Mushroom War - The Scholarly Kitchen

If, like me, you’re watching The Last of Us, you’ve got mushrooms on your mind. On the television series, based on a pair of spectacular if emotionally brutal video games, takes place in a world where rising temperatures has resulted in mutations to Cordyceps mushrooms, enabling them to infect humans. And thus, a zombie apocalypse was born.

But mushrooms have a different sort of conflict going on, between two types dubbed the “Death Eaters” and the “Sapsuckers” in the video below from the University of Minnesota. Beside their tree-benefitting activities, the Sapsuckers are also the tastier of the two groups, so you can probably guess who I’m rooting for to become our eventual mind-controlling dystopian overlords.

David Crotty

David Crotty is the Executive Director of Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Press. Founded in 1933, CSHL Press is an internationally renowned publisher of books, journals, and electronic media, and is a division of Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, an innovator in life science research and the education of scientists, students, and the public. Previously, David was a Senior Consultant at Clarke & Esposito, a boutique management consulting firm focused on strategic issues related to professional and academic publishing and information services. David was the Editorial Director, Journals Policy for Oxford University Press. He oversaw journal policy across OUP’s journals program, drove technological innovation, and served as an information officer. David acquired and managed a suite of research society-owned journals with OUP, and before that was the Executive Editor for Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Press, where he created and edited new science books and journals, along with serving as a journal Editor-in-Chief. He has served on the Board of Directors for the STM Association, the Society for Scholarly Publishing and CHOR, Inc., as well as The AAP-PSP Executive Council. David received his PhD in Genetics from Columbia University and did developmental neuroscience research at Caltech before moving from the bench to publishing.