On a forest reef, part 3/4. 🐚🍄 Here's another cool little mushroom that reminds me of the underwater world: Calocera viscosa (🇫🇮keltasarvikka). Doesn't it look like something straight out of a coral reef? 😊
But guess what - there are fungi that actually live underwater. Fungi have been documented in almost all habitats on Earth, including the underwater ones - they've been found from coral reefs to the bottom of the ocean, and kilometers below ocean sediments. Marine fungi are much less studied than their terrestrial cousins though. Scientists estimate that there are more than 10,000 marine fungal species, but we only have a vague idea of what they’re actually doing.
Marine fungi are known to have some strange superpowers though - more about that in my next post. 😊
On a forest reef, part 1/4. 🐚🍄 What do you see here - a detail shot of a mushroom or a coral? 😉
Years ago, when I was teaching scuba diving on tropical coral reefs, I had no idea that I could find so many similar colors and shapes here in Nordic forests. Now I do most of my diving in the woods. I walk there slowly, like I would float above a coral reef, scanning the forest floor with my eyes, searching for cool little creatures and marveling at all the colorful details.
Like this Ramaria sp. (🇫🇮haarakas) here. Doesn't it look like a soft coral or a sea anemone to you?
A long, long time ago, animals were able to talk with humans. ❤️ Today is "Sipi's day" in Finland. In the old days pigs and chicken were kept inside for the coldest time of the year, but today marks the day they were let outside for the first time, to look for fresh food. The old folks tell how the animals would instruct their caretakers: "Feed me until Sipi's day, and then throw me out on the snow blanket." 🐷
Now we have lost the ability to talk with animals, but Finnish mythology knows a few tricks to re-gain that power. You could try to find a blossoming fern during the Midsummer night, for example. Or you could do a favor for a snake, to get her to gift you the magical white stone every snake carries in their belly. 🐍
If you had the power to talk to animals, what would you ask?
Happy Valentine’s Day! ❤️🍄 Or as we say in Finland, Hyvää ystävänpäivää, Happy Friend's Day! Celebrating just lovers would have been too exclusive, so we decided to include everyone – friends, neighbors, colleagues and hobby buddies alike. 😄
But do you believe that there could be friendship between mushrooms? I'd like to! Especially after seeing these two cute mushroom buddies growing up together. It looks almost like the bigger Amanita muscaria (🇫🇮punakärpässieni) would be protecting the tiny Cortinarius rubellus (🇫🇮suippumyrkkyseitikki). Who knows, maybe friendship is a much more common phenomenon in this universe than we tend to think. ❤️
Cool and weird mushroom toxins, part 4: ibotenic acid. 🍄
This Amanita muscaria (🇫🇮punakärpässieni) contains two psychoactive alkaloids, ibotenic acid and muscimol. I wrote about muscimol a couple of days ago, so here's a weird fact about ibotenic acid: flies find it irresistible. Even the name of this mushroom is derived from Latin for fly, "musca." And that's why it has been used traditionally as a pesticide, to attract and kill flies. 🍄
An old Finnish recipe suggests mashing these mushrooms with milk and leaving the plate on the kitchen table. Just make sure no one mistakes it for porridge... (A valid concern, according to an old Finnish folktale.) 😝
