Fungus

Tony, And I whole-hearted second that , not much to be learned from a copycat ignorent of all research done over the 10+ years after the book he simply summarizes without adding something sensible to it was published. Speaking of "narrowminded arrogance" based on a total lack of expertise.

Guy, 1. I sympathize with her, it must be a relieve to have you out of the house for a while . Just funnin' with ya Guy, take it easy and give my best regards to your wife. 2. And "qualifying" scientifically based answers to your questions as "broad insults" and "narrowminded arrogance" are typical American traits ? 3. Because of this bizarre way of communicating starting with : "far off the radar" ... "some offence still taken" ... "bully pulpit", followed by ridiculing my reply to your questions with suggestions for microscopical assessment by wishing for "world peace" and "a chicken in every pot", followed by : "We've excised Gerrit's constructive advice and will follow it" after I had withdrawn from the thread, "Thank for your frank responses; no sense beating around the bush. Keep them coming ", "Toss a few broad insults" and "narrowminded arrogance." 4. Best of luck, keep up the good work .

Guy, Also being a clinical psychologist/psychotherapist and an expert on human behaviour or communication, why am I not surprised ? Maybe a bit of introspection and self reflection could do wonders for you and for the good causes you're fighting for.

Thompson, Forget the second link (it's a double of the first one) and the movie Elephants of Kilimanjaro by Hugo von Lawick probably is the film Tony meant.

1. New Scientist article. 2. Elephant graveyard.

Thompson, So how do you explain the footage mentioned by Tony and the reports of ethological or animal behaviour researchers and filmers such as Hugo von Lawick on this phenomenon then ?

The main risk in pruining Malus is that the pruning surfaces get infected by spores of Inonotus hispidus or Polyporus varius, which are most present in the fruiting season of the annual bracket fungi, releasing their spores from late July or the beginning of August until the end of October to November, or by spores of Pholiota aurivella, which presence is more confined to September and October.

Tony, No worries, as I've decided to refrain from reacting to any future posts of Guy the TreeSeer.

Marko & Thompson, Tony and I should have used "...". You're taking this much to literally. I meant that elephants have specific places called "church yards" or "burial sites" they go to to lay down and die and that these places are visited by their relatives when they pass on their travelling journeys and shown to their new born while manipulating their remains (skull, tusks and bones).

At last a face to a name and a tattoo . And does Janey really have these huge hands or are they a product of using a specific lense to take the picture ?

Agreed, as I confirmed before with my remark on the other five forms of non-verbal (meta)communication or behavior, which by the way is the same thing, but would you be able to educate yourself or others and to visit and communicate through this forum, if no written language was available and to communicate with me if I would demand of you to write your posts in Dutch instead of English ?

Depending on your human definition of intelligence, cognition and sophisticated communicative skills, this is true or false. And maybe because of lacking certain skills other mammals have, we have invented artefacts and instruments to compensate for our "inadequacies" and to be able to research, assess, document and exploit the capacities and qualities other life forms possess.

Yes, elephants also visit the burial sites of their ancestors, but these are all forms of non-verbal communication or behaviour, which are interpreted by us in an anthropomorphistic or human centered way, not of verbal communication of the kind we humans use to communicate with, along with the five forms of non-verbal communication or behaviour, such as intonation and volume of speech or sound, body language or posture and facial expression including eye contact and fixation (only humans have white of the eye), display or ornamentation of the body, personal space (the space bubble) and territoriality.

Tony, Of dolphins is experimentally documented, that they have (a sense of) an individual (and social) identity, because they recognize themselves in a mirror. With other cetaceans with long term family and/or mother-child relationships, such as whales and orka's, they have in common, that they are known for their very sophisticated "verbal" communicative skills by using sound - clicking for dolphins and "singing" for whales - and for their refined sonar location (of prey) systems. Of orka's, nuclear family burying rituals of and mourning over a dying young has been filmed. But neither of all these capacities will have developed under the influence of "oceanic" drugs, I presume .

