Ingold's Jewels
Ingold's Jewels
This chapter discusses the biology of a cross-section of aquatic fungi. In fast-flowing creeks, foams froth around half-submerged branches or at the bottom of waterfalls. Cakes of foam trap and concentrate the same kinds of marvelous spores all over the world: some are star-shaped with thin limbs connected to a central hub, others are crescent-shaped or sigmoid (an elongated S twisted into an extended helix), and a few combine these features and look like animals created by balloon sculptors. These are the conidia of Ingoldian hyphomycetes, named for their discoverer, Cecil Terence Ingold. As a young professor in Leicester in 1938, Ingold found them in foam that collected in “a little, alder-lined, babbling brook” close to his home. After months of research, he concluded that the spores were formed by a hitherto unknown group of aquatic fungi that were instrumental in leaf decomposition.
Keywords: aquatic fungi, spores, water, Cecil Terence Ingold, leaf decomposition
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