How a carnivorous mushroom poisons its prey

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-a-carnivorous-mushroom-poisons-its-prey/

by sohkamyung • 5 years ago

153 54 5 years ago

noobly2• 5 years ago

As a cultivator, I wish they'd eat the fungus gnats too!.. And I wonder how much supplementing substrate with nematodes would increase protein content, or how'd I'd test this. The ratio of protein to carbs is about 1:2 in these, getting closer to 1:1 would be awesome for cost effective protein, especially as a non-meat item.

Apparently, nematodes can get a whole meter long. It'd be interesting to drop one of such size into a liquid culture or other colonized medium and see what happens, lol.

steve_adams_862• 5 years ago

What kind of cultivation do you do?

I wondered about protein content as well. It would be great to be able to produce a mushroom with respectable protein content. It seems like a stretch, though.

noobly2• 5 years ago

Primarily indoor cultivation of oysters (most cost effective), but also lion's mane and shiitake in lower quantities along with a lot of screwing around with other species for fun. I began construction of my small scale farm just before the pandemic started looking serious (~December 2019), and my business plan was reliant on getting higher-end restaurants as customers (which have fared poorly during this). So it's been somewhat on pause, but I'm hoping things clear up soon, as I've been gathering some nice equipment for good prices over the last year (in large part due to covid, ironically).

It would be great to be able to do assays for protein content at home or for nearly free at a lab to work towards better genetics. An ~86g or "one cup" serving of raw oysters supposedly has around ~3g, and it's worth noting that a raw cup cooks down to maybe a quarter cup or less, which is probably comparatively substantial for those that don't consume meat. The Vitamin D content is also noteworthy, as apparently they're the only considerable source of this in the produce aisle (which I didn't fully appreciate until binge researching last night).

robert_foss• 5 years ago

The larvae can be killed using Bacillus thuringiensis israelensis powder mixed into water.

steve_adams_862• 5 years ago

It’s remarkable just how active fungi are in their respective biomes. They seem like passive growths which inhabit decaying materials from afar, but up close, you discover that they’re entwined in virtually all life cycles, quite actively, and they’re absolutely essential to day to day life as we know it.

One of the best things I ever did was go to a seminar on mushroom picking 20 years ago. It opened up my eyes to a whole new world. After reading this I have a sense of amazement at what fungi are capable of, but I’m not surprised at all. The more you dig into it, the more you discover how crazy that world is. Fungus is really cool.

pfundstein• 5 years ago

Indeed, it's no wonder fungi has a whole kingdom of life to itself.

A fun fact I like to repeat is that fungi are more closely related to us than to plants -- their evolution diverged from animals 9 million years after plants, some 1.5 billion years ago.

ljf• 5 years ago

I love the specificity of the 9 million figure, 1.5 billion years ago.

You set me off on some reading to find out more as it seems so interesting, but I can't find a detailed figure, so I like exactness your estimate provides.

Amazing to consider what the common ancestor was like and also what our animal ancestors were like at that time.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolution_of_fungi

enriquto• 5 years ago

9 million years after plants, some 1.5 billion years ago.

This sentence has an unbelievably high temporal resolution. Can you provide a source of that?

mmmrtl• 5 years ago

That's an unreasonable level of precision to infer from the data available now, let alone what was possible in 1998 when that estimate was made. In fact, there's ongoing debate as to whether fungi split first from all other eukaryotes, or opisthokonts (incl. fungi and animals) split from all other eukaryotes (incl. plants)

mbesto• 5 years ago

Highly recommend watching Fantastic Fungi for anyone else interested in this space:

https://fantasticfungi.com/

y0ink• 5 years ago

Merlin Sheldrake has written an excellent book on this subject, 'Entangled Life: How Fungi Make Our Worlds, Change Our Minds & Shape Our Futures'.

https://www.amazon.com/Entangled-Life-Worlds-Change-Futures/...

Here he cooks and eats some Pleurotus that he grew using a copy of his book:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JJfDaIVl-tE

Interesting guy, fascinating subject.

hinkley• 5 years ago

The permaculture movement is, in fits and starts, coming around to the idea that the fungi are the real farmers, and we should just stop trying to prevent them from doing their jobs.

dschuetz• 5 years ago

Reading this feels like reading a news story from a parallel universe. With fungi it always kinda is.

jansan• 5 years ago

My guess is that more than half of all readers misread "carnivorous" as "coronavirus" at the first glance.

011000112• 5 years ago

Weird, I just ate the first harvest off my blue oyster mushroom kit. I've never been a huge mushroom fan but they were delicious. Tear them up, fry them until they're crisp in olive oil, and top with garlic sauce(*).

