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​A little thing called Tryssglobulus

9/7/2024

12 Comments

 
PictureOnly two specimens of Tryssglobulus aspergilloides have
ever been collected and one of them was found in the
Western Port Woodlands
By Ian Pascoe
 
IF YOU go down to the woods today, you’ll only see a fraction of the organisms that live there. You will probably fail to see the really little things. You might see mushrooms and mosses and lichens and beetles and ants and flies and other things that you are already familiar with. But I’m talking about the really little things, some of which you will never have heard of.
 
Let me tell you about Tryssglobulus aspergilloides. You’re unlikely to know about this tiny fungus, because only two specimens have ever been collected and one of them was found in the Western Port Woodlands!

In 1986, when I was working for Agriculture Victoria as a mycologist, I spent a year with my English colleague Dr Brian Sutton, working on a research project to identify new species of plant pathogenic fungi with potential to affect native plants of potential importance in horticulture. We travelled all over Victoria and other states, walking in the bush looking for plants with leaf spots, stem cankers and other disease symptoms.
 
We became, at one stage, very interested in leaf diseases of Banksia species, and got to know the leaf spots on the upper surface of leaves, but also began to see lots of dark fungi growing within the white, tomentose (woolly) undersurface. There were quite a few species of fungi there and all of them were black, so we got into the habit of collecting quite a few leaves with symptoms to look at when we got back to the lab. One leaf of Banksia marginata that we collected in the Brisbane Ranges had a tiny spot on the lower surface, with a tiny black fungus growing out of what looked like a bit of insect damage.
 
We made a microscope slide, put it under the microscope and immediately realised that it was like nothing we had seen before. We knew that we had not a just new species but a new genus. We called it Tryssglobulus aspergilloides (Tryssglobulus from the Greek roots for lovely little ball) and aspergilloides (meaning - looks a bit like Aspergillus). In 1987 we published a paper describing the fungus in the Transactions of the British Mycological Society 88: 41-46. But we never saw the fungus again!
Picture
The original drawings by Brian Sutton. The scale bars are in micrometres or microns (1/1000th of a millimetre). The conidiophores (the little stalks) average 300-360 microns, the conidiogenous head (the ball at the top) is 17-50 microns in diameter, and the condia (spores) are 2-5 microns diameter.

​In the following decades my colleague Pedro Crous in the Netherlands started asking me if I could try to collect more specimens so that he could grow it in culture
and get a DNA sequence to fit the fungus into the family tree of the fungi. And he kept reminding me to keep looking.
 
Thereafter, I could never walk past a plant of Banksia marginata without stopping and looking for Tryssglobulus, but I could never find it. When Pedro’s asking progressed to nagging, I even went collecting in the Brisbane Ranges but still could not find any trace of it. The fungus, having only been collected once, and never seen again despite much searching, was proposed for listing as “Red Listed” in the Fungal Red List as “A very distinctive microfungus, known only from the type locality  in the Brisbane Ranges, Victoria, Australia.”
 
In 2020 I was walking in the Gurdies Nature Reserve with my wife Joy and, of course, looking for B. marginata, turning over lots of leaves without finding anything at first. Eventually I saw a very stunted little plant with brown lesions on the leaf that I recognised as insect damage. Remembering that there was some insect damage associated with the original specimen, I picked several leaves and examined them with my trusty hand lens. On the lower surface amongst the  leaf-miner damage I thought there might have been something growing but it was too small to tell.
Picture
The Banksia marginata with insect damage.
Picture
Close-up of the fungus on the edge of the underside of the leaf showing the little stalks (conidiophores) with spore-bearing heads on top.
I took it home, put it under the microscope and “Eureka!” – it was Tryssglobulus!!
 
At last! I took photos and emailed them to Pedro in the Netherlands. He was ecstatic. I immediately posted specimens to him so he could get it into culture and get a DNA sequence.
 
