1993 - Mycological Society of America

Commerical users of facilities, holdings, and/or personnel at the And to every cloud silver lining?
New York Botanical Garden pay user fees. This has been instituted
only within the past year or so. For example, I have
charged (and received payment) the ~~~~~~~~~~~l
community for identification of possible poisonous mushrooms.
The physicians or labs were informed at the outset that there
would be a consulting fee. The monies have been deposited into
a restricted mycology account at the Garden.
Roy Hulling
New York Botanical Garden
In my opinion the golden days of classical mycology were shen
the field was dominated by enthusiastic amateurs. Way back
then, there were a few rich gentlement scientim, some
teachers, a few preachers, and a lot of enthusiastic amateurs.
With the demise of the "classical" mycology programs the field
may one again to the amateurs, And once
more become the domain of people who are in it for the love,
not the money. Perhaps "Another Outmoded Tradition" will be
brought - back.
Martin MacKenzie
Enthusiastic Amateur
USDA-Forest Service
Morgantown, WV
A Proposal for Emending the Class "Diskomycetes"*
by John W. McCain'
Fungi are classified by many mycologists accord-
ing to comparative morphology and cytology. There-
fore, the Class Discomycetes has been held to in-
clude those fungi producing asci in apothecia.
Fungi are also classified by industrial and medical
mycologists, microbiologists, and plant pathologists
according to substrate. By this latter system, I pro-
pose to resurrect the category of Diskomycetes [sic]
for those fungi I have found growing on the surfaces
of computer diskettes. Because such "diskophagous"
fungi have not yet been retrieved from metal hard
disks but only from plastic-based diskettes, the spell-
ing of the group name may need to be corrected to
Di s kettomycetes.
The format of the new class Diskettomycetes is a
polyphyletic array of opportunistic saprophytes, in-
cluding species from soft sectors of the genera Asper-
gillus, Penicillium, and Trichoderma. This group
was initialized with Paecilomyces variotii. All byte-
sized fungi in our program to date are ASCII-
mycetes. As some isolates can also colonize magnet-
ic media used for video and audio recording, back-
up specimens will be on-line at the American TAPE
Culture Collection.
The mode of nutrition of Diskettomycetes remains
cryptic. Preliminary tests of diskettes obtained from
lawyers' offices have eliminated the organic content
of stored datafiles as potential growth factors. Fur-
ther tests will input a menu of chips or of mouse or
daisychain buffer.
In preliminary genetic tests, known DNA se-
quences were stored as datafields, but none of the
codes were copied to the "diskophilous" fungi. Thus,
there appears to be no gene-for-gene interface ex-
plaining "resistance" in diskettes; i.e., Ohm's Law
was a better fit than Flor's Law.
Taxonomy of computer fungi requires new soft-
ware - in humid climates, new software may be
needed every few weeks!. In this group, classifica-
tion should not be rigid; it should be floppy.
Based on the abstract: McCain, J.W. & C.J. Mirocha. 1990. Fungi iso-
lated from computer miaodiskettes. MSA Newslefter41(1): 28.
Figure 1. No fungi have yet been found growing directly Figure 2. Diskettomycetes aresaprophytes whose intake/
on computer hardware as depicted here. output devices can crunch byte-sized software.