Word: fungi
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Deadly rivals of man and beast for the life-sustaining juices of the earth's green plants are a vigorous group of non-green plants-the fungi. For ages men watched helplessly while these vegetable vampires literally sucked the green blood of plants, wasted their crops. But about 100 years ago, men armed themselves with scientific weapons and began a desperate war-still raging-against the fungal underworld. Last fortnight, in The Advance of the Fungi (Holt; $4), British Chemist E. C. Large offered a vivid story of the last century's battles, a brilliant reconnaissance...
...Fungi (with the algae which do have chlorophyll) are the earth's oldest and most primitive plants, lacking root, stems and leaves. Fungi also lack the power of green plants to make food out of sunlight, carbon dioxide and water, and must therefore live off organic matter. So there are two types of fungi: 1) parasites, which feed on living plants and animals; 2) saprophytes, which feed on dead organisms. Pleasant are some fungi, such as the mushrooms (commercially grown on horse manure) which decorate steaks. Valuable are others, like the bacteria which decompose dead organisms, fix nitrogen...
...most promising to work in Australia. By far the most potent destroyer proved to be a little moth borer, Cactoblastis cactorum. The larvae of this insect eat the inside of the pear plant, even the roots, and their depredations promote rotting due to bacteria and fungi. Armed with strings of moth borer eggs glued to strips of paper, fieldworkers swarmed through prickly pear land, pinned their deadly eggs on the plants...
Edgar v. Sealer, Jr. '32 of Cambridge, Mass., who will continue his studies on the Neetriales, a group of fungi of considerable importance in plant pathology, was named Honorary Research Associate in Mycology...
They include sponges, jellyfish, earthworms, brittle stars, crustaceans, insects, spiders, molluscs, squid, marine worms, hydroids, siphonophores, sea pens, cteno-phores, corallines, myriapods, balanoglos-sids, ascidians, fish. There are also two kinds of luminous plants-certain bacteria and fungi. These are responsible for the dim shining of damp wood and stale meat, the ghastly glow occasionally seen on human corpses...