Mushrooms and kilts

Scottish foraging
(artist's impression!)

Glasgow these days is getting ready for Commonwealth Games that are due to open on 23rd July next year, and part of the preparations is to make city's numerous blank building walls look better by painting murals on them. These have been springing up left and right recently, mostly featuring some kind of athletic activity. The one in Merchant city, however, features local wildlife: red deer, highland cattle, badgers, a manic squirrel being hunted by a fox, and a man in a kilt hunting mushrooms.

It is good to see that fungi are being featured with prominence they deserve. The picker is even holding an edible mushroom (bay boletus in fact), so the artists must have done some basic research. Just don't take it as recommendation for action and go to a forest dressed like this: a kilt would do nothing to protect you against ticks!

Botanicula

The journey begins

I came over this unusual game by accident, and still wondering if I should get a full version of it. It is a point and click adventure in which a motley crew of mushrooms and insects are embarking on a journey to plant a seed. It has most adorable sounds and music (if you listen to the tiny squeaks those travelling fungi make, you are guaranteed to fall in love with them after five minutes), and graphics like I have never seen before. Beautiful. And weird (in a good sense).

As for the gameplay, the demo can be played in under a minute if you know what you are doing, but the great thing about this game is that there are so many objects and places you can explore that are not compulsory. The more you click, the more cute animations and adorable sounds you discover.

A full version of Botanicula costs $10, and if you enjoy leisurely meditative puzzles (although, who doesn't?), it is worth every penny.

Mushrooms at Kew Gardens

These would fill a few freezers...

Being based in Scotland is great for mushroom forays, but sometimes it feels like I'm way too far from the places where exciting things are happening.

Certainly, the new exhibition of fungi sculptures at Kew Gardens is one of such events. The best I could do in this case was to ask a couple of friends to go for a visit and take a few photos.

The pictures are not the best you'll see in this blog, but the subject matter is so great that even these mobile phone snaps look amazing. If only I could do them myself, with a proper camera!

Mmm... morels. One day, I'll find
the real ones!

The sculptor, Tom Hare, used different shades of willow twigs. Look how skilfully he layered them in his morels, to show off the wrinkles and cavities that distinguish this species. My favourite bit though is the underside of porcini mushrooms: the straw from which it is made does a perfect job imitating the spongy hymenium, both in texture and colour. They look... real!

The sculptures are enormous, some over 4 metres in height. Tom Hare's wonderful creations will be decorating the Broad Walk in Kew until 3rd November.

How to command your fungal minions

This is a trailer to Mushroom Wars game for PlayStation3, and more recently, for iPad.

"TAKE CONTROL OF YOUR MUSHROOM ARMY"
"LEAD YOUR MUSHROOM ARMY TO VICTORY"

I'd say to the developers, eat less of funny mushrooms and maybe you'll still find your way back to the reality space occupied by the rest of humanity. However, I just might blow the dust off my PS3 and check it out. As long as my namekos do not have objections, that is.

Enjoy, and see you next week for more stories of mushroom hunts. The weather forecast for tomorrow is cloudy but no rain - excellent! For once, I might get out of the forest with my feet still dry...

Beatrix Potter, a Victorian naturalist

Souvenirs from the Armitt Museum

My recent visit to Lake District was centred mostly around nature trails and dogspotting, as well as doing weird things such as scaring goldfish living in a telephone box next to a pub in Torver, and giving a traffic cone a tour of the Northern lakes (the latter was my companion's idea, and I swear we were not eating any funny mushrooms... although, after having written this down, I am not entirely sure). However, there was one cultural experience, and that was a visit to the Armitt Museum in Ambleside. It would have been just another local history museum but for one remarkable woman who lived in the area for for most of her life bequeathed to it her archives: Beatrix Potter.

Now, everyone knows that she is a highly acclaimed children's author, the writer who brought to us the tales of Peter Rabbit and his friends, in which charming and simple text is accompanied by beautiful illustrations. In my opinion, these illustrations are a major factor in the success of her books, as it is thanks to them that the stories and characters in them are really brought to life.

