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: 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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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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Friday Fungus: How mushrooms make music more magical!

It would seem that the magic of music can be enhanced with the wonders of mycological intervention - mould makes for magical music! But first we need to understand why some violins sound better:

Low density, high speed of sound and a high modulus of elasticity -- these qualities are essential for ideal violin tone wood. In the late 17th and early 18th century the famous violin maker Antonio Stradivari used a special wood that had grown in the cold period between 1645 and 1715. In the long winters and the cool summers, the wood grew especially slowly and evenly, creating low density and a high modulus of elasticity. Until now, modern violin makers could only dream of wood with such tonal qualities.

All the good trees have gone and we're stuck with trees from warmer woods. Which is where the fungi come in:

Professor Schwarze's developments could soon make similarly good wood available for violin making. He discovered two species of fungi (Physisporinus vitreus and Xylaria longipes), which decay Norway spruce and sycamore -- the two important kinds of wood used for violin making -- to such an extent that their tonal quality is improved. "Normally fungi reduce the density of the wood, but at the same time they unfortunately reduce the speed with which the sound waves travel through the wood," the researcher explained. "The unique feature of these fungi is that they gradually degrade the cell walls, thus inducing a thinning of the walls. But even in the late stages of the wood decomposition, a stiff scaffold structure remains via which the sound waves can still travel directly." 

Got all that. But of course the test is in the audience's ears not in the good Professor's science - and it seems that 'mycowood' does the business:

In 2009 the violins were played in a blind, behind-the-curtain test versus a genuine Stradivarius from 1711. All the violins were played by the British violinist Matthew Trusler. The result was surprising for all participants: Both the jury of experts and the majority of the audience thought that the mycowood violin that Schwarze had treated with fungi for nine months was the actual Strad.

It will be interesting to see whether this affects the market for Strad instruments or whether the cachet of antiquity still wins out over these new-fangled mycowood violins!

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Friday Fungus: Collins Mushroom Miscellany - a review

For Christmas, I received a copy of Collins Mushroom Miscellany by Patrick Harding. I thought I’d share some thought son it with you. The book isn’t a guide to mushrooms but a wander through the highways and byways of mushrooms, toadstools and assorted fungi.

Patrick Harding is a real mycophile having spent a fair chunk of his life teaching us lesser mortals about mushrooms and this miscellany is clearly a labour of love. In and amongst the content are some real delights such as how many fungi there are:

“...the number of known, named species is in the region of 100,000, and the total has been estimated to be closer to 1.5 million different species.”

Now that a whole load of ‘shrooms!

...and some of them are very old:

“Observations of fairy rings, especially those made by the fairy ring champignon (Marasimius oreades), have been made over successive years in an attempt to measure the average increase in diameter of the fruiting ring. As with the growth of trees there are good years and bad years for fungal growth. The rate of increase in the diameter of a ring...is in the range of 20-70cm per year. Even if we take the upper figure, rather than an average, this means that a ring of nearly 800m in diameter must have been made by an individual that is at least 1,100 years old.”

The book talks of ceps, morels, chanterelles and truffles and is beautifully illustrated with photographs and drawings It even tells us of the bad fungi – Serpula lacrymans, for example (dry rot, now happily quite rare in the UK) and Claviceps purpurea (ergot, the scourge of European cereals and source of madness). And of course the book describes the psychotropic mushrooms: fly agaric and the Psilocybe genus.

However, I like the book best for its chapter on M.C.C. (Mordecai Cubitt Cooke), Britain’s first professional mycologist – a man who got dismissed as a teacher for “...teaching too much science.” And who went on to help found the British Mycological Society and to produce the eight volume "Illustrations of British Fungi" for Kew.

M.C.C. is no relative but it is good to know that we share both a name and an interest in mushrooms!

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Friday Fungus - Australian Truffles

The truffle has long been viewed as the emperor of fungi (I hesitate to say mushroom since the truffles we worship aren't fruiting heads) so it was a delight to discover that there are antipodean relatives of this exquisite delicacy - and that enterprising Aussies also took spores of the classic black truffle (Tuber melanosporum - see picture) and established truffle colonies in Tasmania. The primary (but not only) producer of black truffles is Perigord Truffles of Tasmania - nothing like saying what it does on the tin!

However, as well as growing these imported delicacies (a reminder yet again that you can transfer European - even French - classic produce elsewhere in the world and keep up levels of quality) there are also a fascinating range of truffle type fungi native to Australia. These pseudo-truffles are also edible and perhaps our antipodean friends might like to share some of their delights with those of us stuck in the Northern Hemisphere! There's a great deal to learn about these fungi and the Australian Fungi Website is a great place to start.

Finally, mycologists in Australia have identified a whole new bunch of truffles - related to the Amanita fungi that give us fairy rings and magic mushrooms (as well as some edible delights). The Amanita truffles are pictured above and are about the size of a marble. Finally, if you're wanting to experiment with eating mushrooms you gather yourself, truffles are a good place to start as none of the main truffle groups are poisonous (which isn't the same as saying they all taste good)!