413: Finding Fire Fungi Footholds

This episode: Some fungi only form fruiting bodies after forest
fires; where do they hide the rest of the time? At least for some
of them, the answer is: inside mosses!

Thanks to Daniel Raudabaugh for his contribution!


Download Episode (6.2 MB, 9.0 minutes)

Show notes:
Microbe of the episode: Nocardia brevicatena

News item

Takeaways
Forest fires can do a lot of damage, but life grows back quickly.
Certain kinds of plant seed actually only germinate after a fire,
and a similar thing is true of certain kinds of fungi: they only
form fruiting bodies (like mushrooms, for spreading spores) after
a fire. For plants, the advantage may come from increased access
to light with some or all of the canopy burned away, and fungi
may benefit from less competition on the ground. But in between
burn events, these fire-loving (pyrophilous) fungi seem to
disappear. Where do they go?

The study here sought an answer, suspecting an association with
some mosses that reappeared soon after a forest fire in North
Carolina in 2016. They looked for fungi lurking as endophytes
inside moss and other samples, both by growing them on agar and
by DNA sequencing, and they found a number of different known
pyrophilous fungi. Some of these were in soil, or samples from
outside the burned area, but the majority were inside mosses
growing in the recently burned zone.

Journal Paper:
Raudabaugh DB, Matheny PB, Hughes KW, Iturriaga T, Sargent M,
Miller AN. 2020. Where are they hiding? Testing the body
snatchers hypothesis in pyrophilous fungi. Fungal Ecol 43:100870.


Other interesting stories:



Probiotic yeast species could inhibit pathogenic yeasts
(paper)

Plant passes on nitrogen fixing symbionts to offspring




 


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