Socialism explained (the Friday Fungus version)

From a late Soviet TV show called The Fifth Wheel:

"I have indisputable evidence," he said, "that the October Revolution was the brainchild of people who'd been taking hallucinating mushrooms for years, and in the long run, mushrooms replaced their personalities, and they turned into mushrooms. So, I just want to say that Lenin was a mushroom. Furthermore, he was not just a mushroom, but also a radio wave."

So said Sergei Kurekhin in conversation with Sergei Sholokhov the show's presenter (it was, I hasten to add a satire not a serious argument). And, in this Reason article by Jesse Walker, we find that they weaved an elaborate conspiracy theory - akin to John Allegro's equally bizarre argument that Jesus was a mushroom - involving Mayan temple frescoes, Carlos Castenada and much else besides.

The article comments on how Kurekhin was involved with the National Bolshevik Party which may - or may not - be an elaborate spoof. The Party did pioneer some of the punkier bits of Russian opposition politics and Kurekhin was an early adopter of fake news as a propaganda (or satire - hard to tell sometimes) tool. As Walker concludes:

Either way, Kurekhin doesn't just have a famous piece of fake news under his belt—he was an early adopter of ironic fascism too. The man may be 23 years dead, but this is his world; the rest of us are just mushrooms growing in it.

Very odd.

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Friday Fungus: Is work making you ill? Blame it on the wallpaper

Killer wallpaper

We've know for a long time that wallpaper can be dangerous:

Scheele's Green was a colouring pigment that had been used in fabrics and wallpapers from around 1770. It was named after the Swedish chemist Scheele who invented it. The pigment was easy to make, and was a bright green colour. But Scheele's Green was copper arsenite. And under certain circumstances it could be deadly. Gosio discovered that if wallpaper containing Scheele's Green became damp, and then became mouldy (this was in the days of animal glues) the mould could carry out a neat chemical trick to get rid of the copper arsenite. It converted it to a vapour form of arsenic. Normally a mixture of arsine, dimethyl and trimethyl arsine. This vapour was very poisonous indeed. Breathe in enough of the vapour, and you would go down with a nasty case of arsenic poisoning.

This, some say, was what killed Napoleon.

Anyway - and you'll note the role of mould in making this nasty wallpaper effect happen - to bring the story up to date:

In laboratory tests, "we demonstrated that mycotoxins could be transferred from a mouldy material to air, under conditions that may be encountered in buildings," said study corresponding author Dr Jean-Denis Bailly.

"Thus, mycotoxins can be inhaled and should be investigated as parameters of indoor air quality, especially in homes with visible fungal contamination," added Bailly, a professor of food hygiene at the National Veterinary School of Toulouse, France.

'Sick building syndrome' has been blamed on lots of things but it does seem there's some mileage in blaming the wallpaper (or indeed any mouldy material knocking about). More worrying is the associated evidence that our enthusiasm for energy-efficiency and hermetically sealed environments makes matters worse;

The study was published in Applied and Environmental Microbiology, a journal of the American Society for Microbiology. Creating an increasingly energy-efficient home may aggravate the problem, Bailly and his colleagues said.

Such homes "are strongly isolated from the outside to save energy", but various water-using appliances such as coffee makers "could lead to favourable conditions for fungal growth", Bailly explained in a society news release.

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Friday Fungus: The problem with mouldy spaceships

ARTHUR DENT:
Good grief! Is this really the interior of a flying saucer?

FORD PREFECT:
It certainly is. What do you think?

ARTHUR DENT:
Well, it’s a bit squalid isn’t it?

FORD PREFECT:
What did you expect?

ARTHUR DENT:
Well, I don’t know… gleaming control panels… flashing lights, computer screens… Not old mattresses.

It was a good joke that the Dentrassi sleeping quarters on the Vogon constructor fleet were dirty not the gleaming, shiny TV image of a spaceship. But the reality is (albeit perhaps not for Vogons) that keeping spaceship living quarters clean really is important.

The problem, however, is that cleaning spaceships isn't just a simple matter of wiping the surfaces with Flash and leaving the tricky bits behind the cupboards and under the bed till later when you've the time and inclination. Cleaning the places spacefolk live is a matter of life and death and mould:

In our day-to-day lives on Earth, the fungi we live with aren't usually an issue. But in the confined habitat of a spaceship and potentially a Martian settlement, some researchers worry that the microbes that thrive in confined spaces could sicken people or even damage equipment. Venkateswaran, who is a member of NASA's Biotechnology and Planetary Protection Group, is also concerned about human settlers contaminating Mars with our own microbes.

As always with these things, cleaning space habitats has a name - 'proper maintenance protocols' - and really matters. Moreover, every time a new human arrives in the microbiome they bring in a whole new ecosystem of moulds (and you thought you were clean). And these moulds and bacteria change (evolve, adapt) pretty rapidly. We're not really sure about the risks but NASA and other space organisations take it pretty seriously:

In respect to human health, the importance of microbiological monitoring is extremely important for long-duration missions. In this investigation, the major focus is on indoor environmental quality control, specifically studies on environmental microbiology in space (astromicrobiological studies), in order to reduce potential hazards for the crew and the spacecraft infrastructure. Progress is made in these astrobiological studies based on past, and current, collaborative studies with JAXA. The continuing expansion of the on-going microbiological monitoring in the KIBO module, the project named “Microbe-I/II/III”, data is being collected on microbial dynamics in the habitable spacecraft environment. Collected data on these microbial communities aboard the ISS is shared with NASA, ESA, and JAXA.

