A Box Full of Surprises

Most product companies try to keep varying types of fungi from being shipped with their product... ecovative design, a New York-based company is doing the opposite - they want to ship your product WITH fungi.

EcoCradle Packaging is an innovative alternative to the decidedly un-ecofriendly use of polystyrene, packing peanuts, plastic bubble wrap, and paper-based "filler" materials you're often stuck with when you unpack your delivered package.

That's because ecovative design's packaging material is grown. That's right, grown, with vegetative hulls. In just 7 days, miles of mycelia (mushroom roots, if you will) are produced, harvested, molded into a packing shape, and ready to accompany your favorite internet order.

Now I'll be the first to admit that this sounds suspiciously like the beginning of quite a few monster movies. Some crazy scientists (or government agency) holed up somewhere, discover a new process for doing something they think will help mankind... a beaker spills, a lightning storm, and BOOM!, you've got blood gushing everywhere and teenage couple being slaughtered in the woods.

So I contacted ecovative and requested a sample (for the good of mankind, of course). It arrived the other day, and though it wasn't a large sample, you can definitely see where they're going with this.

The mycelial "chunk" is light, surprisingly sturdy (I can pinch it between my thumb and forefinger... I hear a slight crackling sound, but I can't shatter it) and is somewhat attractive (as fungi goes). Both my wife and I did the same thing after first eyeing it... we smelled it. I mean if it were to smell like a old sock in a waterlogged basement, you probably wouldn't want your brand new Amazon package smelling like it, but was pleasantly surprised that it didn't smell like anything.

It's appearance reminds me of the Oyster Mushroom kit I buy once a year for the home school classes I teach (minus the actual mushrooms of course.)

The sample that I was sent was too small to actually use for packing material, but I did take a picture of one of my rubber apes in the box with it. I wouldn't hesitate at all sending Stamp Ape (well, that's his name) through the mail with this stuff. (Actually for now, it'll act as a nice little table for when he has his other ape friends over.)

With a recent article in Scientific American, and a nod as one of the 100 best innovations of 2009 by Popular Science, it appears this melding of fungi and sustainability may be in a box heading your way. You may want to peruse their website to get the full picture. My favorite part is from their FAQ:

Q. Can you eat it?

A. Well, you could, and because it's all natural it wouldn't hurt you. But, it's non-nutritious and doesn't taste very good, so we don't recommend it.

Wanted... Fungi Specialists

I've been following this story for over a year.

In August of 2008, Nicholas Evans, author of The Horse Whisperer, and three friends, including his wife, consumed Cortinarius speciosissimus, a deadly mushroom, sometimes known as a Deadly Webcap. They had mistaken them for chanterelles in the Scottish countryside.

For the past year the four of them have been on dialysis in renal units in the United Kingdom and are currently on kidney transplant lists. Their conditions require 15 hours of dialysis a week. Of course, many people are poisoned by mushrooms each year. Often, the culprit are lookalike mushrooms, or the incorrect assumption that what one sees in a field guide is going to be what was picked, or just the lack of importance being placed on the toxicity of a select bunch of mushrooms.

What this article in last week's Scotland On Sunday website focuses on is the lack of proper experts to identify mushrooms in Scotland.

What I think this event points out is that there are still lots of people who take unnecessary chances, combined with lots of wives' tales and misinformation about mushrooms. Look no further than the comments section of the Scotland on Sunday article where "Commentator #4" calls people idiots and then proceeds to quote one of the biggest mistruths about poisonous mushrooms, only to be (rightfully) chided and corrected by "Commentator #7."

Know your mushrooms.

Can We Get Our Priorities Straight?

Okay, you're on a bus. You've paid a fare and you're being driven to a destination with a bunch of other people. What have you paid for? Well, the convenience of not having to drive yourself (or walk), the fuel...

But did you consider that you might get something else on your ride... like a special prize? Or a treat? How about some edible mushrooms? Say, some Oyster mushrooms?

You'd be happy, right? Well not these folks. It seems that they're complaining that mushrooms were growing out from under the seats.

Like that's a bad thing.

One of the passengers actually had the courage to snap a picture of the offending fungi and went on to say that his children often take this VERY bus. He went on to say-

"If they'd been there they could have touched them, and mushrooms can cause disease or even poison people. Even if it's not poisonous, what does this say about the cleaners? I pay £54.90 per month in fares, which is a lot to be travelling home on transport with mushrooms growing out of it."

