Carnivorous toadstool blogging: Farmaceuticals

A more reputable blogger discusses a natural yet market-based form of helminthic therapy, i.e. reaping the salutary health benefits of infesting one's guts with nematodes (roundworms, pinworms, hookworms, threadworms, whipworms, earworms and Bonian worms).

But the iron-cast Laws of Narrative dictate that once the nematodes have finished their work they will proliferate unchecked and get out of hand. How to deal with them then?

When nematodes go bad

The case-study of the Old Lady and her Progressive Engulfment suggests that one remedy is to swallow something that eats nematodes.

Side-ear but not a fungus

Riddled readers will be already familiar with the existence of nematophagous toadstools. Among the class, it emerges, is the 'Southern side-ear' Pleurotus australis, known as the Oyster Mushroom although it neither secretes pearls nor squirts water in one's eye in self-defense, chiz chiz. And what grows wild in this neighbourhood?


P. australis, is what, NOM NOM NOM.*

But the case-study also reminds us that once the nematodes have been digested, it may be the turn of the fungal hyphae to wriggle and jiggle inside one, requiring an escalation to a further medicinal / culinary treatment. What else eats fungus? Hmmm bacon.

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* Note diagnostic feature of decurrent gills. Not red-currant gills... we have drawn a discreet veil over that episode in the annals of Riddled Genetic Research and agreed not to speak of it again.

Bonus fungal facts: Mycologists receive Special Dispensation!!!

At present Article 59 of the International Code of Botanical Nomenclature permits mycologists to give asexually reproducing fungi (anamorphs) separate names from their sexual states (teleomorphs). When names are available for both anamorph and teleomorph states of the same fungus, the holomorph either takes the teleomorph name, or it can under some circumstances take the anamorph name if it is subsequently epitypified with a teleomorph.

Is there no end to the favouritism and political soundness?