The Amazing World of Fungi!!!!

I was recently introduced to this amazing world of Mushrooms. I was out there at Pea Ridge Military National Park, helping a fellow graduate student Don Nelsen in collecting his data samples. The  awesomeness of finding fungi in field a few days after having studied them in the field is mind blowing!!! After we were done collecting data, we searched for edible fungi with hard luck.

The diversity though amazing can be a nightmare for taxonomist. I hardly would pay any attention to fungi despite them being everywhere I was more or less oblivious to their presence and thought fungi is not present anywhere close to me. Now I understand much more closely the thought process when someone would say to me in India that snakes are only in forests and not where that person lives. They are as oblivious to snakes as I was to fungi.

As a thumb rule I took them all to be bad (except the one in supermarket- Mushrooms)!!!

WO!!! WO!!! WO!!! I could not have been more wrong! 
Nothing! Nothing would have been there had it not been for the fungi!

Some of them decompose:


Without these guys (Bracket Fungi) trees~ no forests~ no life!!! Some of them come in really awesome colors like Trametes Versicolor.


Polypore (Shelf fungus)



Coral Fungi, that held me captivated in awe!!


 Many of the Mushrooms are playing a very important role in Nature. Some of them are the fruiting bodies to Ectomycorrhizal fungal associations!!!!






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