On a recent ramble through the Scottish woods, Roy Watling fingered a dull yellow mushroom and said proudly: “Do you know whose fungus that is? It’s mine.”

The mushroom Boletus porosporus isn’t especially rare, isn’t poisonous, and, Dr. Watling says, “It has a taste like old socks.”

He knows what he is talking about: He discovered and officially named the species more than four decades ago. After a lifetime spent rummaging in the woods, Dr. Watling, 74 years old, has discovered and classified more than 50 fungus species around the world. But now, like some of the toadstools he studies, Dr. Watling is part of a vanishing breed…Read more

The pathogen, Seiridium cardinale, was first identified in California’s San Joaquin Valley in 1928 and has since made its way to Europe, Asia, New Zealand, Australia, South America, and Africa. In many regions, the pathogen has infected and killed up to 95 percent of native trees in the cypress family, including junipers and some cedars.

“The fungus was likely introduced from California either in the South of France or in Central Italy 60 to 80 years ago, and that introduction resulted in a global pandemic that has devastated the region’s iconic Italian cypress trees,” says Matteo Garbelotto, adjunct associate professor and cooperative extension specialist in ecosystem sciences at the University of California, Berkeley…Read more

Researchers at UC Berkeley have found that the spread of a cypress tree-killing pathogen to six continents very likely originated in trees exported from California to Europe in the 1920s.

The study, published Thursday in the journal Phytopathology, determined that the cypress canker disease — Seiridium cardinale — has infected approximately 95 percent of native trees in the cypress family. The study was a collaboration between the Italian National Research Council and Matteo Garbelotto, campus adjunct associate professor of environmental science.

The pathogen, which was first discovered in California in 1928, later spread to New Zealand and France and was soon reported to have spread throughout southern Europe, according to Garbelotto. The fungus, which  chokes off the tree’s water supply, enters through cracks in the bark on the branches…Read more

I have listened over the years as countless patients have told me horror stories about their experience at the nail salon, and how before going for pedicures, their toenails were clear and beautiful. You’ve thought about it, right? All of a sudden your toenails are looking a bit yellow, thicker, maybe they crumble and break.

Blaming it on your nail salon seems like the obvious thing to do. But is this really true? Are nail salons responsible for the epidemic of toenail fungus we now see in our society? Or, is it possible that this is entirely false, and the real cause of toenail fungus is something entirely different?…Read more

A giant puffball, resting in the grass like a massive white pearl, shone in the springtime light of Edgewood Park. Matt Decker FES ’12 and an assortment of other Yale Law School, School of Forestry and Environmental Studies and undergraduate students looked on it with possibility. Decker could have prepared it simply — sleek with olive oil, touched with sea salt, and lightly sautéed — but his foraging guide Wildman Steve said the mushroom would not satisfy Decker’s culinary hopes.

In fact, the white fungi might have sent him and his friends to the hospital.

Decker’s disappointment occurred six months ago, at the beginning of the mushrooming season. But now peak mushroom hunting time has arrived, bringing more puffballs…Read more

Yeast infections are the fourth most common cause of infection acquired by people in hospitals, although in healthy people they are most usually associated with vaginal or oral yeast infections known as thrush. In extreme cases in vulnerable patients, such yeasts can circulate in the bloodstream and spread throughout the body, causing systemic candidiasis. This is life-threatening in around half of patients when the infection spreads in this way…Read more

The fungus grows inside the ants and releases chemicals that affect their behaviour. Some ants leave the colony and wander off to find fresh leaves on their own, while others fall from their tree-top havens on to leaves nearer the ground.

The final stage of the parasitic death sentence is the most macabre. In their last hours, infected ants move towards the underside of the leaf they are on and lock their mandibles in a “death grip” around the central vein, immobilising themselves and locking the fungus in position.

“This can happen en masse. You can find whole graveyards with 20 or 30 ants in a square metre. Each time, they are on leaves that are a particular height off the ground and they have bitten into the main vein before dying,” said David Hughes at Harvard University.

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More than 200 varieties of mushroom were on display at the Devonian Botanic Garden on Sunday, as the Alberta Mycological Society held a unique exposition.

The goal was to showcase the various roles the fungi play in our lives, from culinary inspiration, to medicinal qualities, to preserving local ecosystems.

“They are probably the most fascinating organisms,” said Roland Treu, who studies the spore-bearing fruit at the University of Athabasca.

“They are kind of mysterious.”

With a generous fall of rain this year, a rich array of mushrooms have popped up across the province. But experts have a warning for backyard harvesters – some species are poisonous.

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North America’s most common bat, the little brown myotis, may be all but extinct in the northeastern United States in 16 years, due to a rapidly-spreading fungal infection,  according to a story in Live Science.

The fungus, called the white-nosed syndrome grows on the exposed skin of bats as they hibernate.

If infection continues at current rates, the researchers reported in the journal Science, there is a 99-percent chance the little brown myotis population will drop below 0.01 percent of its current numbers by 2026.

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The ‘jellylike fungus,’ a mushroom known as cordyceps sinensis, which grows inside the bodies of dead insect lavae.

It grows at high altitude on remote Himalayan peaks along the border areas of Tibet, Nepal, Bhutan and India and has been prized as a herbal medicine in Tibet and China since the 15th century.

Indian officials said troops from China’s People’s Liberation Army (PLA) are sneaking across the disputed MacMahon Line border.

While the fungus, which has been dubbed the ‘love flower,’ is not particularly valued in India, its value has soared in China as an aphrodisiac.

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