![]() Luckily for all other inhabitants of the planet, those spores are Goldilocksian in their germination needs. Giant puffballs can produce a mind-boggling several trillion spores. That “smoke” is actually a cloud of practically uncountable spores. There are accounts of Native American children joyfully stomping on mature puffballs, and pretending that the resulting “smoke” was an eruption from a miniature volcano. coli at least as effectively as modern antibiotics do. They fight Staphylococcus aureus (the cause of staph infections), Salmonella typhimurium and E. Using the spores for medicinal purposes has since been backed by science, which has found them to be antibacterial, antifungal and antimicrobial. I’ll Try Not to Spore You with the Details. Millions of spores erupt from each puff of a puffball. To help ensure a hearty fire within a tipi, they would sometimes paint representations of puffballs on the exterior canvas. They would use dried puffballs as a reliable tinder to get a fire going strong. Their legend held that these puffballs were stars that had fell to the Earth during a supernatural event. There, puffballs often grow in rings (some people today call any ring of mushrooms a “fairy circle”). The Blackfoot Native American Indian tribe historically stretched across much of the mid-western prairies of the U.S. Some wore dried ones around their necks to help ward-off ghosts and evil spirits. Cherokee Indians used it to help heal sores and burns (early settlers in the blacksmith trade picked up this trick as well). Some used them as a styptic (stops a wound from bleeding) by mixing the spores with spiderwebs and bark and applying it to wounds. Puffballs are well-known by all the Native American tribes of North America, though uses varied across them. Though likely not a top job-posting you’ll find on LinkedIn, it has revealed some interesting findings about the uses of fungi over the millennia. ![]() One who studies the historical uses and sociological impact of fungi is an ethnomycologist. Ethnomycological InvestigatorĪnd other jobs you didn’t know existed. Puffballs fall into the saprobic category of fungi - meaning there are not parasitic on other species, but rather decompose dead organic matter, such as leaf-litter, in order to grow. Most species like to grow in relatively open areas such as fields, by roads and trails, and in grassy clearings in the forest. They range in size from about golf-ball to a beach-ball, the latter being a Giant puffball mushroom (Calvatia gigantean), which is a highly-prized find by wild food foragers. Who in their country-living youth, and perhaps well into their later years (guilty), hasn’t delighted in stomping on a patch of mature puffball mushrooms to be rewarded by the magical smoky clouds that erupt from the spongy spheres? Puffballs cover a wide number of species throughout North America, and most come into maturity in late summer or fall. Several tipis in this turn-of-the-last century Blackfoot camp feature painted-on puffballs to help ensure a hearty fire will burn inside. ![]()
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