Mushrooms

One More for the Morel

Yeah, I’ve been talking a lot about truffles lately, but it’s the season. I have this gut feeling, though, that morel fans are getting a bit jealous. So I’ve devoted my entries today to the mighty morel.

This first little note has to do with Morel Mushroom Evolution and Biology. The author’s research and photographs on this site show extreme biology and transitional evolution in the morel mushroom including phenotypic variation and a reversion anomaly (!). The morel is in the process of evolving from a single celled organism (a yeast) into a multicelled organism. This hasn’t happened in hundreds of millions of years, so the author states (no name on the site) and now the process is observable having begun about 50,000 years ago for the morel and continuing. This site is intense, as it includes abstracts, more photos of anomalies (like the one shown here), information about morel biology, and a glossary. Like I said - intense.

NOTE: A well-educated reader who focuses on mycology sent a great response to this post. This person stated that:

Many, many fungi have the ability to grow as either a yeast or a mycelium (jelly fungi, smuts, many human pathogens, even some zygomycetes) and this is well understood. Nobody would imply that they all evolved recently from yeasts. All the evidence points to a filamentous form as ancestral for all fungi; many different fungi have evolved the ability to grow as yeasts. Sectoring in lab colonies has been known for a long time, and so have the genetic processes underlying it. Lots of fungi start off as white mycelia and change as they get older, and the sclerotia that morels develop aren’t particularly weird. Variation among fruiting bodies isn’t so special! Morels are well documented to belong to a handful of different biological species–seven or more in N. America.

In addition, this person described the Morel Evolution site as “pseudoscience.” Any other comments?

© 2006 FUNGIFEST.