Outdoor Activity 3: Making a mycelium

Photo © John Latham and reproduced with the permission of King Edward School, Aberdeenshire.

This outdoor activity complements the ‘make a mycelium’ indoor activity described in ‘Introduction to fungi' and shown in the picture below.

Photo © ama and reproduced with the permission of St Faith's School, Cambridge.

The purpose of this activity is to investigate the hidden parts of a fungus and to see how fairy rings might be formed.

You will need:

• A central post to attach the strings to.

• 12 (or more depending on the number of children) wooden posts with plastic pots nailed onto the top (these are the food source stations)
• Posts without pots on top to form a circle around the randomly placed posts with pots.
  
• A mallet
• Tiddlywinks (or Smarties!) - enough for each child to collect 4 different colours
• String on winders (or a ball of string tied at one end to the central post)
• Balloons and tissue, water sprayers, balloon sticks to make mushrooms with spots as demonstrated in Activity 2: mushroom spots. Note: It would be far quicker and easier – but not such fun - to use the little cocktail umbrellas (used in the indoor activity introduction to fungi), or spotty umbrellas, as mushroom fruit bodies at the end of this activity.

When conditions are just right - fungus fruits (mushrooms) emerge from the fine threads of fungal mycelium that lie out of sight beneath the ground.

Photo © ama

Making a mycelium

The children start out as a fungal spore, standing back to back in the middle of the posts (this is the point at which they were dropped by wind currents or some other vehicle after leaving the gills of their parent mushroom fruit body. Each child has a winder or ball of string, attached to a central post and must unwind the string (the fungal hyphae) to become the network of tiny tubes that feed the fungus – the mycelium. The tubes are looking for food – on top of each food post there is a pot. In some of the pots there are coloured counters (or chocolate smarties!). These counters represent food. Each strand of the mycelium must find four different coloured counters before it has found enough food to produce a fruit body at one of the outside markers. Here are the rules, every time you reach a food post you must wrap your bit of the mycelium around it and set off in a new direction until you have found the 4 counters. Then find an outside post that doesn’t already have a mushroom there. An adult will check that you have enough food and then you can grow your own mushroom (follow the instructions given in the mushroom spots activity) until a ‘fairy ring’ has been formed.

Look back at the mycelial network and briefly explain about fairy rings. The tubes in the centre of the ring will gradually die off leaving the tubes around the edge of the ring active and producing a ring of mushrooms. 

The children are quite happy to rewind the strings and do this very quickly.