Weird and wonderful members of the plant kingdom - mushroom invaders

What would you expect to find in the upper atmosphere? Satellites? Little green men? Possibly - but the one thing you would probably never think of is the ground-hugging, humble mushroom. You'd be wrong. Scientists have discovered the spores of fungi, especially puffballs, in the sky in very large numbers, and as high as 35,000 feet. Nobody has been able to work out how or why they do this - whether it's an accidental by-product of their spore (which are like seeds) being so light and aerodynamic that they get lifted this high, or whether the extreme cold has some kind of sterilising action that kills off any bacteria clinging to the spore, thus giving it a better chance of survival when it returns to earth.

You may not realise it, but we have a national shortage of wild mushrooms. This is because they rely on a set of conditions for growth that are not as freely available now as they used to be. As everyone knows, mushrooms and horses go well together - 'where there's muck, there's mushies.' Mushrooms prefer rich soils where large animals, especially horses, have been, or where a gardener has been generous with manure - increasingly as people use sanitised compost from garden centre, the rich ammonia content that they enjoy is stripped away. They also like short grass that they can nose their way through in order to shed their spores in the air and increasing people have gravel or concrete instead. Finally, mushrooms are not keen on chemicals and where farm animals are fed or injected with manufactured medicines to get rid of parasites and make them grow faster, they produce a more chemical laden dung which mushrooms aren't fond of.

So it's just as well that there is some good news. You might be lucky enough to find a Ganoderma applanatum - a mushroom that can live for fifty years and grow to be two feet across!

Mushroom photograph by Sentience, used under a creative commons attribution licence