Koichi Makimura who runs these experiments reckons there's a bit of an issue with those cleaning regimes:

"Fungal monitoring may (be) part of 'proper maintenance protocols' but no one knows what is 'proper maintenance,'" says Koichi Makimura, a medical researcher at Japan's Teikyo University who was also not involved in this study.

Makimura, who has studied microbes on the International Space Station, says that fungi research in general has been neglected here on Earth, so it's hard to conclude what this study's results might mean for the health of the humans isolated with these fungi. But one thing is clear—there's no getting rid of them entirely, even in space.

What's clear in all this is that any living space in space needs to be meticulously clean and cleaned. As the researchers point out there's no escaping from this because humans are 'natural fermentors' making us incredibly popular with moulds, yeasts and other micro-fungi. Maybe it's time for Kim and Aggie Clean A Spaceship?

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Friday Fungus: Mushrooms in Space!

So you've escaped the bounds of Earth and, like Major Tom, are orbiting in your snug space station. The atmosphere is clear and clean, free from asthma triggering, infecting fungus - space is pure!

Ha! Think again:

One mission of the Microbial Observatory Experiments on the International Space Station is to examine the traits and diversity of fungal isolates, to gain a better understanding of how fungi may adapt to microgravity environments and how this may affect interactions with humans in closed habitats. In the new study, led by Benjamin Knox, a microbiology graduate student at University of Wisconsin-Madison, scientists compared two isolates of A. fumigatus that were isolated from the International Space Station to reference isolates from earth.

Through in vitro, in vivo, and genetic analyses, the researchers discovered that the isolates recovered from the space station exhibited normal in vitro growth and chemical stress tolerance, and there were no unexpected genetic differences. The strains in space were slightly more lethal in a vertebrate model of invasive disease, but there was nothing to suggest that as a consequence of spending time in space, there were any significant changes to the fungus.

Yes folks - it's not just that we're squatting on planet fungus but, when we leave for the stars we'll take those mushrooms with us!

Relax though - there's hallucinogenic lichen!

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Friday Fungus: Coffee and climate change

This isn't a 'have a go a climate change' post - that the climate changes is a matter of fact, it's the causes of those changes and their impact on us humans that's the subject of debate (and so it should be). Rather it's about being just a little cynical at the tendency to see negative affects on crop production as consequential on climate change - the example being coffee leaf rust:

Science is in no doubt that the changing climate is behind the rust and other problems affecting coffee production worldwide – and that things are likely to deteriorate.

"In many cases, the area suitable for [coffee] production would decrease considerably with increases of temperature of only 2-2.5C," said a leaked draft of a new report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change,

The problem is that the pesky science really isn't quite so certain about the reasons for the spread of the nasty little fungus that causes coffee leaf rust:

“While CLR infection risk was elevated in 2008–2011 in coffee-growing regions of Colombia, we found no compelling evidence for a large increase in predicted infection risk over the period in which the CLR outbreak is reported to have been most severe, and no long-term trend in risk from 1990 to 2015,” the study concluded.

“Therefore, we conclude that while weather conditions in 2008–2011 may have slightly increased the predicted risk of CLR infection, long-term climate change is unlikely to have increased disease risk,” it added.

This doesn't detract from the problem that coffee leaf rust causes (although it can be treated - this isn't bananas) but it's a reminder that we're too swift to blame climate change - by which we usually mean global warming - for alterations in ecological balance where humans have sought to manage that environment (we call it farming).

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Friday Fungus: On fungal economics - yeast or mushroom?

Or rather fungal metaphors in economics:

Arnold Harberger offered a nice metaphor thinking about this difference in his Presidential Address to the American Economic Association back in 1998, entitled "A Vision of the Growth Process" and published in the March 1998 issue of the American Economic Review. Harberger discusses whether economic growth is more likely to be like "mushrooms," in the sense that certain parts of a growing economy will take off much faster than others, or more like "yeast," in the sense that economy overall expands fairly smoothly overall. He argues that "mushroom"-type growth is more common.

Of course both yeast and mushrooms are fungus but the metaphor in question is made better still if we understand what's happening in the two processes. Harberger sees only the fruiting heads of the mushrooms - the visible manifestation of a symbiotic growing system:

Mycorrhizal partnerships are symbiotic, or mutually beneficial, relationships between plants and fungi, which take place around the plant's roots. While there are many species of fungus which do not form these partnerships, the vast majority of land plants have mycorrhizas (from the Greek mykes: fungus and rhiza: root), and many plants could not survive without them. Fossil records show that roots evolved alongside fungal partners and that fungi may have been crucial in helping plants evolve to colonise the land, hundreds of millions of years ago.

Broadly speaking, there are two main kinds of mycorrhiza: Arbuscular mycorrhizas penetrate the cells of their host's roots, and most plants develop this type. Ectomycorrhizas surround the roots without penetrating them. Trees may form either type, and some form both. In each case there is cell-to-cell contact between the plant and the fungus, allowing nutrient transfer to take place.

