Welcome to an explorable explanation of the world of fungus! The windows work just like normal desktop windows.
(If you ever get too lost, reload the page. If anything gets too laggy, close some tabs.)
FAQs
What is this place?
This is a digital toybox in the shape of an old-fashioned laboratory. Everything in here is interactive- and everything is about fungi. The real world is similar.
What are fungi?
Fungi:
Have cell walls made of chitin, like insect exoskeletons
Form networks of cells called mycelium
Are commonly called "molds", "mycorrhizae", or "mushrooms" - but these are all different forms that some fungi can take.
Can be found living as harmless stowaways inside of plants, as essential components of healthy soil, as parasites, as diseases, as underground truffles, as decomposers, as symbiotes inside of animals, as mold on the bread in your house, as poison, as delicious food... (McGinnis, 1996)
You (yes, YOU) have fungi in you right now. Don't worry, so does everybody else.
No, I mean WHAT ARE FUNGI?
Fungi are a deeply strange sort of life that is neither plant nor animal.
Fungi are closer related to human beings than they are to trees.
Fungi are everywhere, in almost everything, and are an essential component to every ecosystem.
Give me the scientific definition.
Fungi are a kingdom of life uniquely defined by possessing polarisomes, a cellular protein complex used in directional filamentous growth.(Harris, 2005)
What can I do here?
Mess around in a digital lab and poke at fungi until something happens. Have fun!
DISCLAIMER
I am a college student studying mycology, and while I have done my research, this website is for entertainment purposes only. Please do not eat a random wild mushroom without knowing EXACTLY what it is! I do not claim that this website is enough to identify mushrooms.
What is this?
This is a compound microscope. It has multiple different lenses on a body that can rotate to change the lens.
Compound microscopes are useful because you can look at things using both high and low zoom levels. You can magnify enough to see details on individual cells.
A collection of books about fungi.
Tastes like dirt.
Chicken of the Woods (Morchella esculenta) is a shelf fungus that has edible and delicious edges when young. It grows out of tree bark.
Distinguishing features to notice:
An orangeish-white ripply body
"rings" of growth out from the point of connection with the tree
Chicken of the Woods has pores instead of gills on the underside.
アミガサタケ 🍄 Common Morel, Morchella esculenta by ffish.asia / floraZia.com on Sketchfab
The common morel (Morchella esculenta) is a delicious and prized edible. It pops up suddenly in the spring after rainstorms, under birch, under oak, and under apple trees. They fruit after burns and wildfires.
Distinguishing features to notice:
A complex surface covered with irregular holes
a bulbous base that connects smoothly to the "cap"
if you cut a true morel open, it is completely hollow on the inside.
Morchella esculenta
It's locked with a small electronic padlock, with eight letters on the dial. Enter the password?
The researcher in charge of this laboratory must keep the password around here somewhere...
What is this?
This is a map of observations of wild fungi and lichens, sourced from the citizen science database iNaturalist. "Citizen Science" is the practice of having volunteers submit data (like photos of wild mushrooms) at a large scale, which is then analyzed by professional scientists. Individual foragers, hikers, and observant people all around the world have sent in photos of fungi to the database. Scientists can use this data to keep track of species for conservation!
(Di Cecco, 2021) , (Van Horn, 2018)
Grilled cheese sandwich and a salad with bleu cheese dressing. Looks tasty.
This doesn't have any mushrooms in it.
No mushrooms at all. But it DOES have fungi.
Bread
Bread contains yeast - yeasts are single-celled fungi.
Cheddar cheese
This one doesn't contain any fungi. Cheddar is fermented with lactobactillium, which is a bacteria, not a fungus.
Salad greens
The salad might not seem to involve fungi, but all of these greens grew up with symbiotic fungi connected to their roots.
Bleu cheese dressing
Bleu cheese is one of the rare cheeses that use fungus in the ferment instead of just bacteria.
Some fungi can glow in the dark! This chemical ability to store energy and release it as light serves a variety of purposes for fungi, such as attracting insects to spread their spores. (Purtov, 2015)
What is this?
This is a close-up view of yeast cells dividing to form more yeast cells. The individual cells form buds which become the new cells- the real process is not perfectly symmetrical like it appears here. Yeast cell growth and cell division happen in closely connected coordination. (Johnston, 1977) If you zoom out, you can see a full petri dish of Saccharomyces cerevisiae, the Beer Yeast.
(If it doesn't load at first, click "Zoom Out" and then press the back button. I'm still debugging this.)
What is this?
Slime mold is not a fungus, but it acts similar to a real fungus. It senses and grows towards nearby nutrients (which is called Chemotaxis) in a network of cells. Slime molds grow their network in an efficient way. This growth pattern is so efficient that it can be used to mimic the decisions made by human transport engineers.
(Nagataki, 2001) , (Tero, 2007)
Mushrooms can be cultivated in a lab, but there are challenges involved. Many fungi will not fruit (make mushrooms) unless specific environmental conditions are met.
