Poison and giants

Mushrooms are simply fascinating organisms.

Mushrooms are simply fascinating organisms.

Every autumn, society is deeply divided: for some, going “to the mushrooms” is a must, while others distrust everything that they bring in from the forest and limit themselves to eating cultivated mushrooms from the supermarket.

Not entirely wrongly, after all, in Germany there are several hundred cases of poisoning and an estimated double-digit number of deaths every year as a result of overestimating one's own mycological expertise; More precise information is missing because a central register from the statistics of the seven German poison information centers has only been created this year.

On the other hand, mushrooms - if correctly identified - can not only be useful on the plate, but have also recently been discovered as suppliers of materials and, not least, play a crucial role in the global ecosystem, especially through their symbiosis with plant roots, the so-called mycorrhiza.

This close relationship is probably what made multicellular life on dry land possible in the first place: According to common assumptions, land plants, i.e. the basis of the terrestrial food chain, developed from algae, which survived when their habitat dried up because a network of fungal threads supplied them with water and nutrients and in exchange received sugar from photosynthesis. True roots only developed later and thus from the beginning together with the mycorrhiza.

90 percent of all plants today rely on this cooperation - and the remaining ten percent may simply not have been looked closely enough, because fungi are notoriously under-researched. Therefore, their role in agriculture remained unnoticed for a long time; Only recently has it been discovered that agricultural plants that have been “spoiled” by artificial fertilizers neglect their fungal partnerships. In the long term, this ruins the quality of the soil and drives agriculture to become increasingly dependent on agrochemicals.

Aside from their diverse benefits, mushrooms are simply fascinating organisms, from their biochemistry to their reproduction to their internal structure. The largest living creature in the world in terms of surface area is also a fungus, or more precisely: a honey fungus, whose network of cells runs through nine square kilometers of forest floor in the US state of Oregon. And the largest known ascomycete was recently discovered in China - in this case in terms of the fruiting body, which can reach 50 centimeters in height. Unfortunately, the researchers did not reveal whether the giant, consequently named Dianjunus rex – D. rex for short – is edible.