Meet the red-cockaded woodpecker, a black and white bird with a real knack for making holes in living pine trees. Read on to learn of its incredible relationship with a shelf fungus that eats the...
Rust fungi are formidable plant pathogens that have big impacts in agriculture and natural ecosystems. Plant pathologist J.C. Arthur took up the great challenge of figuring out their life cycles.
https://blog.mycology.cornell.edu/2018/11/18/connecting-the-rusts/
This isn't the first post you've seen here about stinkhorns. They've just got that special something. In the Western hemisphere, they're wonderfully disgusting. In the East, they're wonderfully d...
https://blog.mycology.cornell.edu/2015/02/18/an-unlikely-delicacy-the-basket-stinkhorn/
How a familiar garden flower, through sex, sheer luck, and the attention of one man, rose to a pinnacle of popularity only to be suddenly destroyed. All thanks to an unassuming downy mildew that ...
https://blog.mycology.cornell.edu/2014/09/09/hope-for-impatiens/
Fungi are secretive and elusive things. It's hard to get to know them. They expose themselves shyly, briefly, and often bafflingly. Like these twinkly earthstars, which are hiding more than one s...
https://blog.mycology.cornell.edu/2014/06/03/twinkly-earthstars/
They may be taking over the world, but they have problems too: They have an itch they can't scratch. Their dead wear fur coats. They nuke their competitors with poisonous blood. Multicolored Asia...
My students think of Russula species as cheerful mushrooms that are quite benign. They are often pleasingly colored, make good partners for trees, and have an interesting, brittle texture. Other ...
https://blog.mycology.cornell.edu/2013/12/30/a-deadly-russula/
Fungi can be so unfamiliar in all their diverse forms and weird habits. Here's a beautiful coffee table book to help you grasp the enormous diversity of the kingdom Fungi.
https://blog.mycology.cornell.edu/2013/12/19/learning-fungi/
Cesalpino would not have been surprised to find mold growing on his own book, published in 1583. However, he would have disagreed with us about the nature of fungi and where they come from. Also,...
https://blog.mycology.cornell.edu/2013/11/01/how-fungi-grew-on-cesalpino/