So not only is Harberger's view of growth correct - it's unpredictable in its location, mushroom-like - but when we look closer he has a fascinating metaphor for the way in which that unpredictable growth affects the wider economy (extending mycorrhizas) and the society that economy feeds (the tree symbiote of the mushroom).

The yeast analogy, on the other hand, is a managed, planned and controlled system. That yeast converts the sugars in the dough into carbon dioxide and alcohol making the bread rise (and rise again as we bake off the alcohol). When it's baked the yeast is dead and we must start again if we want more bread. There is no beneficial system - everything is the result of external intervention.

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Friday Fungus: We can do with out Barolo - but a world without truffles?

The New York Times reports on the problem created by the clash between fine wine and one of the most wonderful things on the planet - the white truffle:

Not only does this land produce some of Italy’s best, and most expensive, wines. It is also home to the famed Italian white truffle, which can run 200 to 500 euros (about $225 to $560) for a good-size knob that will sit in the palm of your hand.

But what happens when those resources compete? Vines require clear hillsides, and truffles need thick and damp yet clean woods. Today, hillside after hillside of Barolo is planted in neat rows of well-groomed vines more valuable than anything else that could be put on them. The forests, on the other hand, have been shrinking.

The result is that, not only are there fewer places where truffles can grow, but the loss of forest impacts the wine growers and especially those using organic methods. And the truth is that there a plenty of places where fine wines can be made but vanishingly few where "trifola d'Alba Madonna" is found - truffles are altogether too fickle for cultivation.

The result is 'save the truffle':

Save the Truffle wants to protect what has been to this day one of the most outstanding and internationally recognised products of Piedmont. Its fame has been connected to the city of Alba and the surrounding area, the Langhe and Roero, for more than eighty years.

In an area which has become a world heritage Unesco site, in which the truffle, together with the outstanding red wines, are the driving force for international tourism, Carlo and Edmondo believe that this precious fruit of the territory must be approached from an alternative point of view, without mentioning marketing and sales.

This is in the wonderful and conservative traditional of italian food campaigns - perfected by the Slow Food movement that spread across the world (although sadly has become a shadow of its origins by becoming a locavore lobby rather than a celebration of waiting for dinner and using the finest ingredients).

And we can all help - there's a crowdfunding initiative 'Breathe the Truffle' that's helping these people develop and protect the environment in which this magical, exceptional fungus thrives.

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Friday Fungus: council estate mushrooms

The Lismore Circus Estate at Gospel Oak in Camden isn't the most obvious location for a new horticultural enterprise. This - described as "(l)ong sleek apartment blocks (Ludham and Waxham) designed by the firm of Frederick McManus and Partners as part of the Lismore Circus estate" - is the location:



In the basement of this block developers are, however, proposing just such a horticultural enterprise - a mushroom farm:

London could become home to a new mushroom farm capable of growing three quarters of a ton every month using waste materials such as coffee grounds.

Eco start-up Article No. 25 wants to set up the farm in the basement of a block of Seventies council flats in Gospel Oak, and Camden council is considering a planning application.

The mushrooms would grow on a form of compost made from waste materials including coffee grounds and newspapers mixed with straw.

Two important points to make here - firstly this is a great use of essentially redundant space (the unused garages in the image) and secondly it opens up new uses for food waste.

Plus, of course, mushrooms are nutricious and flavoursome!

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Friday Fungus: Your mushroom masters demand worship

And who wouldn't worship something so splendid!

...and you never know they just might provide you with some lottery numbers:

Phra Sirimangkharo is raking in a nice little earner in return visitors donating to his swelling coffers. He said that the fungus – a huge black and white thing that grew on a log outside the monks’ quarters – is believed to be magical. Apparently prayers to the fungus got the 684 number on September 1st. There were many winners in the locality who gave part of their lucky haul back to the temple as a merit payment.

Now they are waiting with baited breath to see if the latest numbers come up again for the next drawing on Saturday. The numbers are 326, 42.

I'm guessing that this is as good a way as any for choosing lottery numbers. Either that or this great lump of bracket fungus really does have magic powers!
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Friday Fungus: Meeting the farming insects...

Ambrosia beetle farms (which you don't really want on your fig tree)

There are several insects that have, over the millenia, developed the intensive farming of fungus. And it all makes for a fascinating story:

Skinny lines of ants snake through the rainforest carrying leaves and flowers above their heads--fertilizer for industrial-scale, underground fungus farms. Soon after the dinosaur extinctions 60 million years ago, the ancestors of leaf-cutter ants swapped a hunter-gatherer lifestyle for a bucolic existence on small-scale subsistence farms. A new study at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute (STRI) in Panama revealed that living relatives of these earliest fungus-farming ants still have not domesticated their crop, a challenge also faced by early human farmers.

All of which suggests that said insects aren't really all that hot at this farming lark (although by 'non-domesticated' we don't really mean wild but rather that the ants still have the fngal equivalent of crab apples despite that 60 million years of farming said mushrooms). Hence:

"We found that the selfish interests of more primitive ancestors of leaf-cutting ants are still not in line with the selfish interests of their fungal partner, so complete domestication hasn't really happened yet."

