jon's blog 1

Jon's Blog

This Blog is a notebook of species identified exclusively on the University of East Anglia's campus and surrounding grounds.

To begin with, here is a large Common Beech Fagus sylvatica and my foot in the foreground for scale. The Bracket fungi around the butt of the beech tree is Ganoderma aplamatum The Artists Pallet Fungus (Jordan 1995)

Inside the Beech tree will be a cone of brown rot, soft and mushy, as this fungus slowly digests the lignum in the tree's core, the fruiting bodies we can see in this photograph are just that...just the fruiting part of the fungus, the part that produces spores. The Mycelium of the fungus, the part that consumes the tree is invisible from the outside, will be a latticework of fine threads which will digest the tree from the inside. 

The brackets we see in this photograph have annual growth rings and even if I kicked the bracket off the tree, it would not help the tree, because they'd just grow back next year, rather like pulling fruit from an apple tree won't kill the apple tree. 
We often think of fungi as being soft like the mushrooms we buy in shops. These are quite different, hard as wood and brittle. The brown stain under the large bracket on the left are millions of spores released by the fruiting body, to be windblown or carried by animal contact into a wound on another tree to begin infection again and continue the fungi's lifecycle. 

Ganoderma sp  are very common in both northern hemisphere and southern, pretty much wherever you can find trees in the world you'll find Ganoderma fungus, this is called a cosmopolitan distribution, the same description can be applied to orka, sparrows and fleas.

It's closely related to other woody bracket fungi which share a trait useful to humans. If it's dry you can light it, blow it out and it will smoulder. The best known for this trick is hoof fungus Fomes fomentarius or tinder fungus, if you were a hunter gatherer 7000 years ago, and you decided to move camp, you could place a lump of smouldering fungus in a leather or birch bag, travel in the pouring rain to a new site and have a fungal firelighter still smouldering in your bag hours later. 



Jordan, M. (1995) The encyclopaedia of fungi of Britain and Europe. Newton abbot: David and Charles.