Christmas Special: Amanita Mushrooms.

Have you ever realized how many things about Christmas just don't add up? Who would really put presents under an evergreen tree? Who gave a fat old man the right to enter houses in the presence of kids, anyways?Why do we have Christmas trees?

Well, there's a perfectly logical explanation for all of this:

Source.

Yep: Stoner mushrooms. In this case, the specific mushroom in question is Amanita muscaria. They are native to most places in the northen hemisphere, particularly in areas with pine trees. A fair amount of X-mas loops back to these mushrooms. Jesus was never involved in Christmas; the makers of the calendar just decided to celebrate it around the day the pagans were celebrating solstice. It was a marketing move to sync Jesus with 'shrooms, in other words.

Amanita muscaria is also called "fly agaric." The reasons for this are rather strange, but the most common is that one could sprinkle some of the mushroom in milk to ward off flies.We can't tell exactly where this practice originated (possibly Germany or Sweden), but it's strange. Flies can actually get high just by landing on the caps of Amanita muscaria.  Just another reason to pick up mushrooms.

Its most notorious use, however, is as a potent hallucinogen. The culprit is muscimol, with ibotenic acid helping it along. The effects are so varied that it would be madness to say that there are any standards beyond "tripping the eff out." Symptoms usually wear off after 24 hours. Severe poisoning only occurs after 15 caps or so; nobody has gone on record dying from these. When other types of hallucinogenic mushrooms get banned, Amanita suddenly becomes popular. Get on your cloaks and start flipping tree skirts!



So, how does this tie in with Christmas? Amanita muscaria mushrooms are commonly found beneath fir and evergreen trees. Replace "mushrooms" with "gifts." Link it with the solstice for good measure. Boom, Christmas.

 Oh, and guess what else likes Amanita mushrooms? Reindeer. Yes, they also get high off of the 'shrooms, causing them to leap about like giddy idiots - that's the origin of flying reindeer. Other possible origins include the flying sensation and hallucinations (sometimes of winged reindeer) brought about by the mushroom.  People can also get high off of the remaining active toxins in reindeer (or human) urine, which is actually safer than taking the mushrooms straight. Yes, I just said that drinking reindeer piss is safer than eating a mushroom off of the ground. (That said, A. muscaria are edible with proper cooking.)



After this, things start to get a little hazy.  We aren't sure whether Santa has any real shamanic basis or not. It is, however, awfully suspicious that St. Nicholas is usually pictured with A. muscaria colors, that he laughs oddly, and that his Coca-Cola-designed image is almost too flushed to be sober. A fluffy coat like that also seems like a good idea when mushroom-hunting in the winter, although whether it's really red and white could be debated. Use a critical eye when browsing these theories.

Of course, A. muscaria's fame extends well beyond Christmas. All of the mushrooms in Mario-land look like Amanita. Pokemon also makes some use of them, with "Amanita" being the name of the storage system manager in B/W and the two new mushroom Pokemon slightly resembling red Amanita. There was also a dancing mushroom sequence in Fantasia, which speaks for itself.

Merry Christmas to all, and to all a stoned night! It's traditional! (Actually, I DID get a mushroom garden for Christmas...)

"They Actually Eat That:" Chocolate Mushrooms.

If you dip anything in chocolate, it instantly sounds more palatable. I've seen chocolate pasta, chocolate bacon, and now, chocolate mushrooms. No, I do not mean those cute little "Chocorooms" cookies; I mean honest-to-goodness mushrooms coated in chocolate.

Unfortunately, I can't find the ones I actually ate at GreenFest one year. They were super expensive, but definitely worth trying. They were made by CordyChi, a brand that uses mushrooms (specifically a Cordyceps-Reishi blend) for all sorts of things. Go figure, the 'shrooms in question were Cordyceps- the parasitic mushroom from China that's becoming more and more popular for helping with respiratory issues, among other things.Alas, the chocolate-covered mushroom caps seem to have vanished off of the face of the planet.

From the official site.

Instead, something new has surfaced. Several sites have started making their own mushroom chocolate. Rather than simply covering mushrooms in chocolate, these Cordyceps are mixed into the chocolate. Better still, sometimes it's raw, vegan chocolate. I'd give it a shot if it's anything like the chocolate Cordyceps caps I had. Hell, even if they were just a product of my imagination, this odd  chocolate has my curiosity piqued.

What? You want an explanation for why dried mushrooms are being made into chocolate? Pff. Everything gets put into chocolate at some point. It's just the mushrooms' turn. This is still not as weird as chocolate-covered ants, which probably started as an unfortunate accident in the kitchen. Bacon chocolate is weirder still; at least mushrooms and ants have some nutritional value to compensate for the sinfulness of chocolate.

