Turns out a group called mycorrhizal fungi form symbiotic relationships with plants. In return, the plant provides the fungi some of the sugars it creates through photosynthesis. Many of our food crops depend on this relationship to produce healthy plants. Like food? Thank the fungi! Fun with Fungi There are many ways to introduce students to fungi. Here are a few ideas:. Obviously, living in the Pacific Northwest gives me an advantage on this one, but since fungi are found in most habitats the world over, you should be able to find a good spot near you.
For desert-dwellers, remember that lichen are fungi living with an algae buddy. Have students bring sketchbooks so they can draw and write about the fungi you find. Once back in the classroom, you can try to identify the fungi you observed using a field guide. There is a mason jar in the cabinet behind me with a slice of tomato, a piece of bread, and a chunk of pineapple.
Buy mushrooms that are in the process of opening. If needed, store them in a paper bag in the fridge until they open up. Mix a teaspoon of sugar with about a cup of warm not hot!
Stir gently. Leave the bottle in a warm place for 20 minutes or so. This might be a little ambitious for classroom use, but could be assigned as a home project and is perfect for a homeschool setting. Mix up two batches of bread dough using any recipe you like.
In the first, follow the directions exactly. Jack-o-Lantern or foxfire fungi are bioluminescent and give off a glow in the dark. The reason is that they manufacture a pigment called luciferin, which gives off light when it is oxidized. It could be because they are trying to attract night-flying insects to spread their spores. These famous fungi are even mentioned in the novel, Huckleberry Finn. The fruiting body of this fungus comes up through the surface like charred, wrinkled arthritic fingers.
Hence, their name! Believe it or not, this deadly fungus that affects rye and other cereals cause black elongated fruiting bodies in the ears of the cereal. The fungus is responsible for the deaths of 10, people in Russia in And some suspect that the eating of ergot on rye may have caused the Salem witch frenzy. If you've spent much time in cemeteries you may have noticed large numbers of mushrooms growing there. These so-called cemetery mushrooms are not feeding on human remains.
They are using the copious amount of nitrogen, ammonia in the coil released as the bodies decompose. This is an off-white greenish-yellow mushroom with a ring, a bulb at the base with a sickly sweet odor.
Read more about how to identify the Death Cap here. Each of these eggs is actually a packet of spores called a peridiole. Raindrops shatter the thin tissue, sending the peridioles through the air. Fairy rings are places of magic and mystery but there's a very scientific explanation. The rings are caused by outward-growing mycelium of a fungus that depletes the soil of its nutrients, creating a dead zone in the center. Purple-spored puffballs can form fairy rings that survive for years or more.
There is one ring at Stonehenge that is estimated to be 10, years old. The Bonnet Mold is a wild-looking fungus that got its name because it looks like it has a punk haircut.
Spores are found at the end of the filaments and are dispersed by insects a well as the wind. Don't be deceived. The caterpillar fungus is not just a fungus. It is actually a fungus and an insect combined in one, sadly sacrificing the caterpillar along the way.
Soon a fruiting body arises from the host. The Caterpillar Fungus has many uses in Chinese medicine and can be quite expensive. It is arvested in the Himalayas,. Chytrids are a type of fungus that has been blamed for the extinction of frogs in the tropics.
The effect of the fungus is especially difficult for amphibians since they breathe through their skin. This parasitic, elm-infecting fungus is carried by the elm bark beetle and is incredibly destructive.
Over 40 million American elm trees have been killed by this disease, and today it is still a very destructive disease of shade trees in the U. Most popular fungi? Certainly, the Fly Agaric is the most photographed of all fungi with its red cap with white specks. The iconic mushroom has been featured in everything from Super Mario to Fantasia and Alice in Wonderland.
Jellies are gelatinous yellow, brown and reddish fungi that have been accompanied by creative explanations for their existence in different cultures.. In Sweden, they were once believed to be vomited up by the cats of witches. And Canadian Inuit thought they were the snot of caribou. Matsutakes are large white mushrooms with reddish-brown flattened scales on their cap, a veil and a tapering stalk with a thick cottony ring near the top.
Matsutakes can be detected by their strong odor, a blend of red hots and old gym socks as one mycologist described it. Revered in the Japanese culture traditionally, they were once considered so sacred in the Japanese imperial court the women were prohibited from saying their name. An extremely large and extremely rare polypore a group of fungi that form large fruiting bodies with pores or tubes on the underside. One species of Noble Polypore in China had a fruiting body that was 34 feet long and weighed pounds!
Oyster mushrooms are a common edible mushroom that is now grown commercially around the world for food. However, it is one of the few known carnivorous mushrooms and will eat roundworms for its source of nitrogen.
The fungi secrete toxic droplets that paralyze the worm and then digests the nitrogen-rich snack from within. Puffballs manufacture their spores in their stomach area and so when a raindrop punctures their outer covering, it forces a cloud-like release of spores.
The giant puffball will produce trillions of spores in the course of its lifetime. A component of its cell walls bonds with red blood cells and creates a gel-like clot that stops bleeding. Yeast is single-celled, and reproduces either sexually or asexually. Asexual reproduction occurs by simple budding binary fission. The mycelium is the vegetative non-reproductive part of a fungus.
It is usually underground or inside some other substance , and made of filaments called hyphae. Hyphae look like threads, or rootlets. The mat of hyphae may be very thickly woven.
The fungus uses them to extract nutrients. Hyphae are usually syncytia. This means the cell walls septa are mostly not complete, and the cell nuclei are not separated from each other as in normal cells. Details differ between species. Symbiosis means living together. Lichens are a symbiosis between a fungus and an alga or bacterium. In this partnership the algal cells live inside the fungus tissue.
The end result is a new mat-like life-form which clings to rock and other surfaces. Another important kind of symbiosis is mycorrhiza. This is when a fungus lives inside plant roots; most trees have mycorrhizal roots, and so do many crop plants. Both sides benefit in this arrangement. Some fungi cause crop diseases; others cause serious disease in humans. Some are highly poisonous: never eat a mushroom picked in the wild unless you know what you are doing.
0コメント