Rare fungus in Scotland with WWI origina

[Jerry B]

An interesting if unproven theory that a rare fungus found at a site in Scotland was likely to have been carried there on the boots of WWI officers who were there for treatment.

The fungi Clavulinopsis cinereoides is rarely seen in Europe.

Ecologist Abbie Patterson made the discovery on a lawn at Napier University's Craiglockhart Campus.

He was working on a contract to catalogue biodiversity amongst plants, birds, mammals, lichens and invertebrates for the university.

He told BBC Scotland he had come up with a "quirky theory" that soldiers' boots may have picked up spores while tramping the fields of Flanders.

During World War One the university campus site served as a military hospital where the war poets Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon were famously treated.

Mr Patterson said: "Looking at an old photograph of First World War officers standing on the grass banking where I found the fungi, my thoughts turned to the question of how the species arrived here at all.

"I thought of the soldiers' boots trampling the devastated fields of Flanders and perhaps picking up spores of C cinereoides and then depositing them on that grassy bank below the old Hydropathic."


BBC News - Rare fungus discovered in Scotland

[Gunny Hartmann]

Interesting article Jerry but i thought it would have been "discovered" long before now, maybe nobody took any notice!...

[Jerry B]

Interesting article Jerry but i thought it would have been "discovered" long before now, maybe nobody took any notice!...

I assume you would have to be a fungus nerd to notice it?

[Erno]

I won't believe it until I see the fungus in a period photograph.

[HPL2008]

I assume you would have to be a fungus nerd to notice it?

Join your local hobby mycologist society: Putting the fun in fungus!

[harryamb2]

why hasn't it spread in all this time?.