Word: fungus
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Cryptogamic-i.e., devious in sexual behavior. As late as 1875 many scientists argued that some fungi were of spontaneous generation. So tiny and evasive were the winter spores of the potato fungus that they were not identified until 1910. Further, reproduction among fungi was usually sexless, with a sexual union occurring perhaps only once in several generations...
...Polymorphous-i.e., varying radically in form from season to season (like insects which are now egg, now worm, now butterfly). Plants once classed as unrelated proved to be variant forms of one species. And as a fungus changed form, it often changed the host it preyed upon...
With this baffling enemy sized up, intelligent defense could begin. The rust, a fungus which destroyed 300,000,000 bushels of wheat in North America in 1916, was proved to pass part of its life cycle on barberry bushes. So, within twelve years, some 18,500,000 of these bushes were destroyed in the U. S. alone. Wild currants were eradicated because they nourished a blister-fungus of U. S. white pine...
Another line of attack against plant fungi is to develop naturally immune strains by breeding. At the turn of the century long-fibred U. S. cotton was rescued from fungus by crossbreeding with a resistant Egyptian variety; in the 1920s Louisiana sugar cane was saved by supplanting the old "noble" strains with resistant breeds. In 1937 the U. S. Bureau of Plant Industry estimated that more than one-fourth of U. S. farmlands were planted to disease-resistant crops...
...Fortnight ago a fungus was insured by Lloyds of London for $1,000,000. Policyholder is the Falstaff Brewing Corp. of St. Louis, which thus treasures its unique, 50-year-old brewer's yeast...