Some edible fungi may puff--Don't sniff too closely!
Have you ever heard of an edible fungus that puffs out spores when you squeeze it? Have you ever imagined that you may end up with pneumonia if you inhale these spores?
Lycoperdon pyriforme, a puffball, is a member of the class Gasteromyces. When you translate its name from Greek, you come up with "pear-shaped puffball" or "wolf-flatus puffball" (pyriform: pear-shaped; lyco: wolf; perdon: to break wind, intestinal gas). This fungus is found in woods and produces basidiospores. The basidiospores are puffed out when exposed to an outside force, such as insects, rain, wind, degradation by bacteria or fungi, or simply squeezing.
Lycoperdon pyriforme is edible at its earlier maturation stage. It looks like a marshmallow. However, one should be very cautious when eating these puffballs--
Lycoperdon pyriforme should be differentiated from
Scleroderma and
Amanita, the poisonous edible fungi.
The medical importance of
Lycoperdon pyriforme is due to the secondary effects of its use in folk medicine as an hemostatic agent for epistaxis. A case report published in 1976 clearly shows that, the spores of this fungus, when inhaled in large amounts, may cause an acute, self-limited pneumonia [
819]. A story from West Bend, Wisconsin (
www.botany.wisc.edu/) also ends up with a similar clinical picture. Some of the students were sold
Lycoperdon fruiting bodies and told that
Lycoperdon is an hallucinogenic fungus. When the students puffed out the spores and inhaled them, they ended up with a self-limited respiratory infection. These observations suggest that
Lycoperdon pyriforme can cause human infections, lycoperdonosis [
1740]. Fortunately,
Lycoperdon pyriforme is of low virulence and the infection is benign.
Want to see how this fungus looks like? For more detailed information about this fungus, the amazing pictures of how
Lycoperdon puffs out, and more, visit
Tom Volk's web page.
