#fungus — Public Fediverse posts

Laetiporus sulphureus

Lohmarer Wald, Lohmar, NRW, Germany, 22.8.2026

#Laetiporus #Laetiporussulphureus #Polypore #Chickenofthewoods #FungiFriends #FungiFriday #Nature #Pilz #Mushroom #Fungus

I have no idea what these mushrooms are, but they are cute. They're about half an inch across. Pierce Road, Harvard Forest.

#fungus #forest #fungi #mushrooms #saprophytes #ecology #biology #biodiversity #nature #naturephotography #forests

Reading in journal club:

Exploring the concept of longevity in fungi

https://linkinghub.elsevier.com/retrieve/pii/S0966842X26001848

#fungi #fungus #mycology

“Nature alone is antique; and the oldest art, a mushroom”*…

Every August, Telluride hosts the Telluride Mushroom Festival—an event that brings fungal science, conservation, foraging, cultivation, psychedelic research, art, and community together in the Colorado mountains. Tamara MC reports…

… Nestled in the Colorado mountains, Telluride has long been a town of festivals: Bluegrass, Film, Mountainfilm, and Jazz. But for more than four decades, the Telluride Mushroom Festival has carved out its own niche as the largest gathering of its kind in North America.

The festival began as the Aspen Mushroom Conference before moving to Telluride in 1981. Its early circle included Dr. Emanuel “Manny” Salzman, a Denver radiologist and one of its founders, and his wife, Joanne Salzman, along with Gary Lincoff, author of The Audubon Society Field Guide to North American Mushrooms; Dr. Andrew Weil, the integrative medicine pioneer; Paul Stamets, the mycologist and entrepreneur who founded Fungi Perfecti; and Goodtimes himself. Furci credits Goodtimes with helping bring the gathering from Aspen to Telluride. Today, the festival operates as a program of the Telluride Institute.

What began as a relatively intimate gathering focused on psychedelics and fungal science has grown considerably. More than 700 people attended in 2019; by 2025, [Guiliana] Furci [here] says, attendance had reached about 1,500. The growth accelerated in the pandemic years, when mushroom foraging and other outdoor pursuits drew new interest, part of what Furci calls “the mushroom hype.” Roughly 70 percent of recent attendees, she says, were experiencing the festival for the first time. Yet despite the influx of newcomers, the gathering retains what Furci describes as a “tribe or family feeling,” with regulars returning year after year and considering one another family…

…

… Without fungi, everyday life would look radically different: no beer, wine, chocolate, coffee, or bread. No penicillin. Fungi decompose organic matter and return nutrients to ecosystems, while fungal partnerships with plants helped make life on land possible and remain essential to much of terrestrial plant life.

“They are a life form that is different than plants and animals,” Furci explains. “They are neither plant nor animal nor bacteria. They can live on land, in the air, in water, both oceans and fresh waters.”

The fungal kingdom is astonishingly diverse, encompassing yeasts, molds, and mushroom-forming fungi, including everything from morels and chanterelles to conks and puffballs. Fungi also form the structural basis of lichens. When Furci mentions that morels and chanterelles are both fungi, she quickly puts the distance between them in perspective: “They are as closely related as a whale and a flea.”

Both whales and fleas belong to the animal kingdom, she notes, yet occupy profoundly different branches of it. The same is true within the fungal kingdom. “There are more ways to be a fungus than there are ways to be an animal,” Furci says.

Some of those differences challenge familiar ideas about reproduction. Schizophyllum commune, a widespread wood-decaying fungus, has more than 23,000 mating types—a genetic system far removed from a simple male-female binary.

Are fungi gendered? “No,” Furci says flatly. But she cannot bring herself to call them “it,” either. “They’re definitely not things, so I can’t talk about them as things. And they definitely don’t have a he vibe.”

For Furci, the problem is partly one of language. Calling a living organism “it” can reduce it to an object, while “he” or “she” imposes a gender fungi do not have. That attention to words extends well beyond pronouns.

Furci is one of the driving forces behind the “3F proposal”: Fauna, Flora, and Funga. For generations, “flora and fauna” has served as shorthand for the living world while leaving fungi linguistically—and often institutionally—out of the picture. In 2018, Furci and mycologists Francisco Kuhar, Elisandro Ricardo Drechsler-Santos, and Donald Pfister published a paper formally delimiting “funga” as the fungal equivalent of fauna and flora: the diversity of fungi within a particular place or region.

The idea has traveled far beyond the original paper. The Fauna Flora Funga Initiative now counts more than 2,500 signatories across 77 countries and documents adoption or use of mycologically inclusive language by conservation groups, universities, museums, and government agencies around the world. In 2021, the IUCN Species Survival Commission and Re:wild formally embraced the three-F framework, calling for fungi to be recognized alongside fauna and flora in conservation language…

Much more: “The Telluride Mushroom Festival: Where Fungal Love Runs Wild,” from @tamaramc.bsky.social

Still, we’d do well to remember (Sir) Terry Pratchett‘s wise reminder: “All Fungi are edible. Some fungi are only edible once.”

* Thomas Carlyle

###

As we celebrate shrooms, we might recall that it was on this date in 1965, on their second day off during their tour of North America, that The Beatles rented a house owned by Zsa Zsa Gabor in Beverly Hills. There, they were visited by Roger McGuinn and David Crosby of the Byrds as well as English actress Eleanor Bron, who’d appeared in their film, Help. While young girls stood outside the gates, John Lennon and George Harrison had their second experience with LSD, and Ringo his first. (Paul did not partake.) It was here that McGuinn introduced Harrison to Indian music, particularly that of Ravi Shankar.

