Nature in the City:
by Sarah Walker, from the June 2005 Newsletter
Shaggy Manes, aka “Lawyers’ Wigs,” appear each spring around Moscow. Their caps start out tall and narrow, then quickly become shorter and wider with black gooey edges.
Mushrooms pop up fast around town with warm weather and spring rains. We’ll see clusters of small golden caps at the base of trees, toadstools in lawns, and shaggy manes along the railroad tracks—and then they’re gone. Mushrooms have one Big Job in life: to spread millions of tiny light spores. Puffballs explode out brown dust, toadstools drop them from gills. Shaggy manes, though, are too narrow to drop their spores, so they have adopted a very weird practice. First, a word about fungi (FUN-jye).
Many fungi are hard to see: bread mold, yeast, penicillin. The familiar mushroom is easy to see, but it is actually only a small part of a much larger being that is mostly underground: The Fungus.
A fungus is made of tiny strands called hyphae. They’re practically invisible and thread-like, and there can be hundreds of feet of fungal hyphae in a teaspoon of soil. Mushrooms start out as a tiny bump on a strand of hyphae. The bump absorbs water, enlarging until its outer skin ruptures and it pushes up above ground as a recognizable mushroom. Even if the soil surface is hard packed, a soft fleshy mushroom can push through. Shaggy manes can break up asphalt!
The group of hyphae strands that make up a fungus is called the mycelium (my-SEEL-ee-um). Mycelia that you can see are the network of white threads under bark or in an old pile of leaves. An underground mycelium can be huge and live for years, even centuries, sending us mushrooms when conditions are right. The mycelium or underground body of a fungus has a great eating style: it lives within its food supply.
Fungi depend on other life for nourishment. They can’t make their own, like plants that make food from sunlight. Instead, fungi absorb nutrients from dead organic matter. They are the great decomposers. Without fungi (and bacteria, insects and nematodes), Earth would be layers deep in dead plants and animals. Imagine a world without fungi, urges Scottish mycologist (fungi expert) Roy Watling: “The whole world would soon resemble a vast city refuse tip, and we would be literally swamped within a very short space of time.”
Fungal dining takes place underground, by four different methods. The typical mycelium lives and grows because its hyphae absorb nutrients from dead stuff. Other fungal hyphae engage in mutually beneficial partnerships with living plants. The boletus mushroom, the delicious porcini of Italian cuisine, is the aboveground body of a fungus that lives under pine trees. The other two ways fungi subsist are: 1) partnering with algae to go through life as a lichen, or 2) parasitizing something else.
I think mushrooms are delicious visitors from an underground world where fungi carry out invisible activities—sometimes in complicated, interdependent relationships—without our being aware of it. It’s humbling to realize that when we take spring walks to welcome back lovely flowers and melodious songbirds, there’s much more “going on” underground that may not be as colorful or tuneful but that supports our world, occasionally sending up a reminder.
Back to shaggy manes. Their caps are too long and narrow, and the gills inside too tightly packed together, for them to carry out the Big Job of dispersing spores. So, they digest themselves (“deliquescence”). Their caps consume themselves from the bottom up, letting out spores and liquefying. The cap turns to a blob of black ink atop the hollow stem. People used to use the black goo as ink. There’s no end to the stories around us!
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