Mycophilia - Eugenia Bone

I am delighted with this book.  I have to admit I got it, started to read and thought - this is more than I want to know about fungus.  But luckily I picked it up again and I found it really was not more than I wanted to know.

It is a book of stories and the stories are told well and are both interesting and factual.  It is like an oral tradition of fungus - a look at lessons and ideas through well told stories.

I loved the telling.  Sometimes I found sections that were of less interest and skimmed them a little quicker, but still found great gems within them.

It made me wonder about wonder how her husband really responded to this obsession with fungus, but otherwise it was a romp.

We traveled places that were fun, met people who were interested and participated in a world I am not interested in being part of, but a world I am interested in.

The kooks were mixed with the scientists, the places and the mushrooms were fascinating and it was a book that I found pleasing in all ways.

Bibliophilia meets mycophilia.

Sample Quotes that I enjoyed:
"There are two types of cheeses that benefit from saprophytic mold. Blue cheeses like Gorgonzola and Roquefort utilize Penicillium roqueforti. The curd is inoculated with the mold, which then grows throughout the cheese, adding flavor and fragrance. Camembert and brie-type cheeses are ripened with P. camemberti. The mold creates teh thick white rind and digests the milk proteins - that's what creates eh silky mouthfeel."

"Sometimes, when two different mycelia [the thread like material that is the real fungus] from the same species encounter each other, they don't fuse but rather become hostile and compete for resources. Individual fungi can communicate with each other via pheromones, the secreted chemicals that trigger social reactions in animals, plants, and fungi. If they recognize a competitor, they can inject toxic chemicals into the substrate in order to repulse competitive species. They can even invade a competing fungus and such dry its hyphae of nutrients."

"A Japanese study looking to reproduce a phenomenon observed in the field, that shiitake mushrooms fruited prolifically after the ground had been hit by lightning, has found that exposing the substrate of various species of fungi to an electrical charge of 50,000 - 100,000 volts for one 0-millionth of a second will double the volume of fruiting. This may be an evolutionary adaptation. Because lightning poses a survival hazard and may deliver a dead tree for dinner, it leads to accelerated fruiting."

"Fungi are organisms that comprise their own kingdom of life, equal in complexity to animals and plants. There are an estimated 1.5 million species, second only to insects in number and diversity, and only 5 percent of them have been identified. Fungi outnumber plants by a ratio of 6 - 1 and make up 25 percent of Earth's biomass. The biggest single living organism on Earth is a fungus. it is 2,200 acres in size weighs 6,286 tons and lives in the Malheur National Forest in the Blue Mountains of Eastern Oregon. Some fungi are so tiny they live between the cells of other organisms. The first terrestrial creatures may have been fungi, and they are more closely related to us, evolutionarily speaking, than they are to plants."