Illustration to "The Tale of Squirrel
Nutkin" (spot the mushrooms!)

What is not so well known is that before writing her first Peter Rabbit story she was a passionate amateur mycologist, and that her legacy includes hundreds of fungi drawings, so detailed and accurate that after more than 100 years they are still easily identifiable. She was also the first person to prove that fungi propagated by spores and managed to germinate them (among her drawings there are her observations of this process through a microscope). She also was the first (in Britain) to suggest that fungi and algae comprising lichens are symbiotic rather than parasitic. Altogether remarkable! She even submitted a paper to the Linnean Society on the subject of spore germination, but it was never published, almost certainly due to some power play of the people in charge. And, almost certainly, because she was a woman. Arrgh, Victorians!

It must have been a great disappointment for her, but there is something we have to thank those eggheads. I am sure that their refusal to publish her paper spurred her to try her hand at a different kind of publication, and a good children's book is much better than any scientific paper, especially one that actually has such significant educational value: her illustrations of plants and English countryside are extremely accurate, even though her description of animal habits is certainly not! I am deeply saddened though that one thing is missing from them: fungi. Except for one illustration to "The Tale of Squirrel Nutkin", all she ever drew for Peter Rabbit was plants. Perhaps that experience at the Linnean cut deeper than her biographers thought, as after it she gradually stopped producing fungi drawings altogether.

Runners, stalkers and clickers

I regularly follow the news of videogame world, and with my love for mushrooms, this particular piece has naturally drawn my special attention. Last week, I wrote about a nice casual game (hold on, I think my little namekos have run out of food... will be back in a second...)

Right, where was I? Oh, yes. Games featuring fungi. I am talking, of course, about "The last of us". Unlike the cheerful inhabitants of "Mushroom garden", these fungi are not something you'd want to meet in real life. They infect humans, turning them into zombies, and trust me, it's not pretty. Here is a link to some artwork. 18+. You have been warned.

This is the correct position

The inspiration for the plot comes from ant disease caused by a fungus called Ophiocordyceps unilateralis. Once a spore settles on an ant, the fungus rapidly takes over its body and alters its behaviour. Eventually, the ant dies and the fruit body ruptures its exoskeleton, releasing spores and spreading the infection. The insects die attached to leaf veins on the underside of leaves. Curiously, almost all of the images I have seen on the web are the the wrong way up. Why? No idea.

So, how likely are humans to be infected by a mutated fungus and turn into hideous zombies? Not at all, actually. Ants are very small and have a very simple nervous system. It doesn't take much to take over it. Now, if we think of a slightly larger animal, such as a frog, things are not so disastrous. A good example are golden frogs, whose population is being decimated by parasitic fungi in Central America. However, it is only untreated frogs that die, so in the attempt to save the species, conservationists capture the frogs, quarantine them and treat them with antifungal drugs. The frogs recover fully and are released back into the wild. Going up to human scale of things, I think I do remember a case when a young girl with an impaired immune system had such a severe fungal infection that she had fruit bodies growing inside her nose. But did she turn into a zombie? Nope. Once the cause of her illness was discovered, the treatment was trivial, and the infection cleared within days. So I don't think we have to worry about stuff other than athlete's foot and ringworm. Just keep some clotrimazole capsules at home, and we should all be safe from this particular kind of apocalypse.

But who needs to worry about plausibility of apocalyptic scenarios anyway?

The world's first genuine mushroom-growing sim

Mushrooms might not be your first choice of characters for a video game, but the creators of Mushroom Garden, a Japanese company called Beeworksgames, beg to differ. The game has simple but addictive gameplay. There is something incredibly satisfying about swiping the screen to harvest your crop. Also, an especially nice touch is a "petting area", where you can interact with the mushrooms you've discovered and collected. OK, maybe THAT is taking things a bit too far.

The video below is its theme song as seen on Japanese TV. Just look at these little nameko mushrooms, they are so adorable!

Stay safe, everyone, do not eat any strange mushrooms, and see you next week!