Australian National Botanic Gardens

ANBG fungal course - 2008

Mushrooms, Stinkhorns, Cannonball Fungi and more...

by Heino Lepp

Visit Heino's Fungi website

The course is aimed at anyone who is curious about what fungi are and the roles they play. If your only interest is eating - this course is DEFINITELY NOT for you. You don't need any previous fungal or botanical knowledge. I will carefully explain the few essential technical terms.

There will be one lecture per week for 10 weeks, as well as some time looking at fungi in the ANBG. We'll arrange those dates during the course.

There will be two streams of lectures:

Thursdays and Sundays The Sunday lecture will repeat the Thursday lecture.

Starting dates and times: Thursday May 1, at 2:30pm and Sunday May 4 at 11am

Where: the theatrette at the ANBG

Cost: a gold coin for the Friends of the ANBG.

Here is an outline of the sessions:

Session 1 - The basics

What is a mushroom?
Hyphae: the thread-like building blocks.
The mycelium: the out-of-sight network of hyphae that produces mushrooms.
What are macrofungi and microfungi? The course will deal mostly with macrofungi.
Ascomycetes and basidiomycetes - two classes of macrofungi.

Session 2 - Spore release & dispersal

Review of the fundamentals from Session 1.
A look at how spores are released - the mechanisms vary from passive to explosive.

Sessions 3 & 4 - Some aspects of fungal ecology

Fungal lifestyles.
The essential ecological roles of fungi.
How fungi interact with plants, animals and other fungi.

Session 5 - Fungi and humans

A look at some of the economic, social and cultural impacts of fungi.

Session 6 - Mycogeography & knowledge of Australian fungi

Where and why do you find fungi?
What's known about Australian fungi?

Session 7 - Some history, mostly 1500-1850

The development of our understanding of the basics of fungi.

Session 8 & 9 – Reproduction & survival

Reproduction – sexual & asexual
Life cycles – some examples of the variety of spore-to-fruiting body pathways
Survival strategies - sclerotia, chlamydospores

Session 10 – Structure, classification & identification

More detail about the internal structure of fungal fruiting bodies.
How do we go about classifying and identifying fungi?
Finally - What is a fungus?......The full, scary definition.

Don't come to this session expecting to learn how to identify fungi. You need more than one session for that! What I will do is to describe some of the features and tools used to classify or identify fungi.