Golden moldies: treasured by aficionados, fungi remain mostly anonymous subjects of distant kingdoms, underappreciated for their role as recyclers.

Publication: Natural History

Publication Date: 01-JUN-04

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COPYRIGHT 2004 Natural History Magazine, Inc.

Fungi tend to be inconspicuous, growing under a log, on a peach skin, inside a building wall. The gallery of photographs on display here highlights a few strikingly beautiful species, as visual reminders that there are entire kingdoms of organisms, often neglected, that are not to be overlooked. For one thing, fungi are extremely sensitive to the environment. Whenever people get alarmed about the stability of the Earth's ecosystems, from deforestation to global warming, the threats to plants and animals are what invariably spring to mind. But behind the scenes are the untold millions of fungus species whose fate is bound up with the health of their sometimes more charismatic hosts--and vice versa. Fungi play a vital role in the web of life by taking apart the complex but specialized molecules assembled by plants and animus and recovering the basic molecular building blocks in a form that future generations can use. Fungi are some of our best recyclers.

Fungi were once united as a taxonomic kingdom by such common features as nucleated cells, the absence of chlorophyll, and reproduction by spores. Until the late 1980s, for instance, students burrowed into mycology textbooks that described "old" fungi (like your traditional mushroom) right next...

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