Friday, July 1, 2011

Scientists find bizarre mushroom, name it after “SpongeBob”

What lives in the rain forest, under a tree? Spongiforma squarepantsii, a new species of mushroom almost as odd as the cartoon character scientists named it after.

“It’s just like a sponge with these big hollow holes,” said San Francisco State University biologist Dennis Des­jardin. “When it’s wet and moist and fresh, you can wring water out of it and it will spring back to its original size. Most mushrooms don’t do that.”

Its discovery in the forests of Borneo suggests that even some of the most charismatic characters in the fungal kingdom are yet to be iden­tified, he added. Shaped like a sea sponge, it was found in 2010 in the Lambir Hills in Sarawak, Malaysia. It’s bright or ange and smells “vaguely fruity or strongly musty,” according to a description by Des­jardin and colleagues published in the research journal Mycologia.

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