Dog Vomit

7 July

“All Fungi are edible.

Some fungi are only edible once.”

― Terry Pratchett

Not all fungi look like mushrooms - in fact most don’t. Let me introduce you to perhaps the most unmushroom-like fungus of all. This splendid Slime Mold rejoices in the name of Dog Vomit Slime Mold (Fuligo septica) and was found on a summer morning walking along on the wood-chips covering a path at the Garden at Fritz. If you have wood chips anywhere, mulch or path cover in your garden for example, then there is a fair chance that one day you will encounter this. It won;t last long, so enjoy it while you can.

Now - back to earth. Fungi are an entire and distinct kingdom of usually multicellular organisms (unicellular ones are the yeasts) that cannot make their own food and are important in nutrient cycling in an ecosystem. They reproduce both sexually and asexually, and they have symbiotic associations with plants and bacteria. They are not plants, not at all.

As they cannot make their own food they have to get essential nutrients from organic material. This involves hyphae, which elongate and branch off rapidly, forming the mycelium which can be very extensive and usually invisible as it will be under the surface of soil or inside the wood of a decaying tree for example. Some species obtain nutrients from dead organic matter and thereby induce and aid decomposition. Other species parasitize plants and are responsible for such plant diseases as Dutch elm disease. Yet others have symbiotic (mutually beneficial) relationships with photosynthetic algae or bacteria, and with plant roots. A symbiotic association of a fungus and an animal that photosynthesizes is a lichen, while a plant root-and-fungus association is a mycorrhiza.

The visible fungi (mushrooms etc) are just the temporary reproductive parts of the life cycle and develop and distribute the spores.