Again... that's a bad thing?!

Talk about a Magic Mushroom Bus...

How to Avoid Being Attacked By A Mushroom

Eat your 3 meals a day! That would be breakfast, lunch, and dinner. Or breakfast, dinner, and supper if you grew up with me in Maine.

It seems New York City's Albert Einstein College of Medicine at Yeshiva University is reporting that by listening to what your Mom said, you can avoid mushroom attacks... okay, actually not really mushrooms, but the smaller, less-understood, somewhat-less-exciting-for-a-blog-post, fungi.

By keeping our normal 98.6º internal temperature, we can fight off any fungal nasties that are looking to take up residence in our bodies. That high of a temperature keeps the majority of fungi attackers at bay. By keeping our food intake up, we are replenishing ourselves with the proper energy to prevent these invasions. The study also suggests that this could be a factor in why mammals rose to dominance after the dinosaur extinction. (Which of course is just a prelude to the day when fungi rise to dominance and throttle us out in the woods - that picture to the left is quite accurate.)

Editors note - That last sentence is not actually part of any study conducted by the good folks at the Albert Einstein College, just a prediction made by most scholars bloggers in the know.

Crimes Against Fungi

With the bumper crop of mushrooms this past summer has come lots of media attention, often small-town media attention, to our favored fungi. Unfortunately the coverage can you leave you wanting a little bit more.

I have nothing against having a picture of Little Susie sitting next to a monster mushroom in the local park. These types of stories are usually followed by having a neighborhood mycologist proudly announce that it's a (insert Latin name) and that these mushrooms aren't usually found around (insert name of local Elks Lodge) and that at first it looked like a (insert name of root vegetable or small Japanese car) and that my first thought was to (insert strange verb). These kinds of articles I can live with.

But if you're going to announce that "Maple harbors humongous fungus," and then proceed to write an article about how the a local retirement facility found a huge mushroom and then not identify it or even provide a picture... well that flunks Journalism 101. The offending article is here.

It doesn't appear that West Virginia's Bluefield Daily Telegraph posts a lot of photos on their site... I mean they didn't even include any for "Crawdads cause problem at leaky lake," or the investigative "Thieves stealing city’s storm drains." I can almost guarantee huge readership upswings if they included photos for these.

Of course there are always worse crimes against fungi. This second article from Colorado's Steamboat Pilot & Today is a better article - has several photos, and the account of a gentleman who found a 20 pound puffball. Things start off fine - “You slice it up thin and fry it up with butter, salt and pepper,” he said. “It doesn’t take long to cook up a mushroom.” I don't know if the fame of such a prized specimen delayed this culinary expectation. but... oh, you may not want to read the following -

“When I picked it, it smelled good,” Wentworth said. “But this one got too ripe. I think the bugs got it.”

“I’m gonna chuck it in the Dumpster,” he said before not-so-ceremonially tossing the 20-pound wonder into the trash.

Photo from the The Steamboat Pilot & Today website.

Somewhat Weekly Fungal Wrap (8/30/08)

Here's another installment of stories from the world of fungi.

In our regular Monster Mushroom series we have a giant puffball from Woonsocket, RI. If it's described as looking "like elephant brains," and weigh in around 4 pounds, you can be assured it'll make its way into the papers.

A study, reported here, in Science Daily, from John Hopkins, Weight Management Center suggests that "increasing intake of low-energy density foods, specifically mushrooms, in place of high-energy-density foods, like lean ground beef, is a strategy for preventing or treating obesity." Mushrooms are approximately 90% water so this would seem to be obvious. Many types of contact lenses also have a high percentage water base, but I wouldn't suggest eating those.

Dave Anderson has a nice article over at unionleader.com highlighting the bumper crop of mushrooms this summer. With all the rain, New Hampshire, and all of New England has supplied an abundance of mushrooms for mycologists - amateur and expert - to enjoy. New Hampshire is where Stacey and I first got hooked on mushrooms.



And finally... we know that some mushrooms may be dangerous to your health. We also know that there are a lot of things that can annoy you on a flight. But what happens when you combine the two? This!

I couldn't find any good photos of mushrooms jumping out of overhead luggage bins and attacking people so I had to use the old standby - A Matango poster.