(*) - My poor attempt at recreating Lebanese 'toum' ended up making an insanely delicious garlic sauce that keeps for weeks in a plastic squeeze bottle in the refrigerator. 2 heads of garlic, 1 tsp salt, 1 Tbsp of lemon juice, and enough olive oil to make it squeezable and palatable. Blend in a blender and squeeze on everything you eat. The garlic has to be insanely fresh though. Garlic that is good enough to cook with may be too bitter to use and result in a sauce that sucks. You can even cut the core out of the cloves to tame the bitterness more but I find that is not necessary if you have fresh garlic. Definitely avoid green garlic or any that has started sprouting.

jcims3• 5 years ago

I live out in the woods and had gone morel hunting a few times without success. I had heard so many stories about how good they were and i was getting frustrated b/c it seemed like the perfect setting for them.

One day I was mowing my back yard and was stopped in my tracks by this beautiful morel standing proud right in the middle of my yard like it was placed there by God himself lol.

They are incredibly tasty.

Also highly recommend folks try those kits you’re talking about, they are really fun.

saiya-jin2• 5 years ago

Morels here in Europe are priced insanely high, only a bit below black truffles. For a good reason I must say, if well prepared they taste properly awesome.

hvidgaard• 5 years ago

Mushrooms in general is a very fleeting thing. For instance, when I take soil from the garden inside and use for planting it's not uncommon for a tiny mushroom to suddenly sprout, bloom, and wilt in less than a day.

jiggawatts• 5 years ago

Now I need to know what Morel mushrooms taste like...

cmrdporcupine• 5 years ago

Yes quite frustrating I had morels pop up on my property once -- which I also noticed while mowing -- and then they never returned to the same spot. So delicious.

I remember as a kid finding a large puffball mushroom in the woods near my house, and brought it home and my dad made a delicious stew with it. Every year I went back to the same area and never found one again.

stjohnswarts• 5 years ago

I don't trust my ability to discern poisonous from benign varieties so I just leave the all where they're at and let them finish out their days in peace.

011000112• 5 years ago

Years ago, before I ever developed a taste for mushrooms, I cut down a eucalyptus in my yard. Next year I had a couple of Morels pop up through the gravel near the stump. Never saw them again, and I lived there another decade or so.

saiya-jin2• 5 years ago

One advice on preparation - olive oil is far from best to use for frying. Its great for cold cuisine and OK for very quick heat use, but things like mushrooms that take time definitely no.

Grapeseed, rapeseed, sunflower oils handle prolonged high heat much better.

DiabloD3• 5 years ago

All three of those are unsuitable due to Omega 6 content. Coconut oil and Olive oil are perfectly fine for frying mushrooms slowly in a pan at medium or low heat.

You're worried about hitting the smoke point, which would impart foul taste to the food, but its unlikely to happen with any competent cook.

KozmoNau72• 5 years ago

That's a very common misconception and a stubborn myth: https://youtu.be/l_aFHrzSBrM

I fry mushrooms (and many other things) in olive oil all the time. It works great, tastes great and as long as you use extra virgin oil, doesn't create any more harmful substances than using rapeseed or sunflower seed oil, probably a lot fewer actually.

You can even deep fry in it, which some celebrated chefs do.

bananasbandanas• 5 years ago

I'm unsure if it even applies in your case, but there is the risk of inadvertently creating botulism when storing garling in oil [1]. Since you are refigerating and adding acid, I'd expect it's probably not an issue.

[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1404905/

nkozyra5• 5 years ago

This is more about the preservation method than the contents. The botulism bacteria clostridium botulinumis is anaerobic, so it spreads most frequently in very low oxygen environments, like canning.

A squeeze bottle is unlikely to provide that environment in the medium term. It will likely have too much oxygen exposure.

Tetanus is another example of anaerobic bacteria that's unlikely to occur unless you encounter a low oxygen environment (like a rusty nail underground). A cut or puncture from something exposed to open air is very unlikely to give you tetanus.

devb• 5 years ago

Funny, I just harvested my first bloom of blue oyster mushrooms last night too. I couldn't believe how good they were.

Sniffnoy• 5 years ago

The delicious, inescapable inference is that they’re the only vegan food that can itself eat meat.

OK, this bothers me. Carnivorous plants are well-known. Surely it must be possible to eat at least one of them?

Edit: The article then even says later that other fungi do this too! Oy.

jtms• 5 years ago

The author’s entire writing style bothers me.

nerdponx• 5 years ago

But you can't eat pitcher plants, can you?

LurkerAtTheGate• 5 years ago

Carnivorous plants are only edible in the most technical sense. They grow in low nutrient environments and slowly digest prey - meaning you'd be eating something that is mostly small leaves coated in rotting insect goo.

wnscooke• 5 years ago

You know why I like mushrooms? Cause I’m a fun guy!

sideshowb• 5 years ago

This appeals to my silly um sense of humour

How a carnivorous mushroom poisons its prey

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