Adding mushrooms to an established viv

[*slddave*]

There's these cool mushrooms growing right outside of my building at school. My plan is to go tonight, collect them, post a pic for you plant folks and with the proper OK's plant them in my viv. Now I have two questions:

1) Mushrooms are not poisonous to frogs right? I remember the general consensus was that shrooms that pop up in vivs are OK, but what about transplanted shrooms?

2) Is it even possible to take an existing shroom or cluster of shrooms and sucessfully plant them in a viv?

thanks all and sorry for flooding the board with my questions today- comp is screwed and don't get to use the school comp too often.

[Frogtofall]

Don't even bother. It would most likely prove to be a waste of time. The fruiting body is only part of the whole organism anyway. You'd have to get that plus all the surrounding soil around it to even get a chance at that thing making it.

What you might want to do is try to collect spore from it and then put those in the viv. That may be the best thing if you really just have to have shroooms in your viv.

[Dancing frogs]

Usually you will get mushrooms without even trying...I do anyway

[StevenBonheim]

What is the substrate like that they are growing out of? If it is some type of mulch, you might be able to harvest a nice chunk of mulch that contains the mycelia, and add that to your viv along with some fresh hardwood mulch. If they are just growing out of a lawn, or patch of grass, you probably wont be able to find the mycelia. Digging up the fruiting bodies and adding them to your tank will result in a big slimy rotten mess. Take some pics of them though! If you add spores to your tank, there is a very small chance you'll get anything to happen. As said above, you'll probably end up with some sort of mushroom in your viv anyways.

[Frogtofall]

Probably a bigger chance than digging a huge hole in the ground and putting that mess in a tank. :lol:

I have more mushrooms than I know what to do with. They finally stopped popping up in my WTF tank (about 50 or so total) and now theyre in my leuc tank :evil: Everything smells like mushrooms :shock:

[StevenBonheim]

Probably a bigger chance than digging a huge hole in the ground and putting that mess in a tank. Laughing

...yeah, digging a large hole in the ground and putting that into a tank wouldnt be a good idea. Inoculating suitable substrate with small pieces of colonized mulch (or whatever it's growing in) would, however, give the mycelia a fighting chance. In the microscopic world of molds and mushrooms, starting out as a spore in an enviornment that's loaded with competive fungi and bacteria is something of a challenge.

[Frogtofall]

Originally Posted by StevenBonheim

...yeah, digging a large hole in the ground and putting that into a tank wouldnt be a good idea. Inoculating suitable substrate with small pieces of colonized mulch (or whatever it's growing in) would, however, give the mycelia a fighting chance. In the microscopic world of molds and mushrooms, starting out as a spore in an enviornment that's loaded with competive fungi and bacteria is something of a challenge.

Which would be true outside or in.

[*slddave*]

Sounds like a big P.I.T.A. so I didn't even bother going on Friday. I've read about shrooms just randomly popping up in vivs but I guess I'm too impatient. I'm all for cool looking plants and I think shrooms fit that bill

Just get an unopened shroom, try to get it with base and everything, plant it in your viv and the wait till it opens. With any luck the spores will like the conditions and you'll get shrooms someday. Or you can have the mushroom open and outside the viv and collect the spores. Throw the spores in the tank after. That way you don't introduce any nasties from the soil, if you are worried about that kind of thing. I did this once with small mushrooms that only live for a day. They kept sprouting for about a month, and some even started growing in my potted plants soil too. But then they died out.