Today, fungal news.
Merlin Sheldrake's book, Entangled Life, won the Science Book of the Year Award. You may recall that I loved this book and it led to some weird pictures of fungal things.
The fungus in the picture grows in the park - on the Brave Three's patch. I saw it while standing under a tree talking to CD who was perching above, wiping his beak on a twig.
The jelly antler of a recent post, that led to a fun half hour in my regular Zoom meeting with Richard in California. I described it as peachy-coloured antlers, rather like seeing coral growing in the wood. He was prompted to do a Google search and during the ensuing deep dive into fungal facts we saw some incredible sights.
Bright blue and gloriously purple fungi.
What a world. Richard said, if you want to imagine an alien planet, think of fungal forms or deep sea delights. I said that was exactly what I'd thought when I saw the jelly antler one. Imagine if it were twenty feet tall!
The whole tree-symbiosis thing makes one think happily of fungi, but they kill trees too. Chestnut blight, for example. And, they kill bats. This is most horrid.
White nose syndrome infects hibernating bats and gradually kills them. One of the ideas in Britt Wray's book is gene-editing bats so they are not susceptible. You'd edit some bats and use a 'gene-drive' - which makes that gene pass to all offspring so eventually the gene spreads through the entire population. The problem is that bats breed slowly and they could die out before they are made resistant. People care about bats because they are pollinators and eat insects that could otherwise eat plants of both humans.
For me, the issue is that right now bats are starving to death because of the fungal infections.
Comments