That being said, the leaf-cutter ants have a complex and sophisticated farming system that acts to minimise the production of fruiting heads (mushrooms to you and I) in favour of producing more of the hyphae that the ants actually eat.

So can we learn anything from these insect farmers? In some ways we can although mostly by reinforcing the value of long-established faming and crop management techniques. Here's some European research into ambrosia beetles:

Initial observations suggest ambrosia beetles plant different fungus varieties in a specific order, similar to crop rotation strategies employed by human farmers. They also utilize bacteria to promote the growth of their fungal crops and to combat pathogens.

"It was also really surprising to find out that in the fruit-tree pinhole borer, the ambrosia beetle species that I mainly study, the major fungus crop consists of a single strain that can be found across the whole of Europe," said Biedermann. "Humans also grow a few very successful cultivars of their crops."

These beetles lug around the spores for the fungus, caputure and use bacteria that kill off damaging pathogens and are careful to protect the interest of their farming environment, the host tree. This last point is perhaps a lesson to us humans in that the beetles that make their homes on living trees don't crop fungus:

'Another fascinating result was that fungi are only found in beetles that colonise dead trees. Beetles that dwell in trees that are still alive do not carry fungi as they would probably kill their host tree.’

The beetles also make use of endophytes - microorganisms that live in plant tissue and repel herbivores - to protect their gardens. And in a fun way the beetles experiment with naturally occurring anti-biotics to further protect and enhance their gardens.

We've barely scratched the surface of what we can learn from insects and the things we can extract from the bizarre world of fungi.

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Friday Fungus: Eating batteries and why bagpipes should be banned...

Some fungus going about its rotten business - loverly!

You'll have noticed just how good fungi are at rotting stuff. The mushrooms and their mouldy yeasty brethren are right at the heart of nature's processes for chewing up - recycling if you must - things that are lying around. Sometimes this is a problem - as people looking shocked at a dry rot growth on the house they left lying around discover. But sometimes - like with nappies - it's brilliant:

A team of scientists from the University of South Florida has found a natural way to recycle the tons of waste batteries. Lead researcher Jeffrey A. Cunningham and Valerie Harwood are using three strains of fungi – Aspergillus niger, Penicillium simplicissimum and Penicillium chrysogenum that are naturally occurring in decaying foods. They have presented their finding at the 252nd National Meeting & Exposition of the American Chemical Society that is held in Philadelphia until Thursday this week.

OK the researchers end up with an acidic soup filled with cobalt and lithium. And don't know how to get those lovely metals out. But it's still great and takes us a step closer to better battery disposal and recycling.

When it comes to rotting stuff, however, fungi aren't choosy. Lungs are good:

Playing the bagpipes could prove fatal, scientists have warned, after a man died from continually breathing in mould and fungus trapped in his instrument.

Doctors in Manchester have identified the condition “bagpipe lung” following the death of a 61-year-old man from chronic inflammatory lung condition hypersensitivity pneumonitis.

The condition is triggered by the immune system’s response to inhaling irritants. When the unnamed man was diagnosed in 2009 doctors were puzzled because his house contained no mould and he had never smoked.

Now I know you've always wanted a reason to ban bagpipes...

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Friday Fungus: Squatting on Planet Mushroom

Us humans think the planet we live on is ours. A plaything gifted to us by gods filled with good things for us to use. We've colonised much of Earth, built great cities, roads, walls, canals - the world is shaped by humanity. We dominate. Or that's what we believe.

Think again. We're squatters on Planet Mushroom:

Fungi are present almost everywhere, in a spectacular array of shapes, sizes and colours, and performing a wide variety of different activities. In 1991 David Hawksworth, a mycologist at Kew estimated the world's fungal diversity at 1.5 million species (equal to the estimated number of all known other living organisms). This was thought at the time to be a radical over estimate, but now other researchers have proposed figures in excess of 13 million. Fungi perform essential roles in every terrestrial, and many aquatic, ecosystems, eg. decomposing dead organic matter to release nutrients, supporting plant life on poor soils by improving the absorption of nutrients when they form mycorrhizal associations with roots, living inside plants as endophytes and forming symbiotic partnerships with algae to form lichens. Any deterioration in fungal populations and diversity can therefore have a considerable impact on ecosystem health, in fact, the loss of lichens from an area is often used as an indication of poor air quality.

We wouldn't be here - there'd be no life - if it weren't for fungi. Plants and animals depend on fungi - without mycorrhizal symbiosis many of our tree species would die. The forests, the grass steppes and even our gardens are grown atop a network of mycelium. The grandest example of this mushroom world is Oregon's honey mushroom:

Next time you purchase white button mushrooms at the grocery store, just remember, they may be cute and bite-size but they have a relative out west that occupies some 2,384 acres (965 hectares) of soil in Oregon's Blue Mountains. Put another way, this humongous fungus would encompass 1,665 football fields, or nearly four square miles (10 square kilometers) of turf.

The discovery of this giant Armillaria ostoyae in 1998 heralded a new record holder for the title of the world's largest known organism, believed by most to be the 110-foot- (33.5-meter-) long, 200-ton blue whale. Based on its current growth rate, the fungus is estimated to be 2,400 years old but could be as ancient as 8,650 years, which would earn it a place among the oldest living organisms as well.

