Deadly Mushrooms

2024 Author: Gavin MacAdam | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-16 13:38

To pick up a basket of strong edible fungi, sometimes you have to overcome a dozen kilometers of forest trails. You don't have to go far for microscopic mushrooms. They themselves make their way through unknown paths, comfortably settling on the roots, leaves, flower buds of plants, significantly reducing the yield of vegetables, berries and fruits, or destroying the beauty of flower beds

In order for a person to have no time to be bored, the Almighty added microscopic mushrooms to the donated food plants, which every fifth kilogram of the crop considers their own and without hesitation devour the fruits of human labor. Moreover, some representatives of the Mushroom Kingdom manage to poison the cultivated grains, provoking epidemics that claim the lives of people.

Phytophthora

Under such a beautiful name is a parasitic fungus that turns potatoes, tomatoes and other fruits of plants of the Solanaceae family from healthy and tasty food products into gray vile rot with a disgusting smell. Starting with Solanovy, he does not hesitate to taste other plants.

Phytophthora, once in a favorable environment, multiplies so rapidly that it manages to overstep the standard limit of the "fifth kilogram" and completely destroys the supply of vegetables, leading a person to death from hunger.

An example of this behavior of the fungus is the popular disaster in Ireland in the first half of the 19th century, when rotten potatoes could not feed people, since they deprived them of their main food. A small fungus managed to change the fate of the people of an entire country, sending to the next world every eighth citizen of Ireland, and forcing a quarter of the population to leave their native lands in search of salvation in other countries.

It is not known in what ways the fungus reached European lands, because its homeland was all the same lands of the American Indians, who loved to combine potatoes with dry meat. Over the millennia, American potatoes have learned to coexist with the fungus, yielding to it the allowable amount of the crop. European potatoes, grown from the best tubers imported from the New World, grew for a long time far from the parasite and completely lost their immunity against it. That is why it was so easy for Phytophthora to win victories in the middle of the mentioned century, ending in hunger and suffering of European peoples.

And today this fungus makes gardeners be vigilant.

Ergot

Who would have thought that you could catch a very unpleasant disease that causes gangrene (death of living tissues) or convulsion (involuntary muscle contraction) by eating rye bread? And this often happened during the Middle Ages.

Although bread was just a mediator, since the culprit of the disease called "Antonov Fire", "Witch's Writhing" (or ergotism) was the Ergot mushroom parasitizing on the ears of rye.

In flour obtained from poorly refined grains of rye, a fungus remains, which, entering the human stomach, becomes the causative agent of the listed ailments.

Modern methods of cleaning grain guarantee the safety of flour, but anything can happen …

Rust

Rust fungi that infect plants appeared on Earth, apparently simultaneously with the appearance of the planet's “green lungs”. The Bible, for example, describes rust as one of the many calamities with which God tests a person's endurance.

People gave the fungus a very apt name, because on the stems and leaves of plants affected by it, a plaque from bright orange to black appears, similar to the color of iron oxide.

Rust, which affected the cultivated crops of cereals in Europe, as scientists found out, made its "first steps" on the leaves of Barberry, from the bushes of which it was fashionable to construct hedges. People turned their anger on the planting of Barberry and hastily began to destroy the "innocent" hedges.

But this did not diminish the rust, since fungi do not always need two plants for a full development cycle. Sometimes the whole cycle takes place on one victim.

The community of rust fungi is very diverse and omnivorous, and therefore can infect any terrestrial plant, be it Cruciferous or Compositae, Bulbous or Clove, berry bushes (currants, raspberries, gooseberries) or fruit trees (pear, apple).

Summary

How to deal with the invasion of parasitic fungi read in the articles of the author with the nickname “

Olik01 And others.