want to grow Cordyceps sinesis...

[Felix]

What are my chances of finding Cordyceps spawn or culture?

[Rev]

Good

if you hang around the shroomery long enough

You should be able to get a culture however itll be the saprophytic anamorph not the infectious one you need to get through to the fruiting cycle which is where the real $ is

However you can use the mycelium cultured on brown rice medium for health benefeits and this is how some compies who do it commercially do it

They say to keep it on 'insect agar'

dont know what that is?

ground freeze dried mealworm tea?? crickets? roaches?

I would hazard a guess you could make a good mix from PDA or MYA supplemented with insect meal or even another crustacean

[Felix]

Thanks, found this at the shroomery

http://www.shroomery.org/forums/showflat-N...ber-560821.html

Im happy to just farm the mycelium, but yes it would be fun to try and fruit the infectious kind.

I think most commercial growers use silkworm substrates but some use soy based products. C.Militaris fruits straight from grain.

You can buy the whole fruit bodies and yes they are pricey. But I wonder if commercial growers allow the spores to develop?

[Ed Dunkel]

Insect agar could be agar made for growing insect or insect cells on or for doing plaq assays to calculate baculovirus (insect virus) titres.

An educated guess from a biochemist friend of mine.

[ 06. September 2004, 12:46: Message edited by: Ed Dunkel ]

[JumpedAngel]

So what are you saying rev?, are you saying these babies are worth going back for?, tell you the truth, I already knew they grew on grubs/larva but wasn't impressed by its ediblity, medical props.?, 5 grams and one greassy duck? viaduck? sounds like horsefeathers to me, (hehe)

[Torsten]

JA or rev, what's that yellow fettucine type thing on the right. Used to grow all over my place on the mid north coast. It looked very inviting.

[JumpedAngel]

Rev sounds like he know much more about this than me but at $4/gm they look inviting to me too, hehe, there appears to be hundreds of these things scattered around the globe and i doubt that anyone could id the ones in my dinky photo's. I might go back and grab them just for trials but I have done some googleing and haven't come across anything yet which would help in really id.ing the local ones.

[Rev]

sorry to be a kill-joy

Im pretty sure the yellow ones are Ramariopsis or Ramaria.

like this one from NZ...

Ramariopsis antillarum

not cordyceps

Some Ramariopsis are edible but none notably gourmet

A pity as they look cool and you could make some wicked looking dishes with them

Cordyceps are much less common though may be locally abundant if they infect insect species that congegate to lay eggs - like bogong moths or plague locust for example

Many species of cordyceps are endangered by overharvesting across asia and if we discover a useful species here we should move to attempt cultivation with haste and move to limit/regulate wild harvetsed sales immediately

[ 08. September 2004, 18:57: Message edited by: reville ]

[planthelper]

found that.

http://www.cyberoz.net/city/sekine/fungi_1.htm

http://www.shroomery.org/forums/showflat-N...21-fpart-3.html

[ 09. September 2004, 10:41: Message edited by: planthelper ]

[JumpedAngel]

question rev

how would you make a spore print out of one of these

[Rev]

good q

hmm

maybe hang by a thread n pin above a piece of card, glass slide, petri

allow spores to fall they should , if visible look like some kind of off centre spray rather than the conventional print

alternatively lay horizontally across a microscope slide

and/or when its over rinse with a minimum of tween + water to dislodge any into solution

which may be useful for infection purposes

then split the sterile stem to clone the inner tissue for veg mycelium. I would suggest antibiotics are a must. media? try a few

Insect agar to plain PDA

Cordyceps gunnii is talked about a bit in VIC

by fungimap

http://fungimap.rbg.vic.gov.au/fsp/sp017.html

or C hawkesii

http://fungimap.rbg.vic.gov.au/fsp/sp018.html

these may well become threatened in future so any cultivation research even to see what they will grow on is valuable and novel

maybe one day we'll find a useful species that can be used as a biocontrol agent for a pest of food crops

this site already suggest C hawkesii is doing the rounds as an adulterant cordyceps sp.

http://www.euyansang.com.sg/others/content...s_id=0000000325

This pdf found by google suggests C gunii and C hawkesii are synonyms but i cant access it

[PDF] Molecular evidence for teleomorph–anamorph connections in ...

File Format: PDF/Adobe Acrobat

... The morphological and sequence data confirm that Paecilomyces hawkesii is the anamorph

of Cordyceps gunnii, while Cordyceps hawkesii is a synonym of C. gunnii ...

journals.cambridge.org/article_S0953756202006378

[ 09. September 2004, 21:23: Message edited by: reville ]

[JumpedAngel]

Okally dokally, i did a little research on Cordyceps before going back out there yesterday..... "there are species of Cordyceps which attack a wide variety of living organism. Cordyceps capitata and C. ophioglossoides both attack false truffles, growing out of the ground in pine woods as drum-stick or club-shaped bodies up to 10 cm high. Cordyceps militaris, however, feeds off buried insect pupae. The relationship between fungi and insects is, however, quite often beneficial to both sides. One unusual example is that of a Stereum species, the spores of which are stored by the female giant wood wasp (Uroceras gigas) in special glands. As the eggs are laid, spore of the Stereum are also injected into the wood. the spores germinate and digest the wood into a state more suited to the young wasp larvae"... 'The World of Mushrooms' - Orbis

There was no sign of the three specimens that i spotted there last time, the only similar thing out there was the one shown below which is again looks like another Ramaria, this was located in a gully nearby, within 1 km, many thanks for your help rev, all there is left to do now is to schedule another trip out there for next winter.

(isn't it amazing how interesting wombat shit can be, I admired the specimen below for ages, thinking that it might be some exotic truffle or something before i realized what it was)

[Rev]

JumpedAngel:

the spores germinate and digest the wood into a state more suited to the young wasp larvae"... 'The World of Mushrooms' - Orbis

Yes the Stereum would decay the indigestible Lignin leaving the cellulose behind. Cellulose is the susbtance that makes up straw (and hemi-cellusose) and this would in turn be digested by the protozoal or bacterial gut flora of the larvae just like ruminants manage it.

From memory fingi that digest lignin preferentially are called brown-rot fungi and also include species like shiitake

Ha! wouldnt it be nice to have them innoculate logs with shiitake instead

In Chile they feed wood logs decayed by ganoderma species to cattle as the fungi has done the same thing as stereum and industrial research has looked at several basidiomycetes to do the same thing isn vats to paper pulp to selectively remove the lignin.

Stereum itself while not edible is the host of one of the edible jelly fungi Tremella

[ 12. September 2004, 15:28: Message edited by: reville ]