We have a pretty negative relationship with our mushroom masters - they cause disease, they rot things, they poison us and are a symbol of dark, unpleasant places. If you set a google alert for fungi, you'll get a pile of stories about fungal infections complete with gory detail and hard-to-look-at pictures. Plus stories about how bats, frogs and bananas are heading for extinction - destroyed by fungi.

But then without fungi there's no bread and no beer, no blue cheese and your salami rots. Wherever we look, inside and outside, there are members of the fungal kingdom - molds, lichens, yeasts and mushrooms. They are the dominant and most significant lifeform on the planet, they clean stuff up, cure illness and keep plants alive. They even help store carbon:

"Natural fluxes of carbon between the land and atmosphere are enormous and play a crucial role in regulating the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and, in turn, Earth's climate," said Colin Averill, lead author on the study and graduate student in the College of Natural Sciences at UT Austin. "This analysis clearly establishes that the different types of symbiotic fungi that colonize plant roots exert major control on the global carbon cycle, which has not been fully appreciated or demonstrated until now."

We truly are living in a world filled with fungi yet we know so little about them and treat the presence of this great kingdom as something to be fought against rather than something to be understood. Sadly there are no undergraduate courses in mycology and precious few postgraduate courses (mostly medical mycology - pretty damned important given the issues with antibiotics). With the result that we're literally running out of mycologists.

Here we are squatting on Planet Mushroom and we know next to nothing about our kindly hosts!

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Stuff to read (including a brief Friday Fungus)

We wouldn't be here if it wasn't for mushrooms:

A fossil dating from 440 million years ago is not only the oldest example of a fossilised fungus, but is also the oldest fossil of any land-dwelling organism yet found. The organism, and others like it, played a key role in laying the groundwork for more complex plants, and later animals, to exist on land by kick-starting the process of rot and soil formation, which is vital to all life on land

Driverless boats...oh yes!!

The world’s first flying water taxis will soon be floating passengers down the Seine river in Paris. The electric, zero-emission vehicle, called the Sea Bubble, will float 70 centimeters above water, touching only along its four “marine wings.” It is set to begin testing in Paris this summer with possible commercialization coming as early as 2017.

The Sea Bubble was invented by Alain Thébault, who holds several sailing speed world records. He is best known as one of the designers of the l’Hydroptère, a ship that was able to break 50 knots thanks to its innovative hydrofoil.

The ancient origins of the North-South divide:

To find a more convincing connection between modern politics and medieval monarchs, we need to go beyond mere borders and explore cultural, political and genetic links. For instance, the advocates of Yorkshire devolution trace their heritage back to medieval times – and even earlier. There’s certainly some evidence to support their longstanding connection with the region.

Mind mapping cities:

It’s the same in mapmaking, says Archie Archambault, a designer who’s making an ongoing series called “Map From the Mind.” Archambault’s maps are based solely on his own explorations and time spent with locals in a given city. “It seems kind of dishonest to make a map completely based on secondhand data,” he says. “The tradition of mapmaking is surveying and being within the parameters of the space.”

The maps he’s made won’t give you turn-by-turn directions from from point A to point B, but they will give you the gist of various cities through the eyes of locals.

Your city isn't the next silicon valley:

Still, if everywhere is the next Silicon Valley, then nowhere is the next Silicon Valley. That’s the reality, and it’s important for cities to grasp it so they can plan their economic futures properly.

“When it comes to tech, nobody can simply create the next Silicon Valley,” explains Aaron Renn, a Senior Fellow at the Manhattan Institute.

“Just because a place has a number of startups doesn't mean it's destined to be a Silicon Valley,” Renn continued. “By all means celebrate a growing tech industry, but don't get carried away.”

People or places?

Given their fundamental territoriality, however, cities can never really be people-based entities in that sense. Harvard economist Edward Glaeser, an advocate for policies that are first about people, is realistic about the choices facing local policymakers. As he put it in an article for City Journal, “No mayor ever got re-elected by making it easy for his citizens to move to Atlanta, of course, even when that might be a pretty good outcome for the movers themselves.”

The very best article on London's pillaging of Bradford's National Media Museum:

I never imagined, thirty years on, that dream would be comprehensively shattered as the status of Bradford's collection, already diminished by cuts and neglect, would be relegated to that of a retro-themed amusement arcade with the notional remit of helping kids through their science and technology GCSEs.

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A fossil dating from 440 million years ago is not only the oldest example of a fossilised fungus, but is also the oldest fossil of any land-dwelling organism yet found. The organism, and others like it, played a key role in laying the groundwork for more complex plants, and later animals, to exist on land by kick-starting the process of rot and soil formation, which is vital to all life on land. - See more at: http://www.cam.ac.uk/research/news/a-load-of-old-rot-fossil-of-oldest-known-land-dweller-identified#sthash.5nhL1A3A.dpuf

Friday Fungus: On the shocking absence of mushrooms in Neal Stephenson's 'Seveneves'

I'm a lot of a fan of Neal Stephenson's writing - he is among the most creative and innovative of modern SF writers. And 'Seveneves' is no exception as it tells the story of man's survival after the moon, inexplicably, blows up.

