everything from nutrition to autism. Now ecologists have learned that those internal microbes can also escape and influence the environment outside us … or at least outside of hippos. A new study of hippos in Africa finds that when the animals defecate into the large pools they wade and swim in, they effectively create a poolwide “microbiome,” sharing gut bacteria with their comrades. And those community microbes can change the water chemistry, setting the stage for massive fish kills when seasonal floods wash hippo waste downstream. If swallowed by other hippos, the bacteria may possibly aid digestion and disease resistance. Tis study increases our understanding of microbial ecology and was published by Dutton et al. in the latest Scientific Reports (11: 23117; doi.org/10.1038/s41598-021-02349-1). How and where, exactly do hippos feed? Glad you asked. Hippos (Hippopotamus amphibius) leave the water at night to graze grasses nearby then they return to the water to digest and excrete the leftovers, basically fertilizing the water (and totally ruining your day if you had plans to go swimming there). Being mammals, hippos rely on microbes to digest the plant cellulose for them. Lots of these microbes exit their tubby hosts within dung excreted into the water. Suspecting that gut microbes might survive outside the gut, the researchers collected water from hippo pools along the Mara River, which flows through the Serengeti in Kenya and Tanzania. During the dry season, some of these pools—which can be sizable and support scores of hippos in some cases—get cut off from the river’s flow. Teir findings? Essentially, the more stagnant the pool, the more hippo gut microbes survived in the water. (Less oxygen makes the water more conducive to gut microbes.) And this led the team to conclude these pools effectively are more than simply the smelliest places a biologist could choose to study, but, fascinatingly, act as a “metagut,” in which one animal’s microbes could easily infect other hippos, possibly boosting the digestive capabilities and immune defenses of all the hippos in the pond. Although beneficial to hippos, the stagnant water is detrimental to other animals, killing fish and other life downstream when seasonal floods flush out the pools.


Move over Texas … there’s a new State


Fungus among us We recently reported here in the pages of FUNGI that Texas had adopted a new official State Mushroom (Corioactis geaster, the Devil’s Cigar mushroom). Not to be outdone, Illinois recently announced that Penicillium notatum is the new State Microbe for the Land of Lincoln, as reported in the Sept. 2021 edition of Scientific American (“Bacterial Bipartisanship;” doi:10.1038/ scientificamerican0921-22). Justifiable honors for a lowly mold that had been known for a long time but became important only in 1928 when Scottish microbiologist Alexander Fleming discovered it could produce the life saving antibiotic penicillin. At least that’s the story of penicillin


we are taught in school. It turns out, few strains of Penicillium notatum actually produce the compound; those that do and were cultured at the University of Oxford were unable to generate large- scale quantities of the drug, which became especially crucial with the onset of World War II. So scientists at Oxford sought help from the U.S. Department of Agriculture in Peoria, Illinois. Microbiologists Mary Hunt and Andrew Moyer took on the problem, and it was Hunt who found a moldy cantaloupe at a Peoria market and brought it to the lab for analysis. As was the case with many women conducting research in that era, Hunt’s contribution to the discovery and study of that mold—which turned out to be Penicillium rubens —was diminished at the time. Moyer’s 1944 publication on P. rubens mentions Hunt only in the paper’s acknowledgments, and the press referred to her as “Moldy Mary.” Penicillium rubens could better tolerate a new fermentation process that let it quickly produce hundreds of times more penicillin than previously studied strains, which enabled the Allies to massively scale up antibiotic production. Te same strain is still used to manufacture penicillin today. Illinois is only the third state to take


this step, joining the ranks of Oregon (which similarly honors Saccharomyces cerevisiae, or brewers’ yeast) and New Jersey, whose state microbe Streptomyces


Winter 2022 FUNGI Volume 15:1 39


griseus also produces an antibiotic. Some efforts to designate official microbes have faltered: Wisconsin failed to pass legislation honoring Lactococcus lactis in 2010, and Hawaii was unable to choose between Flavobacterium akiainvivens and Aliivibrio fischeri in 2013.


Speaking of food microbiology …


Y


ou know how the greatest bread in North America comes from San


Francisco, right? Te city is legendary for fog banks, the Golden Gate Bridge, and sourdough bread. Bread aficionados have long sworn that there is a certain “terroir” with San Francisco sourdough, akin to the regionality of fine wines, and simply not reproduceable anywhere else. Furthermore—and I’m guilty of perpetuating this notion—it had been assumed that because the most famous bakers there had been using their own


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