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Let Us Praise the Bold Molds
- University Press of New England
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p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p letuspraisetheboldmolds It’s that time of the semester again, the point in my college biology course when I must scramble, in the dead of winter, to grow fungi for my students. To most, it’s not a very appealing notion; but to a biologist the fungi are as beautiful as they are intriguing. Delicate as cotton wisps, or tough as leather, each species of fungus has its own very narrow preferences for growing conditions —temperature, humidity, light, and substrate—which allow it to blossom forth, often explosively. Who hasn’t discovered , on a damp autumn morning, the lawn, or that shade under boundless moments 142 p b o u n d l e s s m o m e n t s a pine tree, studded with mushrooms that weren’t there the day before? I recall, many years back, reading about some Long Island homeowners who awoke one day to find translucent, coconut-size globes on their front lawns. What’s more, these spheres seemed to drift across the grass of their own accord. The claim took fire that these entities were from outer space, an assertion that the media seized upon, to the confusion of everybody . This only pointed up, for me, how easy it is to incite fear when one’s raw material is ignorance. The Long Island fungus phenomenon highlighted the one enduring truth common to all fungi: when conditions are just right, they will not be daunted. There’s a story about a New Jersey man who discovered that mushrooms had broken through the hardened asphalt in his driveway. The fellow dug at them, poured lime over them, and even set them on fire, but still they grew. They had to. It was their time. In a contest between man and fungus, the outcome is seldom in doubt. When I first read this story I wondered how organisms so soft and often mushy could possibly disrupt such a tough man-made material. And then, as if being punished for being an unbeliever, I had my own such experience. In our backyard we have an asphalt basketball court, laid down in 1994. It served us well for seven years, until, one day in the fall of 2001, I noticed a bulge about eight inches across. Attributing this to the vagaries of Maine weather, I took a sledgehammer and beat the bulge flat. The next morning there were four such bulges. I beat them flat too. The next day, in a scene reminiscent of a Three Stooges plot, there were six. Curious now, I laid my sledgehammer aside and went about my business, wondering what course the bulges might take if left alone. That evening, when I returned, the aliens had broken through into my world. Mushrooms. Big honking things. Plump and white. It was with a heavy heart that I dug them out, filled the holes with herbicide, and patched up the mess. But every now and then, a new bulge appears, letting me know that they’re still there. Probing. [3.236.111.234] Project MUSE (2024-03-19 07:12 GMT) Let Us Praise the Bold Molds p 143 Molds, mildews, mushrooms. Fungi all. What they have in common is that they are composed of tiny fibers—hyphae— which in some cases are packed tightly together, as in the mushroom , and in others are as diffuse as pulled cotton, as in some species of bread mold. A determined and patient mycologist (one who studies fungi) once measured the growing tips of all the hyphae of a bread mold and found that, in a single night, they had grown an astounding one kilometer. I often sing the praises of the fungi to my students. Once they get over the unappealing sound of the word, most of them warm to these organisms. Neither plant nor animal, they emulate both: they often look like plants, but, like animals, they must get their food elsewhere, usually from dead or decaying organic matter. Ever wonder why the forest isn’t littered with the fallen trunks of dead trees? ’Tis fungi that germinate and spread as soon as (and sometimes before) the sap of these trees has ceased to flow. In fact, even while these trees were young and thriving, their bows aloft, their leaves angled toward the sun, they were literally blanketed with the microscopic spores of fungi. These spores were biding...