So make sure to Be Careful Out There! Mushrooms continue to take over the world... one passenger at a time.

Fungi Get the Stamp of Approval

In its ongoing "Fauna + Flora" series of postage stamps, Ireland's An Post has issued 4 new stamps featuring a variety of mushrooms found in Ireland. Neither Fauna nor Flora, the series is now referred to as "Fauna + Flora (fungi)." I guess that works.

The 4 lucky choices? Well you've got:

* Pink Waxcap (Hygrocybe calyptriformis)

* Scarlet Elf Cup (Sarcoscypha austriaca)

* Parasol (Macrolepiota procera)

* Orange Birch Bolete (Leccinum versipelle)

The Elf Cup and Parasol are fairly common in New England and can be found in most regional field guides.

You can see the whole collection here. And you can peruse the An Post website and see their entire line of fungi stamps here!

This is hardly the first time a country has featured mushrooms as means of decorative delivery. You can see a great list of stamps here. The page will take a minute to load as everything is on one page. This is a great site as you can click on each sheet of stamps to get a higher quality image. Notice a few countries not on the list? Yes that's right. The US is not represented! Our neighbors to the North and South have mushroom stamps... but not us? I mean we're thinking of doing Holiday Nutcrackers and we can't have any beloved fungi?!

If you know of any out there, let me know. I've googled the last half hour and came up with nothing. Well not exactly nothing... I did find this service. I guess I could make my own.

Weekly Fungal Wrap (8/9/08)

Here are some stories from the past week that didn't get their own blog entry.

LiveScience has a great article on a trip to find bioluminescent mushrooms in Southern Brazil. This excerpt alone should get your adventurous juices flowing - "We see dozens of what look like fireflies, except they don't blink off and they don't move. They turn out to be very small mushroom caps belonging to a new species that we named Mycena asterina (tiny stars)."

A press release from Meteor Games announces, "The Legends of Laundry, an exciting and fast paced puzzle game where players must contend with bombs, cats, evil fungi, and an unrelenting assault of stubborn stains in their quest to finish the laundry on time." Evil fungi?! We'll be sure to look at this when it gets released. (Though I have to admit that the "stubborn stains" piqued my interest a bit more.)

Visiting Morgan Hill, California anytime soon? Well you may want to check out the Mushroom Art project running through April, 2009. The show has been extended (which is always a good sign.) Picture on the left is from the Morgan Hill Times.

And finally, we have a Giant Mushroom article and video from 49 News in Topeka, Kansas. It was identified as Bondarzewia berkeleyi. The video clip is complete with footage of the mushroom and the ever-entertaining chit-chat of two news anchors as they try to transition into the next story.

That's our look at Fungi in the news.

Be Careful Out There... (on the internet)

I was originally attracted to this article because of its headline - "Puff ball mushroom found near Littlefork."

I was thinking, "So?" I mean it's a little like, "Stop sign found at end of street!" But I figured it must be an INSANELY HUGE puffball... the size of a Volkswagen, eating small children, that kind of thing. I was severely disappointed to see it was a basketball-sized puffball but nothing worthy of its own headline.

Reading the article I was surprised to see:

"All puffball mushrooms are edible, although not all are considered choice."

Huh? Well perhaps you could twist that to be true. Many puffballs are edible... for a short while. But they often turn from white to yellowish, to greenish, to brownish in a short time and you don't want to experiment with these changes in color. In addition, Scleroderma citrinium (Common Earthball, pictured at right) and Scleroderma areolatum are poisonous. Now Puffballs are not some scientifically determined type of mushroom. You could easily make an argument that Puffballs and Earthballs are different (dealing with texture and how spores in each are distributed), but if you own any mushroom field guide you know they are always listed together... often on the same page. No field guide I own makes a hard distinction.

The article wraps up by saying:

"Puffballs that resemble hard boiled eggs are decaying, and not edible. Discolored puffballs should also be avoided."

Perhaps that sentence should have been appended to the previous one I listed. The lesson? Once again, be careful out there... and everywhere.

You can find some good info and additional pictures of various Puffballs (and Earthballs!) here at mushroomexpert.com.

Be Careful Out There...

In what will sure be an ongoing theme on this blog, here is a story from the Fort Mill Times of a couple who were attacked by a grizzly bear while morel hunting in a burned section of forest in Alaska. Recently burned woodlands are prime areas for morel foraging.

