2023-11-28 21:00:27
Now that there is some night frost, many types of mushrooms are having a hard time. The fact that it also rains a lot is a boost for these creatures. Fungi are neither animals nor plants. They form the separate kingdom of fungi (known from the pizza of the same name, which drastically reduces the thousands of species to the mushroom). There are many single-celled fungi, there are also two-celled and there are a lot of multi-celled fungi. For the sake of clarity, I will limit myself to the stem mushroom tribe, to which the mushroom mentioned belongs. The prototype of the mushroom is also a stem fungus: the fly agaric.
Fly agaric and mushroom have a cap and a stem, but that stem has nothing to do with their name. There are many stemless stem fungi. A stem is a tiny protrusion under the cap from which the spores hang.
Anyway, our future garden is home to all kinds of mushrooms. The common but always cheerful fly agaric is also present. Red with white dots. The fungus in the photo has relatively few white dots, because the red cap has grown to pancake size. The heavy rain can also wash away white dots – the dots are remnants of the velum, the membrane from which the young fungus has emerged. The membranes of growing fly agarics break.
The cheerful mood of a fly agaric seems to turn into euphoria after consuming the mushroom. It is not even excluded that the fly agaric consumer will encounter a real gnome, which may be bouncing back and forth. I have never tried that myself, because the dosage is difficult to regulate, and after overconsumption the cheerful mood can turn into terror. Because of their hallucinogenic effect, fly agarics should not be left in the garden; we are in violation of the opium law with our mushrooms. But hey, they disappear on their own.
Three times a week, biologist Koos Dijksterhuis writes about something that grows or blooms. Read his previous Nature Diaries here.
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