Illustrated Generic Names of Fungi (An Ode to Fungi)

ILLUSTRATED GENERIC NAMES of Fungi, a 451-page book with over 1,000 original watercolors of Fungi life stages (many viewed under the microscope), “created with passion and fervor by Miguel Ulloa,” would be at home in natural history and art museum bookstores/gift shops. “Not only do these illustrations give the book a sense of artistic value, but they also serve to distinguish it from the usual mycology texts,” write Mexico City-based authors Miguel Ulloa and Elvira Aguirre-Acosta, who hope the book “will be well received and useful to students of this fascinating group of organisms.”

Though a good reference volume for science libraries, artists will be inspired by the otherworldly beauty and structural diversity found within the biological kingdoms Fungi, Chromista and Protozoa. The latter two kingdoms having until recently been considered Fungi. The book is published by the St. Paul, Minnesota-based American Phytopathological Society (APS), a scientific society, many of whose members focus on preventing plant diseases (some caused by Fungi) of agricultural importance from negatively impacting world food supplies. The text and watercolors portray 1,592 of the 8,000+ known Fungi genera. Over a million Fungi species are known, and just mentioning them all by name would be an encyclopedic endeavor. But in the age of Internet collaborations, we may yet get there.

“The 1,592 generic names of these 3 kingdoms (Fungi, Chromista, Protozoa) are arranged alphabetically,” and “the genera included are from all over the world, describing fungal diversity from 5 continents,” write the authors. “Brief diagnostic morphological characteristics of each genus are presented. These descriptions also mention the ecology and mode of nutrition of each species of each genus as parasites on organisms ranging from protozoa to vertebrate hosts, including human mycoses caused by fungi, and symbionts with insects and many groups of arthropod hosts, as well as those fungi associated with plants (decomposers, mycorrhizae, and pathogens).”

“An important aspect of the content of this book is etymology, which is the study of the origins and meanings of words,” say the authors. “For the generic names of fungi, the etymology rests on knowledge of the origins, structures and transformations of words. The etymological meaning of any word is an essential part of linguistics —indispensable to speaking and writing with the accuracy, clarity, precision, and elegance that distinguishes academic and scientific language. The technical and scientific vocabulary are derived from ancient words, mainly Greek and Latin, from which innumerable words or neologisms have been derived.”

For example, a Fungi genus found on mossy soils, trees and old wood is named Cora, from the Greek word kόre for “pupil of the eye, young, virgin, beautiful woman, maiden, doll, for the colorful reniform, circular or semicircular thallus…of loosely interwoven hyphae that extend over substrate…to form a delicate pileus.” Additional sources (e.g. botanical dictionaries, Google) will likely be necessary to lookup mycological terms such as pileus (Latin for cap) and thallus (Latinized Greek, referring to twig-like undifferentiated vegetative tissue).

The well-known genus Aspergillus is the combination of Latin words for rough (asper) and the vessel used for sprinkling holy water (gillo), which is what the fungal conidial head resembles under the microscope (vividly shown in Ulloa’s watercolors). Penicillium refers to Latin diminutives for the brush (penicillus) or feather-duster appearance of conidiophores magnified 1,500 times under the microscope.

Etymology also provides “a powerful aid to memory to more easily recall the meaning of a word.” In past eras, write Ulloa and Aguirre-Acosta, “it was a little more common for authors to follow the norm of explaining the origin of scientific names used, including genera and species, a norm that unfortunately very few follow at present. The present work is intended to make up for these types of omissions and contribute to filling a void.”

Plant pathologists focus on Fungi and microbes because of their association with epidemics and famines like the potato blight that ravaged 19th century Ireland. Rusts, smuts, bunts, ergots and other Fungi have infested grain crops since ancient times, and still threaten world food supplies. The Fungi genus Claviceps includes ergots infecting wheat and rye. Clavus is Latin for walking stick or nail; ceps is Neo-Latin “derived from Latin caput, capitis, head, for the club shape of the ascocarps.”

Ergot-contaminated rye flour baked into bread caused epidemic ergotism, mass poisonings known in medieval times as St. Anthony’s fire. The “holy fire” could generate intense body heat and consume whole bodies, leaving behind only charred limbs. Ergot alkaloids cause widely varying symptoms: lethal gangrene (from blood vessel constriction), painful muscle convulsions, seizures, coma, dementia and visions. Sometimes “holy” and sometimes horrific, these visions ranged from shining bright colors and spatial shifts to scream-inducing hallucinations. Symptoms could last for days, weeks, months or years, when not quickly lethal. Ergotism was dubbed Kriebelkrankheit in Germany because it felt like insects crawling under the skin.