In the meantime, worried that it might get lost in the mail, I decided to get the fungus into culture myself. I bought some petri dishes, bought some agar from the health food shop and, using our new pressure cooker, sterilised the petri dishes, sterilised the agar in glass bottles and finally poured the melted agar into the petri dishes. I transferred spores of the fungus onto the agar and eventually got it growing, then transferred it to sterilised pieces of banksia leaves and got it producing spores on the leaf pieces. 
Picture
Microscope photo of the fungus amongst the hairs from under the leaf.
Picture
A single conidiophore with the head of spores (conidia) on top.
Picture
The head of the conidiophore head with conidia attached.
Picture
Scanning electron microsope images of the fungus from a paper by Pedro Crous and colleagues.
In due course Pedro’s team got the sequence and placed it in a phylogram next to its closest relatives. To our disappointment it doesn’t look anything like its relatives! So although we have found it and worked out its place in the fungi, it remains an elusive, enigmatic and beautiful little fungus.
Picture
Ultimately the scarcity of Tryssglobulus aspergilloides appears to be due to its cryptic behaviour, hidden, almost invisible amongst the “wool” on the underside of Banksia marginata leaves with damage from a small insect. It is probably not all that scarce, or endangered. Just a very tiny, hard to find, obscure fungus. As for its relationship with insect damage, it seems likely that the damage is caused by the larvae of the Banksia leaf-miner moth Stegommata sulfuratella which burrows into the lower epidermis of the leaf under the cover of the woolly integument. My specimen had a tiny caterpillar crawling around but I failed to get it to pupate and emerge as a moth.  I suspect the fungus gets its nutrition from the frass (insect faeces and particles of leaf) and is more dependent on the moth than the moth is dependent on the fungus. Certainly the fungus is well placed to be picked up and dispersed by the moth as it emerges from its pupa and walks over the little balls covered with spores on the ends of long stalks.
 
Is Tryssglobulus important to the ecosystem of the woodlands?? Probably not. But the Banksia and the moth are clearly important to the fungus. But how can we really know? No-one has or is ever likely to study the complexity of the relationship. It’s just a tiny little obscure fungus that is very unlikely to be important to anyone except me and my colleagues. If nothing else, it’s my favourite fungus of all time and it made me happy!
 
But above all else it is a powerful reminder that the woodlands are full of little things that we don’t yet know about. And some of them will be very important!
12 Comments
anne m westwood
9/7/2024 11:37:00 am

Very interesting! The eternally fascinating world of synergies, the "partnerships" - more things in heaven and earth etc.

Reply
Ian Pascoe
21/7/2024 04:57:31 pm

Thanks Anne - indeed there are bound to be more things than we can ever know - so it is always a privilege to see something no-one has ever seen.

Reply
Margaret Lee
10/7/2024 01:12:30 pm

Absolutely fascinating. I will wander The Gurdies with eyes open to this

Reply
Ian Pascoe
21/7/2024 05:00:49 pm

Thanks Margaret - let me know if you find it!
There are lots of little things - I keep finding little fungi on the leaves and bark in my backyard - makes it hard to get much gardening done…

Reply
Sally
10/7/2024 01:57:00 pm

Ian, thank you for the magical reminder to appreciate the wonders of the things our eyes cannot see and your marvellous discovery- may there be more!

Reply
Ian Pascoe
21/7/2024 05:02:31 pm

Thanks Sally - keep looking - you never know what you might find!

Reply
Joan
14/7/2024 02:26:16 pm

For anyone who's interested, the Wonthaggi Library has a wonderful book available for loan called "The Allure of Fungi".

Reply
Ian Pascoe
21/7/2024 05:04:13 pm

Thanks Joan - I’ll look out for that!

Reply
Jon Temby
14/7/2024 02:39:43 pm

Great to have yet another special fungi found the the Westernport Woodlands. It would be an absolute disaster if the whole area was converted to a sand mine is appears to be the current trajectory

Reply
Ian Pascoe
21/7/2024 05:07:20 pm

Thanks Jon - it’s sad to think that the already cleared areas have lost things that non-one has ever seen

Reply
E
7/10/2024 04:14:51 am

Dr. Pascoe,

I am currently working on a project where we are looking at the microbial community structure on six different plasticized tent fabrics exposed to the jungle atmosphere of Panama and Suriname over the course of two years. After doing amplicon sequencing of the ITS region for the fungal community, I've found that Tryssglobulus aspergilloides is among the top 20 genera (#17) in relative abundance in the Panama samples! It seems to grow better on the two fabric types designed for the interior of the tents, which are overall less hardy than the fabrics designed for the outer layer. I believe it may have to do with the enzymes it produces to support an endophytic lifestyle, which may aid in partial degradation of the plasticized fabrics and utilization of it as a potential carbon source. However, this has yet to be tested, so it may be obtaining its carbon from elsewhere (such as the frass, as you've suggested) and simply using the fabrics as a foundation to grow on.

Regardless, after seeing this genus in the dataset and googling it to find this blog post, I felt it appropriate to inform you that there are others out there still interested in this little guy!

Cheers

Reply
Ian Pascoe
11/10/2024 10:49:22 am

Thanks very much for your comment - it came as a great surprise and really made my day. I would not have expected to find Tryssglobulus on a fabric on the other side of the world. We always assumed that it would only occur on Banksia marginata as we had failed to find it even on any other Banksia species. So we would never have expected it to occur on rotting fabrics. Of course, if it had not been sequenced, you would probably not identified it. So I am very pleased and surprised. Thank you again, and please feel free to contact me again by email. Best wishes, Ian Pascoe

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