There is a lot more (scientific) literature on "stoned apes", elephants and other mammals, searching for and consuming ripe fermenting fruits containing alcohol related ingredients to get intoxicated and reach a state of drunkenness or "euphoria", but the effects are nothing compared to the effects psycho-actives or entheogens trigger in humans, reaching a state of "enlightenment" while experiencing vivid and colourful hallucinations and dreamlike "visions", impossible to be created in other mammals, because they lack the cones necessary for optimal colour vision within mind or in the outside world. Besides, how do you assess "consciousness" in animals, which can not communicate about their feelings or emotions and cognitive experiences ? I once had a hedgehog in my garden, which came to the ripe and fermenting grapes, which had fallen on the ground. After consuming some fruit, he/she was so drunk, that he/she kept sitting underneath the grapevine without a movement until the next morning. Apart from some reports of reindeer consuming Fly Agarics and licking up urin of Sami and other reindeer, who/which had digested the mushroom before, of which I was told, that the "habit" was induced and introduced by some Sami acting foolishly with their reindeer, there are no reports of mammals searching for and consuming powerful psycho-active plants or fungi. Have you ever seen a horse eating Psilocybe's growing on his or hers dung ?

Guy, 1. You obviously (again) have no idea of what the tree species specific ecosystem and soil food web, including ectomycorrhizal macrofungi, and the life cycle of a Fagus sylvatica of this age (in The Netherlands) looks like, as you would otherwise have understood, that nothing was done hastly or without adequate consideration, as the assessment of all aspects present and diagnosed, including the parasitic and root/wood degrading macrofungi and their tree species specific effects, were taken into account and you would not have suggested this senseless pruning or soil remediation as a "treatment" of a tree in its final reproductive phase. 2. No, why should I ? I'm a well trained Visual Tree Assessor and tree consultant, with over fifteen years of field experience monitoring over 15.000 trees, including mycological aspects, working together with and doing (mycological) research for Claus Mattheck, and (still) educating and training hundreds of Dutch and Belgian arborists and tree managers in the meanwhile in the MTA-method integrated VTA-method and in tree (risk) managment myself. 3. I prefer (teaching and) preaching fact-based scientific research. 4. Who's evaluating what "through such a limited perspective" then ? 5. Fat chance, as I'm no longer interested in anything you write. 6. Now you also seem to have short memory impairments. What about "far off the radar", "some offence still taken" or "bully pulprit" and ridiculing my rightful questions by wishing for "world peace" or a "chicken in every pot" ? No need to react on this post anymore, because I'll leave it at that and from now on stick to not answering to your remarks and questions anymore.

Guy, With these highly selective and not to the points raised answers to my rightful questions and remarks, you're obviously not only in need of a powerful hearing aid, but also of magnifying glasses to read and interpret the text of my post. So to avoid further investment in pointless discussions from both sides, I will no longer react to any of your future posts.

Cassian, Among many other things concerning the content of TreeSeer's posts, this selective answer to my questions is what definitively holds me back from re-entering and being "supportive" to this topic.

Tony, To produce new tube layers on the perennial brackets, the mycelium of G. pfeiferii has to decompose energy rich cellulose (a sugar polymere) from the dead wood of the central column of the beech and convert it into chitine (another sugar polymere), the building material of which the cell walls of fungi (mainly) are made. That is why fungi are closer related to insects then to (green) plants capable of producing energy (sugars) through fotosynthesis by and for themselves and the tree species specific ecosystem, to which the fungi (and insects) connect. For this, the mycelium only needs some hyphae connected to the living tissue of the tree to tap some energy from for the converting process, so in this respect, the mycelium for the greater part acts as a saprotrophic without doing much damage to the cambium, which explains the still viable healthy crown. Once the available cellulose taken from the tree diminishes, the mycelium can no longer form complete new tube layers, so the layers start to receed or retract, which is a symptom of panic fruiting because of the lack of energy provided by the tree's inside.

Tony, Sure it, i.e. the acidification caused by the brown coal heated industries in Germany, Poland and the Czech republic did, but only to trigger A. ostoyae as the primairy pathogen killing all the trees within a decade, a situation we could soon be facing with other tree species all over Europe because of the present nitrification.

Only fungi (and plants) with psycho-active constituents and not in human evolution as a whole, but in the speeding up of the development of our brain, i.e cognitions, a notion of individual (and social) identity and above all development of speech and language, evolving from sign and body language or theatricality (paleoperformance) and uttering sounds to the many languages or tongues we speak today and the ways of modern communication, which seperate us from our next of kin, the primates.