Ergot poisonings, sometimes blamed on witchcraft, were the basis of Scandinavian witch trials right up to modern times. Some “witches” admitted intentionally poisoning food with the black rye ergot in acts of vengeance against their enemies. Fungal ergots also became the basis of crude, sometimes deadly medieval medicines used by midwives and physicians for “quickening” childbirth. Modern medicine uses ergot alkaloid derivatives similar to those causing gangrene to constrict blood vessels and relieve migraine headaches.

Plenty of practical reasons for studying Fungi to make life on planet Earth more pleasant, including self-healing concrete; and a caterpillar fungus called Cordyceps used in Chinese medicine, which could be particularly useful for certain brain strokes where modern medicine lacks effective drugs and treatments. Just as botulism toxin was modified into a best-selling pharmaceutical, researchers study Fungi poisons and bioactive compounds as sources of antibiotic, antioxidative, antitumor, immunosuppressive and other products potentially useful in agriculture and medicine. Fungi biochemicals can also be fermented for industrial use.

“Few fungi have had as broad an economic impact as Aspergillus flavus,” because “the fungus will grow and produce aflatoxin in almost any stored crop seed,” wrote USDA-ARS researcher Maren Klich (2007) in the journal Molecular Plant Pathology. Aspergillus species produce aflatoxins, whose poisonous and carcinogenic presence is monitored and limited to a few parts per billion in human, animal and pet foods worldwide. Epidemics from contaminated pet food have killed animals in kennels. Consumers of contaminated corn have been killed in Africa. Honeybees infected with Aspergillus suffer from a disease called stonebrood.

In the USA, the estimated economic cost of mycotoxins is at least a billion dollars annually; and near $100 million for California almonds and walnuts. “In the field, aflatoxin is associated with drought-stressed oilseed crops including maize, peanut, cottonseed and tree nuts. Under the right conditions, the fungus will grow and produce aflatoxin in almost any stored crop seed,” said Klich. “As human pathogens, Aspergillus species have become increasingly important because immunosuppressed people are very susceptible to infection,” and “A. flavus is also an allergen causing allergic bronchopulmonary aspergillosis.”

“Interestingly, the one cooking process that does drastically reduce aflatoxin is the nixtamalization process (soaking and cooking of maize in an alkaline solution) used in making tortillas,” said Klich. “Thousands of papers have been written on Aspergillus flavus and aflatoxins, so a complete review of the literature is not possible.”

Breads, cheeses, wines, beers, yoghurt, sake, tofu, miso, tempe, soy sauces, numerous biological pest controls and medicines are among the many beneficial Fungi products mostly taken for granted without thinking of their microbial origins. Fungi can also be useful for environmental remediation. Every year 500 million to 1 trillion polyethylene plastic bags are used worldwide, and fungi can be part of recycling solutions. In India, two common fungi, Mucor circinilloides and Aspergillus flavus, were found biodegrading polyethylene shopping bags in landfills; micro-algae degraded discarded plastic bags in shallow suburban waters.

Fungi in the genera Penicillium, grown industrially to produce the antibiotic penicillin and ripen blue cheeses, also produce enzymes biodegrading plastics. One idea is industrial-scale bio-factories where multiple organisms decompose plastics into simpler compounds such as carbon dioxide, an overly maligned and demonized minor atmospheric gas essential to photosynthesis, plant growth and animal life on planet Earth.

Fungi survive in some of Earth’s harshest environments, such as South America’s Desierto de Atacama or Atacama Desert. The remarkable survival skills of Fungi even extend into outer space. Scientists periodically revisit speculations that Fungi existed on other planets, such as Mars in its early phases, or were introduced to planet Earth from regions unknown. The Illustrated Generic Names of Fungi devotes 2 pages and 6 watercolors to Aspergillus, which are among the Fungi whose life stages can survive up to 6 years of the low temperatures, vacuums and irradiation typical of outer space.

Aspergillus and Penicillium are also among the Fungi identified living on the surfaces of spacecraft and the International Space Station. “Exteriors of human and robotic space vehicles are inhabited by millions of microbial cells, many of which are carried as spores that are highly resistant to the adverse environmental effect,” wrote Novikova et al. (2015). “One of the crucial challenges of space exploration is planetary quarantine or how it can be ensured.” Though at various times scientists, including Francis Crick who shared the Nobel Prize for identifying the structure of DNA, have suggested the reverse, that microbial life traveled through outer space and colonized planet Earth.

Back on planet Earth, May and Adams (1997) estimated that Aspergillus Fungi had a $45 billion dollar positive impact on the USA economy from large-scale production of citric acid and industrial enzymes such as amylases, proteases and lipases. There are over a million filamentous Fungi species. But “no governmental agency, except the USDA, has acknowledged the relative importance of filamentous fungi to the health of the general population and their importance to our national economy, let alone to the global economy,” wrote May and Adams. “This group of organisms is likely to tell us much about ourselves and how cells have solved many fundamental problems in biology.”