As ever with Stephenson, the writing is dense reflecting how much he's researched the ideas presented. Indeed, for non-physicists wanting to get their heads round the science and maths of orbits, the book is fantastic. But if your head doesn't want to get round Lagrange points and orbital decay the story still carries you along as a few thousand intrepid folk struggle to create a means of survival in space. And Stephenson knows his audience:

“We're not hunter-gatherers anymore. We're all living like patients in the intensive care unit of a hospital. What keeps us alive isn't bravery, or athleticism, or any of those other skills that were valuable in a caveman society. It's our ability to master complex technological skills. It is our ability to be nerds. We need to breed nerds.”

So up there in space (and, as a sideline, in caves under Alaska too) the human survivors have to eat. Indeed, it's the lack of food that does for one section of the space-dwellers, turning them into cannibals. The mention of how this started is a beautifully snarky reference to the culture of blogging and social media:

“Tav started it,” Aïda said. “He ate his own leg. Soft cannibalism, he called it. Legs are of no use in space. He blogged it. Then it went viral.”

The main source of food Stephenson gives us up in space is algae grown hydroponically in the little spaceships (delightfully named 'arklets'). And this is fine except that it's rather limiting. It's true that algae - as plants - have the additional advantage of helping with the atmosphere but it's a lot harder to get the necessary nutrients from this source than from another option - fungi. Yet, for some reason, this option isn't even considered even though the intensive production of fungi as meat substitutes is a well established science:

Mycoprotein is made in 40 metre high fermenters which run continuously for five weeks at a time.
The fermenter is sterilised and filled with a water and glucose solution. Then a batch of fusarium venenatum, the fungi at the heart of Mycoprotein, is introduced.

Once the organism has started to grow a continuous feed of nutrients, including potassium, magnesium and phosphate as well as trace elements, are added to the solution. The pH balance, temperature, nutrient concentration and oxygen are all constantly adjusted in order to achieve the optimum growth rate.

The organism and nutrients combine to form Mycoprotein solids and these are removed continuously from the fermenter after an average residence time of five to six hours. Once removed the Mycoprotein is heated to 65°C to breakdown the nucleic acid. Water is then removed in centrifuges, leaving the Mycoprotein looking rather like pastry dough.

If you were really setting up to survive in space entirely 'off-grid', I'd expect someone to suggest the role of fungi in making that possible. There's little about the process described above that couldn't be replicated off the planet. And for all you mushroom haters - you'd get used to it!

The next consideration - admittedly one Stephenson doesn't set out in scientific detail - is how to 're-terraform' the earth after it's surface had been scorched for four thousand years. Here, again the role of fungi (and to be fair those algae) is significant:

Mushrooms have been around for tens of millions of years and their activities are indispensable for the operation of the biosphere. Through their relationships with plants and animals, mushrooms are essential for forest and grassland ecology, climate control and atmospheric chemistry, water purification, and the maintenance of biodiversity. This first point, about the ecological significance of mushrooms, is obvious, yet the 16,000 described species of mushroom-forming fungi are members of the most poorly understood kingdom of life. The second point requires a dash of lateral thinking. Because humans evolved in ecosystems dependent upon mushrooms there would be no us without mushrooms. And no matter how superior we feel, humans remain dependent upon the continual activity of these fungi. The relationship isn’t reciprocal: without us there would definitely be mushrooms.

So, if you're going to create a human-friendly environment on a planet, the starting point has to be fungi because without those fungi it's not a human-friendly environment.

None of this distracts from the book. As James Lovegrove in the FT puts it:

Seveneves is a superhuman achievement, dense, eloquent, exhaustive, exhilarating, powerful, utterly readable, and ultimately uplifting. Stephenson imagines the worst that can happen, and insists that we can make the best of it. It’s the end of the world as we know it, and he feels fine.

I just think it would have been even better with mushrooms.

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Friday Fungus: wild mushrooms and the tragedy of the commons

You've got dressed up, hired a cab and are safely seated in that special restaurant for your special occasion. Scanning down the menu your eyes fall on a "mosaic of chicken, wild mushrooms and pistachio nuts - an elegant combination of woody, autumnal flavours packed into a chunky terrine". If you're me, you leap as the prospect of wild mushrooms and place the order for your starter. What you don't do is ask how those wild mushrooms arrived at a posh restaurant in Ilkley. Perhaps it's time to start asking - for the sake of our woodlands and for the sake of us continuing to enjoy the fabulous flavours of those wild mushrooms blessing our palettes.

We're familiar with the tragedy of the commons (although it is often misrepresented):

...each human exploiter of the common was guided by self-interest. At the point when the carrying capacity of the commons was fully reached, a herdsman might ask himself, “Should I add another animal to my herd?” Because the herdsman owned his animals, the gain of so doing would come solely to him. But the loss incurred by overloading the pasture would be “commonized” among all the herdsmen. Because the privatized gain would exceed his share of the commonized loss, a self-seeking herdsman would add another animal to his herd. And another. And reasoning in the same way, so would all the other herdsmen. Ultimately, the common property would be ruined.

So it is with wild foraging for mushrooms.