Guy, 1. What type of mycorrhizae, ecto- or endo ? How will you determine the presence of either of them, and more specifically of the first type, if no FB's of symbiotic macrofungi are above ground ? How will you interpret the presence (or absence) of (tree species) specific ectomycorrhizal macrofungi, if they are fruiting above ground ? And how do you know, that this Eucalypt species is associated with endo- or ectomycorrhizal micro- or macrofungi ? 2. Maybe rhizomorphs or plaques, as Tony already implied ? 3. Indeed, "from this severely limited mycological view", so why "contribute" with all this utter nonsense to the subject at hand. 4. You could have saved yourself from a lot of work by simply confining to this post from the thread you started yourself.

Alex, As I very well understood, but I merely wanted to point out, that the Adam & Eve and snake & "apple" fairy tale was a made up story or parable only created to conceal the truth to the masses of what early christianity was all about : - a pagan drug induced "religion" with rituals and ceremonies lead by shamans, who later became the priests and the pope, - worshipping the Fly Agaric, i.e. the Cosmic Egg, Golden Fleece, Holy Grail, Avalon, chalice (wine : "blood") and bread or host (flesh), as the one and only god, - with Jesus and Mary both being symbols or representations of the not yet fully understood (immaculate conception of both Anna and Mary) reproductive life cycle (mycelium, spores) of Amanita muscaria, - and Anna, mother of Mary (see the Tree of Jesse), being symbolized by the spruce, with which the symbiotic Fly Agaric (among others, f.i. birch : witches' broomstick with flying ointment) is associated (ectomycorrhiza), ... and to warn off people to stay away from the forbidden fruit, because one would be excluded from a (non-existing) heavenly paradise, if one would have a personal, i.e. an one on one close encounter with the deity without the interference or mediation of the shamans, i.e. the clergy or the only in mind control, manipulation of the masses and earthly power interested politicians of the church. The (supposed) "founder" of the christian church, the apostle Paul, if he did exist, was a megalomaniac paranoid schizofrenic, who had done a bit to much drugs to be healthy for his mental sanity. Until the last period of the Middle Ages, that is to say before the pharmacratic inquisition started, the use of floral and/or fungal drugs to reach "enlightment" and make "contact" or "communicate" with the deity, was restricted to the higher clergy and nobility, who had a special somewhat hightened part of the church near the altar closed off by a wall or curtains from the illiterate community, to perform their drug induced rituals and ceremonies in secrecy and hidden from the "ignorent" believers, just as they did in monasteries and nun's convents, of which the sectarian convents founded and "ran" by high priestess Hildegard of Bingen are a good example (I'm writing a paper and a book on her). In those days, asceticism was a method to highten the effects of the orally taken psycho-actives or entheogens used. At their initiation, monks had their heads shaven (tonsur) in order to put the red "fleece" of the cap of the Fly Agaric on top, making a direct uptake of the drug by the brain possible through the fine blood vessels in the skin, in order to overcome the awkward side effects of orally consuming it. Among us three, Jan Irvin, John Rush and I have documented over 4.000 examples of church art, (symbolically) depicting the Fly Agaric or the Liberty Cap and/or psycho-active plants, which survived the 16th century iconoclastic fury, of which only a few have been published this far.

Yes and no. Sometimes you have to assess and monitor the tree-fungus-environment "picture" over some years, as f.i. often is the case with annual biotrophic parasitic macrofungi, such as Meripilus giganteus or Pholiota squarrosa (photo 1) fruiting with lots of and/or extremely big FB's, in which case you also have to assess and monitor the panic fruiting of the tree characterized by lots of smaller and/or sterile seeds and the decline or vanishing of tree species specific ectomycorrhizal macrofungi. And with perennial bracket fungi you can often recognize panic fruiting by receding fertile tube layers (see second photo of Phellinus ignarius on Salix) or by (partially) sterile more or less bulbous FB's (see third photo of Daedalea quercina on Quercus rubra). ---

It is, if you take all the sand grains enclosed in the FB's cavities and an appointment with the dentist the next day for granted .