I had to format my phone and my computer because aids and stuff. But I'm babbbbbk
Because at my school I had to fill out a form saying "I am starting my thesis on this date, on this topic, with these advisors" and part of the degree program terms is you only have X amount of time to finish once you officially start it. I can technically start over on a new topic, but I have to get some advisors to sign off on it and everything again and I've moved so it's a big hassle.
How do mycorrhizae actually comminicate with the plants they exist in symbioses with? Like, I'm told that the plants can send signals to the fungus asking for nutrients and the mushrooms can send signals back, but is that really what's going on? Please explain it like I am five/a liberal arts major
There's some amount of really basic, "I (plant) don't need shit from you, I'm going to direct my sugar somewhere else... oh really? I'll send my nutrients somewhere else then" going on, but I know there's more complex signalling going on too. For example, there are "cheater" (or "parasitic") mycorrhizae that somehow convince their host to give them sugar without actually giving them anything in return (and can even reroute the carbon and stuff they get to other plants they're connected to). I'll have to read up on all that again. Good question!
Do all mycorrhizal fungi interact in the same/similar ways or are there distinct differences in some?
Yep, there are differences. There are two main groups of mycorrhizae: ectomycorrhizae, generally the ones growing with trees (and also a lot of tasty forest mushrooms are in this group) and vascular-arbuscular mycorrhizae (VAM, also called arbuscular mycorrhizae/AM, or endomycorrhizae), that are called that because they make little "trees" (arbuscules) inside the root cells of vascular plants. Unless the taxonomy changed while I wasn't looking (which it tends to do a lot with fungi), AM are all in one group (Glomeromycota). AM have a special signalling dance with the root cells that allows them to actually set up shop inside special root cells, ectomycorrhizae don't do that but instead grow in between root cells and set up a sort of net they can use to catch any sugars that leak out of the plant root cells. There are also ericoid mycorrhizae, which also grow inside of the root cells, but they are only in one group of plants (Ericaceae).
Besides that, the same individual fungus can be beneficial (helps with growth) in one host, and in another either doesn't do anything or straight up steals from it (and sometimes gives the stolen resources to another host). There's a lot of trying to figure out exactly what causes a mycorrhiza to be a "cheater" or "parasite" vs a helper, sometimes it's time dependent or plant age dependent (one season it helps one member of the network, another it helps a different one), sometimes it's a preferred host thing (ok I'll help you out for now but if I find a host I like better later I'm gonna be helping them instead), there's probably some effect from whatever else the root is also infected with (plants are pretty promiscuous too and have a bunch of different fungi in different parts of their root system).
So, the short but accurate non-answer is, "It's context dependent."