The New Forest Association (NFA) says there's growing anger over "commercial gangs" invading and filching fungi to flog to posh hotels and restaurants in back-door deals.

Experts have warned the gangs could even kill because pickers who don't know the different species are likely to take deadly toadstools and other poisonous fungi in mistake for edible and safe mushrooms.

Forestry Commission bosses have now vowed to "disrupt" commercial pickers plundering this autumn's crop - but campaigners are demanding an outright ban.

This same story is repeated across our woodlands - from Epping Forest to Ogden Water you'll see evidence of large scale mushroom gathering. How else did you think all those wild mushrooms arrived in all those restaurants? And the easy result of authorities is to introduce a ban:

Authorities in London's Epping Forest have been stopping and searching walkers in an attempt to catch foragers who are stripping the woodland of fungi.

Forest keepers are trying to crack down on the harmful practice after gangs of foragers descended on the woodland in vans to cart away hauls of mushrooms which are then sold to restaurants.

The plants can fetch up to £50 per kilo as the trend for foraged food in upmarket restaurants in London and around the country has sent demand soaring.

The problem is that, as we know too well, a ban would simply drive up the price and make it worth the while to carry on foraging (the downside risk is probably pretty small). Even if we banned restaurants from selling wild mushrooms - imagine the foodie cries of pain - there's still be a market at the restaurant backdoor at an even higher price.

Instead of banning foraging would it not be more sensible (and lucrative) for places like Epping Forest and the New Forest to auction off the rights to crop the mushrooms? Trust me, if you've forked out thousands of quid for something you'll be making really sure people don't arrive and steal it from you. The owners of the rights would back up the local keepers and wardens to stop the poaching of fungi - we'd have an industry interested in a sustainable product rather than a collection of uncontrolled exploiters of common rights.

Despite this, I'll bet you that the choices of authorities will be the ban not the licence.
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Friday Fungus: Terroir - or how fungi make your wine taste different

The idea of 'terroir' is well-known to wine buffs and is most commonly described as:

In a larger context, wine tasters try to define terroir as the specificity of place, which has come to include not only the soil in a region, but also the climate, the weather, the aspect of the vineyards and anything else that can possibly differentiate one piece of land from another.

The same grape grown in a different place will produce similar but distinct wine. And the wine buffs will talk about soil, climate, aspect and even the phases of the moon in trying to explain what this all means. Funnily enough they never mention mushrooms let alone fungi. Well they should:

Professor White offers a scientific, if unromantic explanation of terroir: wine character can be determined by the rate of water and nutrient uptake by the vine, and different types of soils will affect this rate — with microorganisms playing an important role in this process.

He describes how the mycorrhizal fungi in the soil form a symbiotic relationship with the vine’s roots. “The mycelium of the fungus grows within the root itself,” he says. “And some of the hyphae grow out into the surrounding soil, extending the root surface available and enhancing the uptake of water and nutrients such as phosphorus.”

The degree to which these fungi are around plus the different varieties will affect the rate of water and nutrient intake - ergo changing the flavour of the wine. And there's more because those other (and rather important to making alcohol) fungi, yeasts will vary from location to location:

“The wild yeasts that come in to the winery from the vineyard with the grapes can influence a wine’s character, particularly at the start of a spontaneous ferment,” says Paul Chambers, research manager in biosciences at the Australian Wine Research Institute in Adelaide. “And there’s mounting evidence that the complexity of microflora of each vineyard varies from region to region.”

Terroir is a romantic notion filled with the idea of a place's history, its uniqueness - the concept is part of wine's mystique. Yet the reality is that microbial variations and the different fungi knocking around the patch are the reasons for that difference rather than just soil, climate or aspect (and let's be clear that the phases of the moon stuff is nonsense).

Another way in which fungi make our lives (and the wine) wonderful!

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Friday Fungus: Duet for slime mould and piano

Slime mould is pretty weird stuff. But I never saw its musical genius coming:

A duet for slime mould and piano will be premiered at an arts festival this weekend, giving new meaning to the term "culture".

Festival director and musician Eduardo Miranda has put the decomposition into composition: his new work uses cultures of the fungus Physarum polycephalum.

This mould is the core component of an interactive biocomputer, which receives sound signals and sends back responses.

The result is a musical duet between the fungus and Prof Miranda, on piano.

"The composition, Biocomputer Music, evolves as an interaction between me as a human playing the piano, and the Physarum machine," Prof Miranda told the BBC's Inside Science programme. 

I'm sure we'll find out what the slime sounds like in due course.

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Friday Fungus: Drug-crazed dinosaurs, the Black Sorcerer and other tales of ergotism

It seems that back in the olden times (about six-thousand years ago some would say) those dinosaurs - the herbivorous ones - weren't just munching on grasses but were also munching on ergot, the famously psychoactive fungus that is the precursor to LSD and even got it's own saintly mania in the form of St Anthony's Fire. Still there's something joyous about drug-crazed dinosaurs:

A study from Oregon State University claims gigantic grass-eating dinosaurs used to get high on a prehistoric form of the psychedelic drug.

The discovery came after researches located a perfectly preserved amber fossil in Myanmar.

Estimated to be 100 million years old, the fossil contained the ergot fungus, which can be turned into the active ingredient in LSD.

