Fungi Appreciation Thread!

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Wow!

That toad is using that thing as a stool!


What do they call those things again....?

What a gorgeous fairy ring! Great composition in the photo too.

Due to fresh interest in the general topic, I have bumped this thread. My apologies if this has irritated anyone..

one of my in-laws works at fungi perfecti, an olympia [washington] mushroom science lab, they work on using 'shrooms and other mycoproteins to cure diseases. there is a good documentary on netflix about their firm.

Yes, it is hard for me not to be jealous of all the job opportunities now for mycologists. My specialty was the fungi imperfecti.

Imperfect, but a fun guy?

I have always pronounced it with a soft g and long i.

But they were fun little guys.

i pronounced them like funky, as in funky fungi

While do I think that Paul Stamets has done a great job at piquing the public's general interest in fungi, I don't consider him a true mycologist. I do, however, consider him to be a modern-day snake oil peddler and a pseudoscientist. The documentary you mentioned is gorgeous, but is basically an advertisement for his products in disguise.

I like the soft g as well. I know many people that have changed the way they originally said the word just so they wouldn't hear the "fun guy" joke anymore.

But how did they get that "imperfecti" adjective stuck on?

Sexual apparatus is the lodestone for figuring out classification of fungi.

There is a large group of fungi who have NEVER been observed to develop any sexual apparatus. Whoever first noticed this called them "imperfect" because they had no sexual apparatus. I suppose the latin people decided to stick the "i" on the end.

Fungi Imperfecti.

I have been out of the field for decades, so for all I know they have all be identified this group. But I doubt it. Flown has much more recent information.

Fungi and their related slime molds and lichens and I think the blue green algae are an amazing group for study. Had I time and a decent microscope, might start looking again.