MUSHROOMS. TOADSTOOLS, and other FUNGI

Forest and Bird, Volume 15, Issue 3, 1 August 1984, Page 26

MUSHROOMS. TOADSTOOLS, and other FUNGI

by

David Gregorie

You eat mushrooms and you don’t eat toadstools, right? Not quite. There are many kinds of fungi you can eat besides mushrooms — truffles, boletes, puffballs, ink-caps and wood-ears are five of the better known kinds. But it is very foolish to eat any fungus you are not absolutely sure about. Mistakes can be fatal. The bright red and white fly agaric, for example, will make you very ill if you eat it. But it can’t hurt you in any other way, so if you find one don’t destroy it. Admire it. Fungi are most peculiar plants. If they are plants. They don’t grow like plants and they don’t behave like plants. They don’t have leaves, or flowers, or fruit, or seeds. They don’t have chlorophyll which gives plants their green colour. And they don’t use energy from the sun to manufacture their food in the way that plants do. Instead they feed off living plants or animals or the remains of dead ones, in much the same way that animals do. But they aren’t animals either. They belong to their own special group that doesn’t fit exactly into either the plant or the animal kingdom. Mushrooms and toadstools are certainly not plants in the way that pansies and pine trees are. You can’t grow them from seed, or plant them out or shift them from place to place. They have much the same job in life as the fruit and seedpods of ordinary

plants. They are what the scientists call the ‘"fruitbodies’ of a large spreading network of underground living material called mycelium. This is the main part of the fungus’ body. When two different sets of mycelium of the same species of fungus meet underground they mate and join together and then produce mushrooms, toadstools, puffballs or other kinds of "‘fruitbody"’ according to their species. The ‘‘fruitbodies’’ produce millions of tiny spores that wash away in rain water or blow away in the wind until they find a place where they can grow into a network of underground mycelium like their parents. If you place an ordinary table mushroom right-side-up on a piece of white paper and leave it undisturbed for a day or so, you will find a brown pattern on the paper where the powdery microscopic spores have fallen from the gills on the underside of the mushroom. Fungi come in so many shapes and sizes that we often don’t recognise them for what they are. There are thousands of different kinds of toadstools, hundred of thousands of moulds and mildews, and hundreds of weird-looking fungi that look as if they have arrived from another planet. Not all of them live on the ground. They can grow inor on plants or trees, or even in or on animals. Many common blights and

diseases are caused by fungi that feed on plants or animals, often slowly killing them in the process. Athlete’s foot, ringworm and thrush are three unpleasant skin diseases caused by fungi that grow on people. The mycelium burrows under your skin making it itch terribly; the ‘‘fruitbodies’’ growing in the dead and peeling skin scatter their spores around and infect other parts of your body and other people. But some fungi can cure diseases instead of causing them. Penicillin, for example, is made from a kind of fungus called penicillium. We use fungi in many ways. Yeastis a kind of fungus that has been used for thousands of years for making bread, wine and beer. It is also a popular health food. Living yeast turns the sugar and starch in grapes or wheat into alcohol and carbon dioxide gas. We mix yeast into the dough when we make bread and the carbon dioxide it gives off makes the dough swell up into a light and puffy mixture instead of going hard and solid like a biscuit. The yeast used in making wine and beer produces the alcohol that makes them intoxicating as well as the gas that makes them bubbly. Another kind of fungus grows in blue-vein cheese giving it the special flavour that many people like. So if your parents hold a wine and cheese evening, fungus will always come to the party. For more about New Zealand fungi read Mushrooms and Toadstools, by Marie Taylor, one of the Mobil New Zealand Nature Series. oe