The Southern Hemisphere’s collection of alternate-universe creatures is not limited to emus, echidnas, and monkey-puzzle trees. There are also crazy down-under fungi. And one of them was first encountered and collected for science by none other than the Big Man himself: Charles Darwin. Darwin was on his course-of-western-history-altering Beagle cruise when he was probably captivated [...]

Does these look like lichens to you? According to Gregory Retallack, they should. Yesterday, Nature published an article by Retallack that makes a radical claim: the Ediacaran Biota (635-542 mya) of bizarre creatures that preceded the Cambrian Explosion were not pneumatic semi-mobile marine animals, but instead sessile land-dwelling lichens and protists living high and very [...]

Perhaps like Moselio Schaechter and me, you were surprised to hear the identity of the fungal pathogen in the New England Compounding Pharmacy fungal meningitis outbreak: Exserohilum rostratum. Unlike outbreaks caused by names we see regularly — influenza, norovirus, E. coli, Salmonella, Listeria, etc. — Exserohilum is not a name that is likely to have [...]

Amanita mushrooms — like all creatures — rot, but most of them can’t rot other things. The fact that they don’t rot other things is not news to biologists, who have long known that many, if not most, fungi have become professional partners with trees, plants, or algae. The fact that they can’t rot other [...]

It’s a bit embarrassing to admit you were recently on your hands and knees excitedly filming a cow pie. But I was. And the reason was this: Here’s another one found nearby: There were five or six of these polka-dotted mounds in close proximity. Gorgeous orange cup fungi on a cow pie! I’d never heard [...]

Last fall the small Alaskan coastal village of Kivalina was inundated by a mysterious orange “goo”(click for photo). Locals and others suspected a toxic algal bloom (see here for image), or perhaps some sort of chemical release, or millions of microscopic “crustacean eggs”. Yet just a month later the mystery substance was identified as none [...]

Just days after Sci Am published my story on the “bleeding” bacterium Serratia marcescens, a friend sent me this video, in which the marketing department behind the film “Contagion” up north apparently decided to go super-geek and cook up something delightful. Science as art, my friends. Way, way cool, boys. In addition to Serratia, which [...]

Author’s note: This is the last of a series of four posts in Fungi Month here at TAA. Enjoy! Last month a mysterious orange film (“goo” in the media vernacular) washed up on the shores of a northwest Alaskan village called Kivalina. Experts suspected crustacean eggs; locals were unnerved. In retrospect, reports that the substance [...]

There is something curious about the sedimentary rocks laid down around the world 250 million years ago, at the height of Earth’s greatest extinction: they are often riddled with filaments, and no one is sure what they are. Nothing like them has been found in rocks before or since. What seems apparent, and what everyone [...]

Not long ago I was perusing some old press releases when I stumbled onto an interesting tidbit buried in one from the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew (I know I probably said that like a dumb American since I don’t know what people actually call it in the UK, but let’s face it: I am [...]

In order to survive in complex and interesting environments in the wild, bacteria have a whole arsenal of chemical products that they make within the cell. These chemicals are used for signalling, defence and communication between bacterial cells. One particular group of these chemicals is called the polyketide group, which I have a particular fondness [...]

Unlike animals, plants do not have a circulating blood system containing cell capable of fighting off bacterial invasion. Instead, they have to rely on various other techniques, which I covered in detail way back on my old Field of Science blog. One method they use is to kill off cells that are close to a bacterial or [...]

I’ve been getting quite into the human microbiome lately, covering both vaginal bacteria and digestive tract bacteria. One thing I thought it might be interesting to highlight is that we talk about the human “microbiome” rather than the human “bacteriome” because it contains a range of microbial species including bacteria, fungi and even possibly blastocysts. [...]

I’m doing a journal club presentation tomorrow, where I take a paper apart in front of my lab through the medium of powerpoint. It’s a nice short little paper but it does bring up some interesting points and also works as a prime example of a very common way that scientists go about exploring how [...]

The U.S. has spent several billion dollars looking for life on other planets. Shouldn’t we spend at least that much finding and identifying life on Earth? That is the argument behind a taxonomy analysis by a trio of scientists in Science, published on January 25. They argue just $500 million to $1 billion a year [...]

A dishwasher makes a nice addition to any home. But the appliances also make a nice home for a number of fungi, some of which are pathogenic, according to a new study. A group of researchers from institutions in Slovenia, the Netherlands and China took samples from the rubber seals inside 189 dishwashers from 18 [...]

These are not the best of times for amphibians. All around the world, populations of frogs, salamanders and newts are declining. At least 489 species (7.8% of all known amphibians) are nearing extinction. More than a hundred of these endangered species have not been seen in recent years, and have likely gone extinct already. Who [...]