Chocolate is probably the Murphy's Law of food: Anything that can be put into chocolate will be put into chocolate. The issue, then, is whether it actually tastes good or not. Surprisingly, mushrooms work. Maybe ants and bacon aren't so far out, after all.

Fungus Among Us: Skirted Stinkhorn.

Since the power outage unfortunately cut our fungus week short, here's what I would have done if the power hadn't gone out. Yes, I know, we already did a stinkhorn, but this stinkhorn is a little more eerie.

More here.

Perhaps this would have been a little more appropriate for Halloween, but the skirted stinkhorn (Phallus indusiatus) is the quintessential "weird mushroom." It's identifiable as a mushroom, but looks like it was laced with cobwebs or the skirt of a ghost. Every tropical region in the world has this thing. It's that one mushroom that people photograph and demand to know what it is. Now you know, and knowing is half the battle.

P. indusiatus has a very distinctive 'skirt' of lacy indusium- the stuff beneath the cap on this mushroom. As in the basket stinkhorn, this mushroom uses its scent and presumably holes to help spread its spores around. Again, the spores are stored in a sticky fluid called gleba as opposed to being airborne. Is it just me, or do all stinkhorns sound like something out of alien movies?

Unlike the other stinkhorn we covered, yes, this baby is edible. It was a rarity in Qing dynasty cuisine for a long time. The notorious Empress Dowager Cixi had a particular fondness for skirted stinkhorn, and Henry Kissinger got a taste of it as well. It has been successfully cultivated in China since 1979. It is now sold commonly in Asian markets, so if you're curious, take a look there.

Along with actually being edible, P. indusiatus has a few compounds in it that may prove useful. One, hydrxylmethylfurfural, could prevent browning in commercial food. Extracts are antioxidants and antibiotics. There is almost nothing bad about this mushroom...except that it might be an alien spore. Quick, run!

Fungus Among Us: Basket Stinkhorns.

Still don't think fungi can be made into art? Well, sometimes, nature decides to do the work for us. There are some fungi that look like pieces from a modern art museum, only alive and spontaneously making the landscape a little weirder.

Stinkhorns, particularly those in the Clathus genus, resemble some sort of weird, alien art. Most of the time, they just look strangely like mammalian genitalia. Clathrus ruber, however, has a fruiting body that is bright red and would not look out of place in a museum of modern art. It is also called the basket stinkhorn. Although originally native to Europe, it has since spread to every continent bar Antarctica.

In the case of basket stinkhorns, you guessed it, the fruiting body looks like a basket. It starts looking like a sort of egg on the ground, but blossoms into the strange, netlike structure after some time. Like something out of a sci-fi story, a greenish, spore-filled goop called "gleba "coats the inside of this structure with spores. Just about the only thing creepier would be an alien fetus resting within that net.

Wait, no. There is something creepier than an alien fetus in that net. As the name 'stinkhorn' might indicate, this fungus reeks of rotten meat. This scent, combined with the latticed structure and bright colors, lures flies into the cage to help spread the spores. Luckily, this only lasts 24 hours after the 'egg' ruptures, so threat of a massive alien invasion are unlikely. The coming of the Lord of the Flies is another story.

For centuries, there have been superstitions about simply touching this fungus leading to illness. It's called "witch's heart" in Yugoslavia. Nobody knows if it's really edible or not; the eggs might be, but the one person who was daring enough to try a 'blossomed' basket wound up getting sick. Something that smells like rotten meat would probably not be good to eat by the smell alone; China's tried anyways.

But is it art? 

Creature Feature: Glowing Mushrooms.

For those of you who do not get the mushroom joke, please look up "Badger Badger" on Google. You're welcome. Now, without any further ado, something that we assure you is not a result of acid:



No, you are not on drugs. Those mushrooms really are glowing. They are members of one of seventy-one odd species of glowing mushroom. Thirty-three of those species are in the genus Mycena; this genus's bioluminescence is widespread enough that scientists theorize that the genus somehow lost its glow along the way.

Glowing Mycena mushrooms are native to Brazil, Australia, Malaysia, Jamaica, Puerto Rico, and Belize. They glow all the time, but the glow is not very visible in daylight. Take a few of these in a dark room and enjoy the night lights; one researcher compared a rain forest floor covered with glowing mushrooms to looking up at the night sky, glimmering with stars.

Why do they glow? Nobody really knows. Desjardin, a fittingly-named mycologist, theorizes that the mushrooms glow to attract nocturnal animals. This somehow helps them disperse their spores. Glowing is apparently sexy, now. (Do not give Kuro ideas, science! That's dangerous! Whoops, too late.)

 

Save the rain forest. It has glowing mushrooms!


Tomorrow: More 'reptile food' and a giant rodent!