Tag: Fungi

The fungus and bacteria tackling plastic waste – BBC News

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Plastic is blighting the world. I try to avoid it, but my bin is still shamefully full of it.

I have managed to avoid some by not using plastic bottled soaps, shampoos and toothpastes, but it is literally a drop in the ocean.

I have tried writing to cat food manufacturers to ask then to make pouches of cat food in biodegradable packaging , but got no where, so I was heartened by this article that particularly mentions Nestle who make the cat food that my planet destroying fur balls demand.

Fungi maybe the answer to concreting over the world by making building materials and it might just save us from plastic rubbish too .Why future homes could be made of living fungus

Here’s to the mighty mycelium!

Bacteria, fungus and enzymes can all digest plastic, but can they work at a useful commercial scale?
— Read on www.bbc.com/news/business-57733178

Scarlet Elf Cup.

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Scarlet elf cup is perfectly named. This fungi is pale orange on the outside, vermillion on the inside and as delicately formed as a tiny porcelain bowl. The cups appear at this time of year on fallen twigs, especially hornbeam and it is one of those wonderful species found across continents on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean.

This group of Sarcoscypha coccinea was found on a wet Sunday walk in the Jura and may well be the varient . When looking this up on the inter web, I found the same story repeated over and over again: children in the Jura were said to eat elf cups on bread and butter and the cups were used to serve schnapps in.   Now hipster wild food foragers and over imaginative chefs have found many bizarre and unappealing ways of serving wild food that would have been better left to the creatures of the forest; but I have never yet been served them as a sandwich filling or used as a glass here in the Jura. It does go to show how the same misinformation is recycled even in the quiet world of natural history and it leads you to wonder how much more prevalent this incestuous repetition must be in the wider world where we all get our information from the web.    Pass the schnapps filled elf cup!!

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