FERN’s Friday Feed: Listen to the ’shrooms
Welcome to FERN’s Friday Feed (#FFF), where we share the stories from this week that made us stop and think.
How fungi are surviving—and even thriving—in a warming world
FERN and Orion Magazine
“They are neither plant nor animal, but a wild conglomeration of things, existing in ways that are so central to ecosystems that what we have learned about them forces the breakdown of traditional taxonomy,” writes Meera Subramanian. “And even with what we have learned, scientists from the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew estimate that as many as 95 percent of the planet’s fungal species have not yet been identified. For the species we do know about, the vast majority are mycorrhizal, living in close relationship with a photosynthetic partner, exchanging resources so both can survive and thrive. Plants give their carbon-laced sugars to the fungi, and the fungi exponentially increase the plant’s uptake of nutrients and water in exchange. This partnership allows plants to better tolerate stresses, from droughts to pests to pathogens, and helps trees like Douglas firs and redwoods reach their towering heights. Author Merlin Sheldrake describes mycelium, which makes up the mycorrhizal network, as the ‘ecological connective tissue, the living seam by which much of the world is stitched into relation.’”
The fish was a fraud
FERN and Inc. Magazine
“[T]the investigation into Mary Mahoney’s Old French House goes back to early 2016, after a confidential informant told a Marine Patrol officer that he wanted to discuss ‘illegal activity’ taking place at Quality Poultry and Seafood, a well-known Biloxi supplier,” writes Boyce Upholt. “The informant alleged that in lieu of redfish, an iconic (and heavily regulated) product, Quality was selling a related local fish, black drum; shrimp often came not from the Gulf at all, but from Ecuador or Nicaragua. Importantly, what Quality sold as red snapper was often perch, a carnivorous freshwater fish imported, in this case, from Africa. … Most of the restaurants that Quality supplied with seafood were unaware of the scheme. But the informant suggested that Mary Mahoney’s had knowingly bought foreign fish for use on its menus.”
How a hazelnut spread became sticking point in Franco-Algerian relations
The New Yorker
“In early September, customs authorities at the port of Marseille and at Charles de Gaulle Airport, outside Paris, refused to allow two separate shipments of El Mordjene to enter French territory. Both lots—about a dozen pallets total, of eight hundred and forty jars each—belonged to independent importers, who had never before run into trouble. The rationale for the goods’ rejection wasn’t clear. On one form, customs officials wrote that the spread appeared ‘to infringe the trademark, designs, and model of the Ferrero Group,’ the makers of Nutella, who sell tens of millions of jars in France each year,” writes Lauren Collins. “If El Mordjene was in short supply before, now it became mythically scarce. Prices climbed to twenty, even thirty euros a jar.”
The river that came back to life
The Guardian
“Last year, the final of four hydroelectric dams on the Klamath River were removed in the largest project of its kind in US history. Forged through the footprint of reservoirs that kept parts of the Klamath submerged for more than a century, the river that straddles the California-Oregon border has since been reborn,” writes Gabrielle Canon. “Years before the dams were demolished, as teams of scientists, tribal members and landscape renovation experts tried to envision how recovery should unfold, there wasn’t a guidebook to go by. There weren’t records for how the heavily degraded ecosystems should look or function … In less than a year’s time, a dramatic reversal has taken place. Some spots have bounced back beautifully. Others had to be carefully cultivated to mimic what could have been if the dams never disrupted them. Native seeds were cast across the slopes, some by hand and others from helicopters. Heavy equipment trucked away mounds of earth. Invasive plants were plucked from around the reservoir footprint before they could spread across the barren ground.”
After millions of years, why haven’t carnivorous plants grown larger?
Smithsonian Magazine
“The horror can only be seen in slow motion. When a fly touches the outstretched leaves of the Cape sundew, it quickly finds itself unable to take back to the air. The insect is trapped. … Little by little, the leaf curls over the insect … as the digestive process begins. It’s hard not to relate to the little insects that carnivorous plants like the Cape sundew, Venus flytraps and pitcher plants feed upon,” writes Riley Black. “What seems to be an inert plant, a part of the ecological background, suddenly becomes an inescapable trap. The idea has stuck with us so strongly that we have turned human-eating plants into a sci-fi staple, even though such organisms may seem to us primordial or better suited to some prehistoric moment. In fact, carnivorous plants do have a deep history that stretches back millions of years—throughout their past drawing in essential nutrients from animal prey that the soil itself does not provide. Most of this carnivorous botany is small, but the diversity of different trapping mechanisms raises an evolutionary question. Why haven’t carnivorous plants grown to sizes large enough to rival the human-munching plants we repeatedly invoke in fiction?”