Puffball+Fungi

=Giant Puffball: Bald Heads of Buried Giants?=

//Calvatia gigantea//

 * [[image:P1140794-1.JPG width="344" height="269"]]

Look what Angel found...
A Giant Puffball fungus! It's as big as a soccer ball, feels like a huge marshmallow, and all powdery with cocoa-like spores. This fungus grows SO BIG it is often mistaken for a sheep lying in a paddock. Puffballs are white before turning into a mass of brown spores which are eventually blown away by the wind. || www.ojibway.ca/mushrooms

Puffball Maths:
A Giant Puffball may contain 7 trillion spores. Lined up in single file, the spores would extend all the way around the Equator.

and....
If each spore produced a puffball the size of Angel's, the resulting puffballs would extend from the Earth to the Sun and back! ||
 * [[image:giant_puffball-12.jpg width="330" height="234"]]

Under the Dino-lite....
The Giant Puffball is a tangle of tiny strands called //**hyphae**//. Each strand is only one cell thick! All the strands tangled trogether are called the **//mycelium//**. Special enzymes in the mycelium can digest a log of wood! This is the way the fungus gets its food. ||

The threads are a bit like a huge power grid...
Between each strand are little thread-bridges, open at both ends for food-fluids to flow through, bringing lots of growing power to the fungus. || //Brown spores filling the mycelium//
 * [[image:giant_puffball-16.jpg width="333" height="254"]]

Puffball words....
//**spores**// - the "seeds" of the fungus || //A spongy mass of hyphae//
 * //sporocarp//** - the part of the fungus producing the spores
 * //gleba//** - the solid mass of spores within the sporocarp

Long, long ago....
After the first plants broke away from the jumble of early creatures, fungi and animals developed together for a little while. Although fungi have cell walls like plants, their walls are made of chitin - the same as insect and crustacean exoskeltons. Plant cell walls are made of cellulose. ||