Waiting the last days before retirement, I came across this bit of fluff: The Deaths of Millions of California Trees Endanger the Lives of Thousands of California Humans | WIRED In 2013 another researcher with the US Forest Service named Geoff Donovan took advantage of the fact that another beetle, the emerald ash borer, killed 100 million trees across 15 states in the US. Using statistical models to rule out the impacts of a whole bunch of other potentially confounding factors—race, education, income—Donovan’s team was able to connect illness with places that had ash borer infestations and concomitant loss in tree cover (which you can see in satellite imagery). His result: Counties with borers had 6.8 additional deaths per year per 100,000 adults from respiratory disease, and 16.7 deaths from cardiovascular disease. Over the arc of the paper, that means 100 million dead trees—roughly 3 percent of tree cover on average—killed 21,193 people. “The implicit thing I’m saying here is that if you either kept the trees or increased the amount, you’d get the opposite effect,” says Donovan, now on a sabbatical at Massey University’s Center for Public Health Research in New Zealand. “I don’t think it’s the worst assumption in the world.” What a timely sabbatical from an out of the way place. Bob Wilson
You have an odd definition of fun. Tree mortality has increased many places, for many reasons. I suppose that Donovan et al. 2013 found a small correlation with human mortality. Sorry to report I choose not to delve much into that. Such forests do other, much more interesting things. Some will burn. All (almost all) will have new trees sprouting, maybe of different species etc. Bad Beetles don't eat everything, and trees are a resilient bunch. Few though will share my bwah hah hah enthusiasm for the increased dead wood.
We're having fun, two old friends who enjoy sharing sometimes a grim humor: Dutch elm disease - I've seen it up front and personal growing up in Oklahoma American Chestnut blight - before I was born, ". . . It is estimated that between 3 and 4 billion American chestnut trees were destroyed in the first half of the 20th century by blight after its initial discovery in 1904.[3][4][5] Very few mature specimens of the tree exist within its historical range, although many small shoots of the former live trees remain. There are hundreds of large (2 to 5 ft diameter) American chestnuts outside its historical range, some in areas where less virulent strains of the pathogen are more common, such as the 600 to 800 large trees in northern Lower Michigan.[6][7] - Wiki Doug studies them much more than I. I'm content to enjoy the solar shade and evaporative cooling of our home. However, I agree that trying to establish a relationship between trees, deforestation, and human lifespan and health, this is a little difficult. The "fun" is this is not a formal paper but rather an article that tries to humanize other papers. My usual practice is to use these lay articles to identify the formal, source papers and cite them. It has to do with how we share technical data without getting lost in the 'reader's digest' versions. Doug, Found a bag of Shiitake mushrooms in a dark corner of the fridge, at least three weeks old and damp. Ordinarily I would have expected them to rot but spread out on a paper towel, there was no evidence. This resistance to rot could have been absence of opportunity in our fridge but I was wondering if they might have unusual resistance to rot. Bob Wilson
Fungi often very aggressive among species. Hyphae (thread-like main bodies) can overgrow somebody else's sporocarps (what we call mushrooms). In Bob's fridge the Shiitakes avoided being 're-rotted' for weeks at 4 oC. Most fridges turn into reservoirs for fungi that do well at 4 oC. This situation is not necessarily odd. Or normal. Being quite wary of fungal toxins, I would not eat these even after heat treatment. It is possible that somebody somewhere would be interested in genomics or proteomics of this bag of mushrooms, but I don't know who. Shiitake are supposed to be quite medicinal, even here in a country where many foods are so perceived. May have been first cultivated 900 yrs ago, I was shocked to learn. Now anybody with a dead oak stick can make them happen.
Pop. media also enthusiastically recounts research that being around live trees makes one healthy and happy. Maybe being around dead trees generally has an opposite effect. However, it makes me happy. A zillion species of dead-wood-dependent critters might be said to feel the same way. Those have been vastly studied in boreal and temperate forests, mostly in Europe. Deadwood critters in tropics and subtropics remain comparatively unknown, and that makes me sad.
As follow up to that, the basic plating for background fungus in a sample is incubated in a fridge. Growth is slow, but it keeps the background bacteria from interfering in the test.
in a well-cleaned fridge +++ Advice on how to cook mushrooms and preserve their nutrition: https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2017/05/170519083817.htm This just covers popular species including shiitake. There are others less often consumed that are 'iffy' in terms of human toxicity, that seriously need to be boiled. If you ever see a person in hospital after doing mushrooms wrong, you might get to my level of caution. Sissiness.
same here. my daughter wanted to grow a mushroom log, but i told her i wasn't eating them. why do i trust the grocery store, past performance?
I would confidently eat from a commercial mushroom log. They are heavily inoculated with single-species 'spawn' under controlled conditions. In the unlikely event that it produced some different looking mushrooms I would not eat those. It is foragers in the wild who might misidentify their targets. Might sell at a farmer's market. There you might control enthusiasm. "hey that looks different" is supposed to flash yellow in your mind. July/August is wild mushroom time here. Street markets have many more than 'basic 6' species. Controlled enthusiasm. A few tasty species are fine unless one also consumes ethanol - so those are out.
Oyster mushroom (Pleurotus) is another commonly cultivated tasty mushroom. It gets trivia-love for killing and eating nematodes. Whence it gets nitrogen. A little olive oil, a little black pepper, hit the grill - man oh man. We are safer eating these from (straw-bag) cultivation because it has a couple similars in the wild that will rock your world. Not in a good way.
