{"id":3935,"date":"2018-08-14T05:12:35","date_gmt":"2018-08-14T09:12:35","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/orionscoldfire.com\/?p=3935"},"modified":"2022-09-26T10:04:03","modified_gmt":"2022-09-26T14:04:03","slug":"fungus-among-us","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/orionscoldfire.com\/index.php\/2018\/08\/14\/fungus-among-us\/","title":{"rendered":"Fungus Among Us"},"content":{"rendered":"

Camera Girl is a great naturalist.\u00a0 She likes being called Hawkeye because of her sharp and discerning vision.\u00a0 She uses this keen sense mostly to see what it says on the speedometer in order to tell me I\u2019m driving too fast.\u00a0 But she also is adept at spotting interesting flora and fauna in the great wide world of our back yard.\u00a0 She spots monarch butterfly caterpillars and hungry foxes and great blue herons and all kinds of birds around her feeders.\u00a0 She discovers muskrats and minks and turkeys and turkey vultures, hawks and deer and coyotes and all kinds of flowers wild and garden.\u00a0 Last year at about this time she spotted some unusual white plants sprouting underneath a conifer on the edge of a heavily wooded area of the property.\u00a0 I thanked her for her find and proceeded to acquire a nice collection of mosquito bites crawling around on my belly trying to get a shot.\u00a0 Here is the plant.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

I thought it a very interesting plant and assumed it was white only because it was in a darkly shaded area.\u00a0 I thought no more about it until this year.\u00a0 In the last few weeks we have had some extremely hot and also some extremely rainy weather.\u00a0 So even though it is August my \u201clawn\u201d is a verdant carpet of crab grass.\u00a0 And at the same time a great variety of different species of mushrooms have appeared in the yard, especially close to some wooded areas of the property.\u00a0 Camera Girl knows I like to use mushrooms as subjects for close-up and macro photography and so she provides me with info on the best new mushroom sightings.\u00a0 This year was no exception so I have managed to photograph a goodly number of interesting fungi.\u00a0 But what was different was her discovery of additional specimens of the sprouting white plants.\u00a0 I was able to use the superb magnified focus of my new Sony A7 III to very good advantage on these plants.<\/p>\n

\"\"
Monotropa uniflora, Indian pipe, ghost plant, corpse plant, Sony A7 III with Minolta 200mm f\\4 Macro lens<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
\"\"
Monotropa uniflora, Indian pipe, ghost plant, corpse plant, Sony A7 III with Minolta 200mm f\\4 Macro lens<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
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Monotropa uniflora, Indian pipe, ghost plant, corpse plant, Sony A7 III with Minolta 200mm f\\4 Macro lens<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

And because the places I found the plants was not as dark as last year\u2019s location I decided that their coloration was not a fluke of location.\u00a0 They really were white.\u00a0 Using all the resources of the interwebs I was able to identify these unusual plants.\u00a0 It is known systematically as Monotropa uniflora<\/a> but commonly it is called Indian pipe, ghost plant and corpse plant.\u00a0 It has no chlorophyll to allow it to produce sugar from carbon dioxide and water.\u00a0 Instead it steals its food from underground fungi of the family Russulaceae<\/a>.<\/p>\n

\"\"
Sony A7 III with Minolta 200mm f4 Macro lens<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
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mushroom, Sony A7 III with Minolta 200mm f\\4 Macro lens<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

 <\/p>\n

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mushroom, Sony A7 III with Minolta 200mm f\\4 Macro lens<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"\"
mushroom, Sony A7 III with Minolta 200mm f\\4 Macro lens<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
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mushroom, Sony A7 III with Minolta 200mm f\\4 Macro lens<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

This condition of lacking chlorophyll and living parasitically off fungi makes the Indian pipe what is known in botany as an obligate myco-heterotroph<\/a>.\u00a0 And it gets even more complicated than that.\u00a0 The fungus that Indian pipe is mooching off is simultaneously in a symbiotic existence with underground tree roots of beech and other woodland trees.\u00a0 The tree roots allow the fungus access to sugar and the fungus breaks down decaying material in the soil so that the trees can absorb the nutrients it could not obtain on its own.\u00a0 In fact, the tree roots and the fungi form an interface called a mycorrhizal network<\/a> in which the cells of the roots and the fungus interpenetrate each other to allow nutrient materials to flow in both directions to the mutual benefit of both.\u00a0 So it was no coincidence that Camera Girl discovered the Indian pipe while scouting out new mushrooms.\u00a0 The torrential rain and torrid heat of the last few weeks is what triggered the sprouting mushrooms and the Indian pipe bloom. \u00a0And now I see the even closer relation between these two life forms.\u00a0 The mushroom is the victim of the Indian pipe thief.<\/p>\n

So, this is the kind of weird stuff that I am interested in.\u00a0 This doesn\u2019t really belong solely in photography or current events and definitely not in science fiction or reviews.\u00a0 That is why photog\u2019s Corner was made, for this kind of weird stuff.\u00a0 Caveat lector, let the reader beware.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Camera Girl is a great naturalist.\u00a0 She likes being called Hawkeye because of her sharp and discerning vision.\u00a0 She uses this keen sense mostly to<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_mi_skip_tracking":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_active":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_note":"","_exactmetrics_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1263,3],"tags":[1280,1281,300,1206,1275,296,1106,1279,1276,1200,1277,1267,461,1278],"class_list":["post-3935","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-stuff-that-personally-interests-me-miscellaneous","category-photography","tag-a7-iii","tag-a7s","tag-camera-girl","tag-flowers","tag-indian-pipe","tag-macro-photography","tag-minolta-200mm-f4-macro-lens","tag-monotropa","tag-monotropa-uniflora","tag-mushrooms","tag-obligate-myco-heterotrophy","tag-photogs-corner","tag-photography","tag-russulaceae"],"yoast_head":"\nFungus Among Us - 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