Nature alone is antique, and the oldest art a mushroom. - Thomas Carlyle

Fungi and mushrooms are beneficial to our ecosystem by processing dead material, healthy plant growth, nutrition, medicine and creating a healthier environment. Unlike plants, mushrooms cannot photosynthesize since they lack chlorophyll. Hence, they survive using special methods such as symbiosis, saprophstiym and parasitism.

Symbiosis: Many mushrooms are linked to trees by symbiosis. They help the tree extract minerals and water from the soil and in exchange, the tree supplies the mushroom with carbohydrates.

Saprophstiym: A few mushrooms feed themselves by digesting the organic matter and at the same time returns nutrients to the soil.

Parasitism: Some microscopic mushrooms are parasites. A few attack a healthy host (tree, plant or insect) and live on it without killing it while others attack unhealthy hosts, thereby hastening their death.

Some mushrooms remain poisonous in order to protect themselves from being eaten and that they can reproduce. A few non-poisonous ones use the opposite strategy. They need animals to eat them in order to spread spores through faeces. Presenting a few colourful poisonous mushrooms which I came across this autumn.

A tryst with nature #fungi