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Plantain crop hit by fungal disease due to unusual mist

The plantations initially sustain black leaf streak disease that spreads across the tree and gradually the leaves would wilt.

A fungus infested plantain tree in Thanjavur on Wednesday File

Dt Next Bureau

Published on : 

8 Feb, 2023, 6:19 pm

TIRUCHY: The untimely rains and unusual mist formation resulted in spread of fungal disease in plantain crop. Banana plantations on several acres were affected across the Delta due to the fungal infestation.

According to farmers, banana have widely been cultivated across the region on par with paddy. However, recently, the region has witnessed an unexpected mist condition leading to fungal disease. The plantations initially sustain black leaf streak disease that spreads across the tree and gradually the leaves would wilt.

Though agriculture officials had advised to use a few anti-fungal solutions to prevent the disease, farmers claimed that several trees in the region had sustained the disease in an advance level and they fear that total damage could be the result. So, they appealed to the government to conduct an assessment and provide some relief to the farmers.

“Due to this disease, against the actual 15 leaves in grownup trees, only six are available and other leaves wither away. This results in poor yield and in some trees, the bunches would get destroyed leading to a heavy loss to the farmers who undertake plantain cultivation,” said Mathiazhagan, Thanjavur district president of Banana Farmers Association.

He said that, despite the fungal infection being quite common in banana crops, the unusual mist had aggravated the infection resulting into a total loss of the trees. He also said that the farmers have passed on the information to the Banana Research Centre for a study and are waiting for a remedy from them.

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Understanding the Mystifying Function That Fungi Play in Ecosystems

TOPICS:Dartmouth CollegeEcologyEvolutionFungi

By DARTMOUTH COLLEGE DECEMBER 20, 2022

Fruiting bodies of shaggy scalycap (Pholiota sp.) on a log just off the Appalachian Trail in Hanover, New Hampshire. Credit: Bala Chaudhary

New scientific review analyzes what we know about how fungi disperse.

When you say “fungi,” most people think of mushrooms, the fleshy fruiting bodies above the ground or food source, but most fungi do not actually produce mushrooms. Furthermore, of the estimated 3 to 13 million fungal species on Earth, many are microscopic in size, and therefore invisible to the naked eye.

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Fungi live in a wide range of environments including in soils, inside the tissues of leaves in rainforests, and in deep oceans. Understanding how fungi move across a range of spatial scales is important to understanding ecosystems and has significant implications for agriculture and human health, according to a new review published in the journal Annual Review of Ecology, Evolution, and Systematics.

Fungi are frequently associated with death and decay, such as mold that grows on old food, or mushrooms that decompose leaves on the forest floor. “We typically think of fungi as decomposers, but they are cryptic and do many different things,” says lead author Bala Chaudhary, an associate professor of environmental studies at Dartmouth. “Fungi can also function as nutrient cyclers, pathogens, and mutualists that live in a beneficial association with plants and other organisms.”

Fungi can also be human pathogens. For example, Coccidiodes is another soil-borne fungus that releases spores into the air as a result of land disturbance and soil degradation. When the spores of this fungus are inhaled, Coccidiodes can cause a serious respiratory disease called Valley fever, also known as coccidioidomycosis. Soil ecology, climate justice, and environmental health are three fields that interconnect and might benefit from a better knowledge of fungal dispersal.

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“Experts working in agriculture, public health, and many other fields are interested in understanding fungal dispersal, as this information can be used to predict things like future crop pandemics and outbreaks of human disease,” says Chaudhary, who is an ecologist. “Furthermore, studying how fungi disperse is central to understanding fungal biodiversity and where species are distributed on Earth.”

Chaudhary’s co-authored analysis on how fungi disperse is the result of a collaboration with senior author Matthias Rillig, a professor of plant ecology at the Institute of Biology at Freie Universität Berlin, and members of his lab, during her sabbatical in 2019-20.

To synthesize existing information on fungal dispersal and highlight emerging research in this area, the team used a research-weaving approach that combines reviewing journal articles with analyzing trends in publishing, also known as “bibliometrics.” The team examined over 4,500 documents from nearly 1,200 sources from 1951 to 2021. Most of the articles pertained to fungal dispersal research in the United States, the United Kingdom, and China.

The researchers found that scientific literature on fungal dispersal has focused on three topical areas: fungal disease, including climate change, which was the most prominent theme represented; fungal diversity, communities, and mycorrhizal fungi, including soils and forests; and the evolution of fungi, including molecular methods.

As part of their analysis, the researchers pose theoretical relationships between the relative importance of vectors of dispersal and spatial scale and vectors of dispersal. They identified four scales of fungal movement from microscopic to landscape scales.

Tiny root-like structures of fungi at the mycelial level move through the soil on the smallest scale. Invertebrate animals, including micro/macroarthropods such as ants, and earthworms can transport fungi through their castings and nests, and small mammals and birds who may transport fungi via their feet, feathers, and digestive tracks serve as vectors for moving fungi at larger scales. Abiotic vectors, such as water and wind, are responsible for fungal movement at the largest scale across the landscape and continents. Rivers transport sediment containing fungi propagules across continents, ocean currents and tides, and precipitation, as well as humans, all play a role in the global transit of fungi.

“With climate change, environments are getting dryer in some regions and wetter in others, factors that can change where fungi reside,” says Chaudhary. “Soil disturbance from agriculture, land development, and other human activities can also release soil fungi into the air.”

“Climate change, coupled with anthropogenic land use, can really impact the way that fungi move. The relative importance of movement vectors changes across spatial scale, but there’s very little data to support these relationships,” she says.

“More data is needed to understand the biodiversity of fungi and the many factors affecting their movement in our ecosystems.”

Reference: “Fungal Dispersal Across Spatial Scales” by V. Bala Chaudhary, Carlos A. Aguilar-Trigueros, India Mansour and Matthias C. Rillig, 25 July 2022, Annual Review of Ecology Evolution and Systematics.
DOI: 10.1146/annurev-ecolsys-012622-021604

Carlos Aguilar-Trigueros and India Mansour at the Institute of Biology at Freie Universität Berlin also contributed to the study.

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