Fungi

Fungi Fungi is a strange collective term for a variety of things – both nice and nasty. The nice ones are edible mushrooms and truffles; yeasts that provide rising agents for bread, beer, yoghurt, kimchi and kombucha and mould in blue cheese. The not so nice things are fungal toe disease, mould on things that aren’t blue cheese, and poisonous mushrooms. Fungi are also the basis for tofu – this can be nice or nasty depending on your taste. Medicines are developed from fungi, including antibiotics such as penicillin – which is quite useful. All types of fungi are members of a group of eukaryotic organisms – amazingly these are considered to be a kingdom (in today’s society this could be considered to be a term that may cause offence, being one which may indicate a male domination of things) and are neither plant, nor animal. Interestingly the word ‘fungus’, used in the singular, has also been adopted by a bogeyman -neither animal nor plant. There are currently 120,000 identified species types of fungi, and no known data on the number of bogeymen. Fungi are heterotrophic, so are humans – they need to consume nutrition from plant or human matter (note humans don’t generally eat other human matter). Fungi may be parasitic or mutualist - they consume matter, but they also contribute to the composition of other matter, which in turn constitutes compost, used to grow vegetables and plants. Fungi may form symbiotic relationships with their hosts, where both benefit from the relationship. This is nice. Fungi release around 60 million tonnes of particulates into the atmosphere every year, but these particulates are dispersed and have no impact on climate change. Fungi filaments vary from short to long, and some are very long indeed, one study measured 8 miles of fungi filaments in one teaspoon of soil. It’s not clear why this is interesting – although it may provide some insight into why mould grows so quickly on damp bathroom walls and old window frames. Unlike humans and bogeymen, who are mostly of similar size to each other, mushrooms can be tiny to massive. The largest living organism in the world is a honey mushroom – covering 2.4 miles in Oregon – this mushroom has consumed trees and woody plants in its pursuit of largeness. The smallest mushroom type averages about 4 millimetres – just under a million of these mushrooms would be equivalent to the honey mushroom. Some mushrooms reproduce by releasing spores, or fragmenting, and new mushrooms grow. Other types have a sexual relationship where the hyphae fuse and cause new growth. Hyphae are the long filaments produced by some mushrooms. This information is in fact quite interesting after all and means that mould on bathroom walls may actually be happily reproducing. Human reproduction techniques are well known, but there is no published insight into the reproductive habits of the bogeymen. On balance fungi seem to be more beneficial to both the planet and the human species. This may make the downsides more acceptable to deal with. 500 words Bridget Irvine 24 August 2020

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Four Idols

Image
  Francis Bacon was an English scholar and philosopher who lived from 1561 To 1626. Amongst other things he wrote and thought about thinking.   I was Googling “idols” and Francis Bacon’s Four Idols kept cropping up, so I read a bit about them and it seemed very difficult and complicated. Then I kept on reading about them and actually it’s not that difficult, in fact I think it’s really interesting.   As I said, Francis Bacon thought about thinking and, long before the birth of modern psychology, he understood that the human mind doesn’t always reason correctly. He argued that this fact needed to be understood before new ideas could be developed.   He advocated using inductive reasoning and experiments to gain insight and to prove or disprove a theory.   He wrote a book called Novum Organum and in it he outlined the Four Idols which (I think) basically described four major errors in mental processing that result in obstacles to new and innovative thinkin...
Read more
Image
  Propagation, oo-oo-oo Propagation Propagation's what you need, If you want to plant a seed, make a rose bush or a reed, Propagation’s what you need! If you’d like to make new roots, or grow some tasty fruits, Propagation’s what you need! If you want to grow a plant, but think that you can’t, Oo-oo propagation's what you need! Do you want to be a propagate-er, Ooooo!!! For those of a certain age, you may have broken into song. Memories of Roy Castle and the McWhirter brothers on Record Breakers have been (dare I say it?) propagated in your mind!   Plants for free! There are lots of different ways in which plants can be propagated; the most common is by sowing seeds, after all, this is how it is usually done in nature. Because seed production relies on flowers producing seed by combining male pollen with female ovule, the resulting seed may produce a plant with different coloured flowers from the mother plant’s, leaves might be larger or smaller, ...
Read more