Just a nice mushroom article from Oz...
Fabulous fungi December 4, 2007 - news.com.au
We'd be knee-deep in leaf litter and rotting tree branches if it wasn't for fungi, lichens and mosses, Dr Teresa Lebel says.
"The roles that all these organisms play -- the recycling of nutrients -- if we didn't have the fungi, bacteria, mosses and lichens, we basically would have a hard time keeping under control all the leaf litter and branches that fall down," she says.
These "non-vascular" plants are honoured in a new exhibition called Hidden in Plain View: the Forgotten Flora at the National Herbarium of Victoria.
Lebel is a mycologist (fungi expert) and one of the exhibition organisers. Her favourite opening line is: "I work on things people step over, stomp on or completely overlook, and that usually makes people go, 'What!' "
She says fungi's role in penicillin, yeast, bread, beer, wine and cheeses is often overlooked.
"A lot of our food items have fungi of various sorts. Vitamin C is produced in commercial quantities with fungi.
"Stone-washed jeans aren't made by little old ladies beating the jeans on pebbles in a stream. It's a huge vat of jeans with the fungus in there.
"They discovered the fungus eating the canvas on a tent in World War I in Hawaii and isolated it. It has enzymes that can eat cellulose and cotton."
Lebel attributes her love of fungi and the plant world to her parents and one of her university lecturers.
"My father is a naturalist and my mother is a botanical artist. I moved back and forth between Canada and Australia every three or four years as a child. From a very young age my brother and I were investigating things and seeing two completely different environments.
"The contrasts were strong -- going to the northern hemisphere with pines, swamps and snow and coming back to the dry heat of Western Australia.
She studied zoology and botany at the University of Western Australia.
"One of my lecturers talked about fungi. It was one of the few courses that was still teaching mycology.
"He would walk in with a palm tree and machete and put it on the table, chop it into rings, hand them out and say, 'Right, we are going to talk about palm trees today'."
Lebel is also an expert on native truffle.
"We have found nothing that is edible for humans yet, but we are working on it," she says.
Lebel says only two people in Australia teach mycology, but it's a kingdom waiting to be discovered by more people.
"We have names for about 20 per cent of the fungi that produce mushrooms," she says.
"That leaves 5000 to 6000 that haven't been named yet.
"Every field trip I do I find a new species, possibly even a new genus, and there are few groups that you could say that about."
Free entry, until December 17, Hidden in Plain View: the Forgotten Flora, National Herbarium of Victoria, Domain House, Birdwood Ave, South Yarra. Ph: 9252 2495
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