Peter Roberts - Fungi: A Species Guide

Colorful, bizarre, mysteriousfungi have evolved an extraordinary range of weird and wonderful shapes and forms in every part of the globe, from the tropics to the poles. Titanic toadstools erupt from termite mounds, evil-smelling stinkhorns attract flies to spread their spores, flamboyantly colored corals emerge in the depths of forests fungi are hard at work all around us, yet all too often they go unnoticed and unappreciated.

More than 75,000 species of fungi have been described worldwide and the numbers keep growing, year by year. This book dips into the kingdom of the fungi with a carefully chosen selection of 75 different species, each one of interest not just for its appearance, but also for the role it plays in the great chain of life.

Everyone knows that some fungi are edible and that mushrooms are cultivated for food. But did you know that most trees and flowering plants also depend on fungal partners for their nutrition? Or that all the wood in the world is rotted down and recycled by fungihelping to create the fertile soils that plants need to grow? Or that many of the antibiotics we depend upon today were originally derived from fungi?

Each species featured in this book has its own particular lifestyle and this lifestyle often dictates its form. There are fungi described that look like miniature birds nests and use raindrops to catapult their spores into the air, fungi that engulf their neighbors to create bizarre hybrid fruitbodies, fungi that attract insects with scarlet tentacles resembling flowers, fungi that protect themselves with leathery arms that open in the rain and close again when dry, fungi that entice foraging sows with the pheromones of wild boars.

Edible fungi are featured, including some of the less familiar species that are now finding their way onto supermarket shelves. Poisonous and hallucinogenic fungi are also here, as well as several that have been found to possess potentially useful propertiesparticularly in the search for new and better pharmaceuticals.

A hundred years or more ago, fungi were thought of as lower plants or cryptogams, on a par with mosses and liverworts. They did not produce flowers and their seeds were very small, but they were still plants of a sort. However, it gradually became clear that fungi had little or nothing to do with plants. They were not made of cellulose, like plants, but of chitin (a substance more usually associated with insects). They did not contain chlorophyll and could not use sunlight to convert carbon dioxide into sugars. As a result, in the 1960s, they were placed in their own groupingthe kingdom Fungi. Curiously, modern DNA research puts the fungi even farther from plants. Fungi are part of the opisthokontsa group that also includes the animals. It seems animals and fungi once had a common ancestor, some time after plants went their separate way.

Modern systematics, based on analysis of DNA sequences, divides the kingdom Fungi into at least seven different groups or phyla. Although they are all of interest (fungi in the phylum Neocallimastigomycota, for example, live in the stomachs of ruminants, helping to break down plant material), most are microscopic and beyond the scope of this book. All the selected species in this book, therefore, belong either to the Ascomycota or to the Basidiomycotathe two fungal phyla that produce large, visible fruitbodies.