Enjoy the Illustrated Generic Names of Fungi for its unique combination of beautiful watercolors combined with Etymology. It is like an illuminated manuscript, a window hinting at an underlying fungal reality dwarfing imaginations. A good springboard for delving deeper into the Fungi.

The Asian Invasion -Insects in Global Trade

NATURAL WOOD PRODUCTS are better than synthetic petrochemical plastics is a common refrain, almost a rallying cry for many who consider themselves “green,” organic, sustainable or environmentally correct. Thus, the fashionable zeal in some sectors of society to ban plastic shopping bags and allow wood-pulp paper bags. But what if being “green” and using natural materials like wood instead of synthetic petrochemical plastics led to deforestation and pestilence? That’s pretty much the world trade situation these days.

At first glance wood pallets, crates, dunnage, and packaging materials seem to be the low-cost, sustainable “green” alternative vis-a-vis more expensive, synthetic petrochemical plastics. But wood packing materials used in global trade have spread a pestilence of native Asian wood-boring beetles to new homes worldwide. The North American invasion by Asian wood-boring species of bark beetles, ambrosia beetles, and long-horned beetles were among the hot topics at the Entomological Society of America (ESA) annual meeting of Dec. 2010 in San Diego, California.

Since hitchhiking to North America from Asia in solid wood packing materials and being detected near Detroit, Michigan in 2002, the wood-boring emerald ash borer has killed an estimated 30 million ash trees in the northern United States and southern Canada. The remaining North American ash trees are threatened. Though Sara Tanis, whose Michigan State University work is on You Tube, reported at the ESA annual meeting that blue ash (Fraxinus quadrangulata) “can withstand infestation and continue to survive.”

Emerald ash borer control is now multinational, involving the U.S. states of Michigan, Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Kentucky, Maryland, Minnesota, Missouri, New York, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Tennessee, Virginia, West Virginia, and Wisconsin plus the Canadian provinces of Ontario and Quebec. The Asian wood-boring beetle invasion is so far along it might make little difference if world trade abandoned wood pallets, crates, dunnage, and packing materials.

“Control strategies are now shifting to how we can manage established populations in the longer term,” Shajahan Johny of the Canadian Forest Service Great Lakes Forestry Centre in Sault Ste. Marie, Ontario, Canada, told the ESA. “One possibility is biological control, which is recognized as the most suitable long-term pest management strategy for invasive species.” Johny is looking at fungi in the genera Isaria and Paecilomyces attacking emerald ash borer in Ontario.

In Michigan and Ontario, Canada, the early emerald ash borer hot spots, woodpeckers can peck out up to half the wood-borers; which is good for the birds, but not stopping beetle movement to new trees. “In their native habitats, Agrilus (sci name of genus of 3,000 wood-boring beetles) populations are generally suppressed by a diverse group of natural enemies and/or host tree resistance, and rarely become serious pests,” said Jian Duan, Lead Scientist of the emerald ash borer biological control team at the USDA-ARS Beneficial Insects Introduction Research Unit in Newark, Delaware. The USDA has searched Russia, Mongolia, China, and South Korea to find specialized parasitoids that can be introduced to North America to hunt wood-boring beetle eggs concealed under loose bark and larvae hidden inside trees. The idea being to restore a natural ecological balance.

Asia has not been immune to wood-boring beetle outbreaks. “The mass mortality of oak trees (Japanese oak wilt) has recently increased explosively in Japan,” Masahiko Tokoro of the Forestry and Forest Products Research Institute (FFPRI) in Ibaraki, Japan, told the ESA. The Japanese are using a Decoy Tree Method (patent pending). Trap trees are baited with an aggregation pheromone attracting the wood-boring oak ambrosia beetle (Platypus quercivorus). Ethanol (alcohol) is added to the mix, because it is emitted by unhealthy or stressed trees and attracts beetles.

“Oak trees survive when they have been inoculated with a fungicide against the pathogenic fungus (oak wilt) before being attacked,” said Tokoro. “The decoy trees are lethal to the beetles because the symbiotic fungi (i.e. the ambrosia) that the beetles feed on are killed by the fungicide.” Neighboring trees can be similarly protected.

Variations on this method called push-pull are being developed in the U.S. to protect nursery trees from exotic ambrosia beetles (Xylosandrus spp.), said Christopher Ranger of the USDA-ARS Application Technology Research Unit in Wooster, Ohio. Ethanol is injected into sweetbay magnolia trap trees to stimulate ambrosia beetle attack. Beetles are “pushed” out of trees being protected by application of a repellent compound such as verbenone (dispensers) or via commercial botanical repellents such as Armorex, Veggie Pharm, Cinnacure. Azatin or Eco-Trol.