Shots from the archive: puffball lad
We’ve got some impressive collections of old photographs here at Cornell. At the Cornell Plant Pathology Herbarium, we have 60,000 or so. Our images are of fungi, plant disease, agricultural methods, plus mycologists and plant pathologists. You can browse a subset of our images online. Some would make good quirky art to hang in your apartment (try an archive search on ginseng, or potato)…
Supermarket Mycology. Flyspeck disease of apples
People get fussy about their apples, and tend to reject them if they’re bruised, or have nasty fungal lesions on them. But flyspeck is a subtle disease, and you’ve probably eaten it many times. I have, and I’m none the worse for it. Here we visit two different apple diseases, flyspeck and sooty blotch, in full rotating glory.
When strawberries go bad
What could be better than succulent fruit, rotting in time lapse? And doesn’t everyone want to know more about the fungi that rot strawberries? These are rhetorical questions.
Something funny in the herbarium
Guest blogger Susan Gruff was Curator of the Cornell Plant Pathology Herbarium until her retirement in 2007. With over a quarter of a century of daily dealings in the Herbarium, Susan has some stories to tell. There are thousands upon thousands of interesting specimens contained in the Cornell Plant Pathology Herbarium. Every now and then, […]
Mystery liverwort fungus, chapter 3
What could it be, this liverwort thing? Has anyone ever seen this before? FAM pursues the fungus through the musty dusty literature and the well-stocked but torturous passageways of his own brain. Finally, the magical powers of Santa Claus are invoked.
Mystery liverwort fungus, chapter two
The saga of the Friday Afternoon Mycologist vs. the mystery fungus continues… Last week, fear won. Making a slide of a mysterious fungus at 4:50 when someone is waiting to be picked up at five o’clock is just too irresponsible an act. Remember this if you are ever in that situation. It is now 3:45 […]
Cabbage monstrosities
The things that were once called Fungi but aren’t anymore are legion. Here’s one of them, a little swimmy thing that causes clubroot of cabbage. It gives cabbage monstrously clubbed roots, and as a bonus, acts as a vector for other diseases. Although we love its monstrous cruelty, we have banished it from the kingdom of Fungi. Be gone!
Lemon lapse time rot
Moldy lemons aren’t victims of just any mold–they have their own specific pair of evil parasites. Here a lemon succumbs to one of those evil Penicillium twins, in time lapse.
Complementary Colors–Hemlock rust
I am fortunate to live in a grove of hemlock trees by a babbling stream. A soft, blue-green hemlock light embraces me as I drive home in the evenings. In June, however, bright orange stars appear in the hemlocks. Amid the healthy turquoise hemlock cones, some wear a dense powdery coat of orange aeciospores. This […]