A new spectacular species of fungi
02 April 2010
In the Grand Sud of New Caledonia, a team of researchers from the Laboratoire des Symbioses Tropicales and its partners discovered a new species of fungi coloured an almost fluorescent pink with a highly surprising form. Podoserpula miranda , named by its discoverers for its remarkable splendour, lives in the heart of a forest of Arillastrum gummiferum , in symbiosis with these trees.
New Caledonia, is a French overseas territory of 17 000 km² surface area. It is renowned as a biodiversity hot spot, especially for its flora and characterized by a very high level of endemism. This context also favoured the emergence of a highly original cohort of fungi. The recent development of a research programme which includes the role of fungi in the adaptation of plants to extreme soils, like the New Caledonian mining soils, helped identify several hundred new species for this territory.
