Natural Toxic Clean - can fungi be used?

[Montero]

The world’s first environmental clean-up happened 400 million years ago

When it comes to cleaning up land contaminated by toxic waste, we can follow nature’s example before humans populated the earth.

theconversation.com

 

[Cthulhu.Science]

Fungus -- What could go wrong?

 

[Montero]

Pumping more chemicals into the environment as a clean-up of toxic waste - that could go wrong. Main thing is not to leap onto mass deployment of a new solution before really thorough testing - so I'd be wanting to see 10 plus years of research and trials before anything is put into use.

PS - not seeing any fungi in the picture.

 

[AllanR]

There have been a number of experiments with oyster mushrooms, they seem pretty effective at cleaning up petrolium soaked soil.

 

[tinkerdan]

Aside from taking so much time off for environmental cleanups and saving the world: he was a real fun-gi.

 

[Robert Zwilling]

Fungi are already cleaning up the soil, which is almost anything laying around, that's their job. People are always looking for a free way of cleaning up something that cost money to clean up. Ideally, the clean up should come from the profit, including clawback, but then there would be no profit, so that's never going to work.

There has been a lot of interest in harnessing bacteria to clean up polluted ground. Bacteria has been found outside of recycling locations that are naturally eating the plastic in the ground. People would like to to modify the bacteria to eat plastic faster, light speed would be nice. But once out in the wild, which will happen, the question is, how will the bacteria know which plastic is no longer wanted and which plastic isn't ready to be eaten yet?

The bacteria freely share the tools, no patents, no copyrights, its all free to use, but they don't share the resources. They share the genes that make their living more successful with each other, even ones not related to them. They have a very sophisticated protocol system that makes our internet system look like play school. They use go betweens to facilitate the transfer of genes between bacteria that can't directly transfer genetic information between each other. If bacteria can add plastic to their dinner table, they could cover a lot more territory to their operations as plastic has no territory restrictions unlike natural food sources.

 

[Cthulhu.Science]

Pumping more chemicals into the environment as a clean-up of toxic waste - that could go wrong. Main thing is not to leap onto mass deployment of a new solution before really thorough testing - so I'd be wanting to see 10 plus years of research and trials before anything is put into use.

PS - not seeing any fungi in the picture.

If you are referring to my post, that is a promo picture from the new HBO series The Last of US, which is based on a pair of video games of the same name. The basic setup is that a strain of fungus infects and then controls people in a zombie like state. So people become puppets to the fungus, similar to the way that certain fungi control insects.

Here is a site about fungi that controls ants.
"The Ophiocordyceps unilateralis fungus has just one goal: self-propagation and dispersal."

 

[AllanR]

here's my favourite cordycep video

 

[AllanR]

Oh, and there is the plastic eating fungus: Pestalotiopsis microspore Pestalotiopsis microspora - Wikipedia