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According to the
recent approach to the taxonomy of living organisms, fungi are
treated as an autonomous group, which is considered separate from
animals and plants and has a kingdom status. It has been estimated
that there are about 3-4 thousand of fungi on the area of the
Bia³owie¿a Forest. Mushrooms, which are usually associated with this
name, constitute a very low percentage of them. Fungi are a very
diversified group, which contains unicellular organisms (i.e. yeast),
molds, mushrooms and others, with both soft and hard, perennial
fruitbodies (the so called bracket fungi). A separate group of fungi
which are quite popular in the Forest are the slime molds.
According to the
present taxonomy, lichens the organisms which arose from the
combination of algae and fungi into one symbiotic formation - belong
to the fungi kingdom. In this relationship, algae are responsible
for photosynthesis, i.e. providing carbohydrates, whereas fungi take
mineral salts from the ground and constitute "the skeleton" of this
formation.
In the Bia³owie¿a
forest there is a great diversity of lichens (at present there are
about 400 species). Almost all ecological types of lichens are
represented: from the rarest rock lichens, through the species
related to dead wood and growing on the soil, up to epiphytes.
Unfortunately, due to air pollution, the most sensitive lichen
species are already extinct or are dying out at present. In
comparison with historical data it has been stated that in the
recent years 58 lichen species have disappeared. Fruticose lichens,
which are very rare today, belong to the group which is most
sensitive to air pollution. Foliaceous lichens, which cover whole
tree trunks, are less sensitive and can still be encountered in many
places. The least sensitive and most wide-spread groups are
crustaceous and powder lichens.
Most of the mushrooms
produce soft, often edible fruitbodies, which makes them popular.
Many people consider them as typical fungi representatives. Contrary
to this belief, they constitute the least numerous, and therefore
unrepresentative group of the fungi kingdom. They are not a
homogenous group of organisms in the taxonomic sense, either.
Usually, the mushrooms are divided into two subgroups: tube
mushrooms (king bolete, slippery jack, birch bolete, bitter bolete)
and gill mushrooms (toadstool, shaggy parasol, honey mushroom).
Apart from them, there are many fungi with soft fruitbodies, whose
shapes do not resemble common mushrooms at all (jelly fungus, coral
fungus, etc). Some of them used to be collected and consumed in the
past: cauliflower fungus, toothed coral fungus and morels. Nowadays
they are very rare and therefore placed under legal protection.
Fungi which produce
hard, chitin fruitbodies with bracket shapes are commonly referred
to as bracket fungi. Most of them are unknown to an average person
and considered completely useless. Our ancestors (in many regions of
Poland not longer than a few dozen years ago) knew and used at least
one kind of bracket fungus: hardwood trunk rot. They used it to
produce "hubka" [tinder], an inflammable material which together
with a flint and a piece of metal comprised the set for striking
fire. Wild-bee keepers in the Bia³owie¿a Forest used another kind of
bracket fungus, Daedalea quercina, to smoke bees when taking away
honey.
Having a closer look
at bracket fungi, one can notice that not all of them are hard. Some
of them can even be edible, but usually at a very early stage of
development - e.g. sulphur shelf (Laetiporus sulphureus) and
beefsteak fungus (Fistulina hepatica). An interesting case is the
aniseed-smelling Gloeophyllum odoratum - a bracket fungus growing on
dead spruce wood. |
