Getting freaky with fungi: A historical perspective on the emergence of mycology

Background/Question/Methods

Many people still view fungi as if they were plants, but we now know that they are as distinct from plants as animals. In fact, despite the importance of fungi across all ecosystems as mutualists, pathogens, decomposers, and predators, they were only formally recognized as a separate kingdom in 1969. Change has been slow, despite early recognition of fungal uniqueness: Italian botanist Pier Antonio Micheli arguably founded mycology in the 1730s, and the Englishman Miles Joseph Berkeley coined the term “mycology” one hundred years later. These two set the tone for much of mycology: Micheli focusing on cataloging species and their relationships, and Berkeley focusing on the interactions between fungi and plants, with a particular eye towards disease.

From these simple origins, mycology has flourished. In the mid-nineteenth century, Heinrich de Bary set the groundwork for modern mycology, pioneering work on lichens and coining the term symbiosis. His contemporary, Albert Bernhard Frank, described the mycorrhizal symbiosis, and suggested for the first time that mutualisms may be as important to evolution as competition. Some of Frank’s ideas were not accepted until nearly a century after they were first proposed. Another great contributor to mycology was the British-Canadian A. H. Reginald Buller. In the 1920s he discovered that fungi in the genus Pilobolus are able to fling spores more than two meters away towards light by using a lens within the sub-sporangial vesicle to aim. Buller also discovered the mechanism of spore dispersal in Basidiomycetes that has been given his moniker, Buller’s drop. From research on the rate at which spores dropped, he guessed that the mechanism involved changes in surface tension. It took 75 years to discover the exact mechanism of the surface tension catapult, in 1989.

Results/Conclusions

The applications of modern mycology are vast, and still being explored. Slime molds mimic Tokyo’s rail system because they find the most efficient path between resources; they could inform human engineering. Spores of Ascomycetes are known to cooperatively generate their own wind. Only a hundred thousand species of fungi been described, but estimates of fungal diversity are up to 8 million species. This highlights how much we have still to learn about this fascinating kingdom of life. There is much to be learned from mycology, both from the history, and the science.