Without even being turned into the psychedelic drug, ergot can have poisonous or mind-altering effects on animals that ingest the dark fungi.

Of course we've no idea whether the ergot had any effect on the dinosaurs - they may have tripped happily away or, more likely, experienced the other and painful side-effects from ergot (and indeed plenty of other psychoactive fungi). And this might have been just as deadly for the dinosaurs as it is for people.

Vasoconstriction in the extremities was the cause of the burning pains and gangrene; some cases were so severe that fingers and toes or even hands and feet were lost. This quality of ergot alkaloids was exploited as early as the Middle Ages, when midwives would use a small quantity to speed up labor and reduce bleeding. 

Today - as well as LSD - we've used the ergot to develop effective treatments for migraine and postpartum bleeding along with emerging treatments for dementia.

Since ergot growth will be concentrated we can picture the saurian crisis when they munch through as field of infected grasses - something similar to the Pont-Saint-Esprit poisoning in 1951:

In this small town there was only one bakery and everyone bought bread from it. Strange things started happening. People developed a burning sensation in their limbs, began to hallucinate that they could fly, did strange things to their dogs with forks and in general acted weirdly.

OK some conspiracy theorists claim variously that it was the CIA - or rather a rogue agent called (and this is wonderful) "The Black Sorcerer":

...it seems they were targeted by a top secret, U.S. government programme to test new drugs as potential weapons against enemy populations. New evidence suggests that the bread was deliberately infected with LSD as part of a covert operation mounted by MKULTRA, a shadowy operation run by a renegade, alcoholic intelligence agent called Sidney Gottlieb.

Known as the Black Sorcerer, Gottlieb - whose favourite hobby was stomping round nightclub dance floors despite being born with a club foot - was an American military chemist put in charge of the U.S. government's secret mind control programme, which involved using drugs to kill and disable the enemy.

I have my doubts but it is a rather good tale - better than other theories blaming the bleaching of flour and industrial pesticides. There is one that fingers a different fungus - Aspergillus fumigatus. This is very common, it likes to grow in stores of vegetation so could indeed colonise a grain silo. But the descriptions of the behaviour at Pont-Saint-Esprit really do match descriptions of ergotism (and given its similarity with LSD - the effects of that drug too). However, the give away in the description is the persistent reference to "burning sensations" - this is the physical reaction to the vasoconstriction and not a side effect of LSD.

Finally I would remind you that (it is said) ergotism is why witches fly on broomsticks.

A number of Spanish witches admitted during their inquisitions that they engaged in night-flying. This is because witches would use hallucinogenic drugs to get high and make them believe they were flying. Their way of administering the drugs was rather novel even by modern day standards.

The hallucinogenic they used was called ergot, it came from a mould that grew on rye bread. In high doses ergot is fatal, but small amounts would lead to extremely intense experiences. Therefore, in order to avoid the risk of death, witches looked for alternative ways to absorb the drug quickly into their blood stream.

The most effective way, and the one with the least ill-effects, was through the female genitals. Witches would rub an ointment made with ergot onto the end of their broomsticks and quite literally sit on it.

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Friday Fungus: Penicillium salamii - the sausage fungus

You all know dear readers that molds and fungi are essential in artisan food production. You may also know that one role for these chaps is in the curing of meat (one or two of you may never eat salami again though):

Generally, salami uses Penicillium nalgiovense--a white, edible mold--in the meat curing process. When the salami is cased, spiced, and ready to go, meat producers introduce the mold to seal in flavors and keep other potentially dangerous molds out.

Using DNA sequencing, the team identified two fungi living on the cured meats they analysed: Penicillium nalgiovense, the typical mold, and another mold that seemed to be related to Penicillium olsonii. But it wasn’t exactly the same.

 So now you know that the white outside layer on the salami you bought on that market stall yesterday is an edible mold - indeed it's several types of edible mold. Those researchers have found a little visitor to the sausage - a mold they didn't know about. And they've called it Penicillium salamii - sausage mold.

And why not!

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Friday Fungus: It had to happen! Welcome to mushroom chocolate!

I am grateful to Julia for bringing this to my attention:

Our aim has always been to develop high quality medicinal mushroom products that improve your health and wellbeing. Not only that, but we want to make it a tasty experience too. That's why our chocolates are the perfect excuse to enjoy raw chocolate whilst getting all the healing benefits of mushrooms. 

The full chocolate range - seven flavours is available at Harrods. Where else!

The firm in question is Hifas da Terra who are a splendidly batty (but super-scientific) Spanish company:

The Hifas da Terra project comes from the University of Santiago de Compostela (USC ) where Catalina Fernández de Ana Portela, biologist and founder of the company, began to develop an initiative to grow saprophytic fungi on wood logs. After several years of business coaching and scientific studies at the forestry reasearch center ”Lourizán”, Hifas da Terra was created in 1999. A biotechnology company focused on mycology, trying to bring the knowledge of the beneficial properties of mushrooms to the people.

The firm retails mushroom kits, creams, soaps and health spa treatments, assorted gourmet products (including mushrooms in honey - not to be confused with honey mushrooms), food supplements and gifts, including a range of stylish clutch bags:

Brilliant!

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