Besides puncture wounds to the rib cage it is unclear from the article whether they also came home with any mushrooms. Hopefully they did.

Roll Out the Red Carpet...

Last week, the International Institute for Species Exploration announced ten new species that have been discovered, ranging from a "shocking pink millipede" to a giant "duck-billed dinosaur." The list includes a new species of mushroom, Xerocomus silwoodensis, named after Silwood Campus on Imperial College in London.

Xerocomus is a genus of fungi similar to boletes and is listed with other Boletus, Boletellus, Leccinum, Tylopilus in many field guides. On the undersides of the caps they have pores (small holes) instead of gills (appear like creases). Many boletes are considered choice edibles... no word yet on this new species, though I can imagine the temptation of those that discovered it.

You can check out the entire Top 10 here. Thanks to Fran for sending this my way!

photo from the International Institute for Species Exploration website

Serious Business in Idaho

As I noted in a previous post, it's morel season! The state of Idaho spells out their permit process for mushroom hunting here. They also note that "Commercial pickers and buyers are prohibited from camping in developed campgrounds," and that personal use of picking mushrooms is limited to 5 gallons.

My favorite question from the FAQ is:
(Q) When will the mushroom permits be available to purchase?
(A) There is no official beginning or ending day, however, permits may be available approximately mid-April. Permits are issued for a specific number of days, therefore buying ahead may only be appropriate for those buying a seasonal permit.

I read that over a few times before I understood it to mean... Here I come to claim my 5 gallons! Or something like that.

And one final thing... "Free use mushrooms cannot be sold, bartered or given away." If you pick them they're yours. Even if you don't want them, they're yours.

Pillowhead?

Don't we have enough to worry about when we're sleeping? You've got bed bugs, the Tokyo Stock Exchange, snoring, light pollution, not getting enough sleep, getting too much sleep, nightmares about pennies...

Okay, maybe that last one's just me.

In 2005, research conducted by the University of Manchester found that our nighttime pillows can produce millions of fungal spores. We've known sleeping can present us with an array of nasties. A pillow ecosystem if you will. This particular fungus is the microscopic Aspergillus fumigatus. Just the name alone should be a warning. It's a common fungus often associated with asthma and many allergies.

You can see the article here. I know, it would've been helpful to be alerted to this back in '05. But what would you have done? And here's an article from 2007. Lots of fun. There are lots of other links. This does make me wonder how often should I replace my pillow?

Though I don't think I'll be buying this pillow anytime soon.

Be Careful Out There...

So you're spending a nice afternoon in the woods foraging for mushrooms, when...

You get threatened by a turkey hunter with an axe! (I couldn't find any free pictures of pilgrims wielding axes, so you'll have to settle for a musket.)

You can read the account here.

And if I can offer some advice... The best thing to do would be to run. Arming yourself with a handful of chanterelles probably wouldn't have the outcome you were hoping for. Plus you'd be out a handful of chanterelles. I suppose you could hurl a stinkhorn or two at the guy with the axe.

Amanita Linked to More than 20 Deaths

One of the deadliest mushrooms, Amanita phalloides (The Death Cap) is being blamed for the death of at least 20 people in India, while dozens other are being treated for poisoning. This particular variety of mushroom is responsible for the majority of poisonings in the Unites States.

Symptoms of the Death Cap are:

*Early stages include cramping, diarrhea, vomiting and dehydration. This stage can last up to a day.

*Second stage often includes the person feeling better. Many think they are well on the road to recovery when kidney, liver and other organ damage begins.

*Third stage includes organ failure and often death.

You can read the BBC News article here.

Photos and additional information about the Death Cap can be found here at MushroomExpert.com.

Lite Brite Mushrooms

Over the last few years I've collected a lot of links to various fungi articles. I'll be posting some of my favorites to this blog.

In 2006, National Geographic published a story about bioluminescent fungi growing in Brazil's Ribeira Valley Tourist State Park. The mushrooms are members of the Mycena genus.

Mushrooms, of course, aren't the first organisms to bioluminate. As the article points out, other organisms including some bacteria, earthworms, and ocean life do as well. The term foxfire often refers to the bioluminescence created by members in the Armillaria genus, including Armillaria mellea (Honey Mushroom) which is common in New England.

You can find the article and accompanying photos here:
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2006/10/photogalleries/glowing-fungi/index.html