Actor Peter Fonda was also present, and helped comfort Harrison as he grew unsettled after taking LSD and thought he was dying. According to Fonda, Lennon overheard him saying to George, “I know what it’s like to be dead,” recalling a childhood incident in which his heart stopped beating several times due to blood loss after accidentally shooting himself in the stomach. Lennon then told Fonda “You’re making me feel like I’ve never been born,” words that were later included in the Revolver track “She Said She Said.”

I've been posting my #mycology and #fungus photos on a #pexelfed server and then reposting them here. I'm not sure that's a good idea; maybe I should just post them under my plain old #mastodon account.

I don't know what to do to keep things easy and clutter-free.

Saw some great fungus at the park today!

Damn it I forgot the good hashtags again.

#AgingPunks #Fungus

#FungiFriday

Coral fungus 😃
Nice name 😉

#Coral #Fungus #Forest #Hiking #Walking #Fungi #FungiFriends #Photography

#fungi #fungus #mushrooms #mushroom #champignon #champignons un bolet radicant probablement

A cute (and large) mushroom in my neighborhood 🍄
#mushtodon #Indiana #wildlife #fungus #mushroom

Fungal manifestations recently observed along the Pierce Road, Harvard Forest.

#fungus #forest #fungi #mushrooms #saprophytes #ecology #biology #biodiversity #nature #naturephotography #forests

#MushroomMonday

So many of these in the woods. They look poisonous… but pretty 🤔🍄

#Mushroom #Fungi #Fungus #FungiFriends #Forest #Hiking #Walking #Photography

Myconid

#sketch-a-day #art #graphite #myconid #DnD #Dungeons&Dragons #fungus #mushroom #fantasy

Turkey Tail #fungus, Pierce Road, Harvard #Forest.

#fungi #mushrooms #saprophytes #ecology #biology #biodiversity #nature #naturephotography #fungus #forests

LOOK AT ALL OF THESE AMAZING FUNGI I SAW YESTERDAY!!!!

#AgingPunks #Fungus

Hydnellum Peckii "bleeding tooth" mushroom. Garden of the Goddesses trail, Colorado, USA.

#Fungus #Hiking #Photo

This is a #backyardnature #mycology help request...can anyone identify this #fungus? They're appearing in my front and back yards, but only in locations where trees (redbud and Bradford pear) have been removed; this one is roughly 8" in diameter, with a 1.5" woody stem.

Basically - what is this, is it toxic to animals, and is there a suitable pet-safe fungicide?

Ganoderma resinaceum on Salix sp.

Duisburg-Homberg, NRW, Germany, 8.8.2026

#Ganoderma #Ganodermaresinaceum #Pilz #Fungus #Basidiomycete #FungiFriends #Nature

Bird's Nest #Fungi (family Nidulariaceae) growing in our garden bark mulch. The various species produce fruiting bodies that look exactly like tiny bird's nests. These here are about 1/4 inch across. The "eggs" are called peridioles (not profiteroles; that's a French pastry) and contain spores. When a raindrop hits the nest the peridioles spring away and disperse the spores.

#mushrooms #saprophytes #ecology #biology #biodiversity #nature #naturephotography #fungus

Hmm, this maple got some fungal disease.

#Tree #Maple #Disease #Fungus #Forestry

Threads of underground #fungus networks are long enough to reach beyond the Solar System
These fungal communities form intimate relationships with the roots of plants, which they provide with nutrients like phosphorus and nitrogen in exchange for carbon, 1 billion tons of which the networks sequester underground annually, previous research has found. If the fungal network wasn’t storing it, that carbon would be warming the atmosphere.
https://arstechnica.com/science/2026/06/threads-of-underground-fungal-networks-are-long-enough-to-reach-beyond-the-solar-system/

... i was hoping to get pictures of hikers but it seemed everyone had an ill-behaved dog Sunday, but I got this mushroom instead...

#photo #photography #fungus #mushroom #nature #forest #monkeyrun

Threads of underground #fungus networks are long enough to reach beyond the Solar System
These fungal communities form intimate relationships with the roots of plants, which they provide with nutrients like phosphorus and nitrogen in exchange for carbon, 1 billion tons of which the networks sequester underground annually, previous research has found. If the fungal network wasn’t storing it, that carbon would be warming the atmosphere.
https://arstechnica.com/science/2026/06/threads-of-underground-fungal-networks-are-long-enough-to-reach-beyond-the-solar-system/

A very orange #fungus, Pierce Road, Harvard #Forest.

#nature #naturephotography #mushrooms #fungi #biology #biodiversity #ecology #saprophytes #forests

How to Treat Fungus on Plants Naturally: Garden Up’s Ekta Shares Easy Remedies https://www.allforgardening.com/1919528/how-to-treat-fungus-on-plants-naturally-garden-ups-ekta-shares-easy-remedies/ #BlackSpotsOnRoseLeaves #CommonGardenFungi #FungalDiseasesInPlants #fungus #garden #gardener #gardening #GardeningTipsIndia #HealthyGardenPlants #Home&Garden #HowToPreventPlantFungus #MouldOnPlantSoil #OrganicGardening #OrganicGardeningMonsoon #PlantDiseasePrevention #PlantFungus #WhiteFungus #WhitePowderOnLeaves

Is this #fungus a Dryad's Saddle?

I can't even say what kind of tree it's on, I suck at trees too.