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Come back to this page each day to read another entry from Cathie Katz's beautifully illustrated journal, "Nature a Day at a Time."
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Mushrooms are part of an enormous group of fungi. They are not always considered plants by scientists because of their un-plantlike behavior. The above-ground part of the mushroom commonly seen growing in yards, woods, and logs is short-lived, but the network of underground threads, mycelium, can live for centuries. Mushrooms are carnivorous. They attack nematodes by releasing chemicals through their mycelium. Within seconds, the nematodes are paralyzed and quickly digested by the mushroom. Mushroom caps protect the delicate gills from being bombarded by raindrops. The gills need the moisture so they don't dry out, but the pressure from rain would destroy them.
In the speed with which they spring up, in their numbers, and in their strangeness, mushrooms are the offspring of the forest earth itself. One day the woods are dark, green, empty. Next morning they're full of pallid little visitors.Castle Freeman, Jr. in Spring Snow |
Cathie Katz, the author of several books on natural history, also co-founded The Drifting Seed, an international newsletter about rain forest drift seeds. In her engaging Nature a Day at a Time, published by Sierra Club Books and Random House, Katz interweaves fascinating facts about familiar creatures, pen-and-ink drawings and quotations.
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