Foxfire - Blog Posts

Things I've always wondered about in Keeper of the Lost Cities

Foxfire's school hours. It's well established that elves live across the globe, and with light leaping it's not hard to travel, but like, if they live all around the world, they all live in different time zones. So some kids would go to school when it's dark at home. How do they decide when? It's not talked about at all in the books and this annoys me a lot. Is there Elvin Standard Time?

I know that they make a big point in the books that they have no Human prejudices but I think that clearly they do. Everyone's a little weirded out by the fact that Sophie wears pAnTs and doesn't like dresses or glitter (which is scandalous and totally not common for millions of girls around the world) and clearly they don't have any boys who wear dresses or girls who shave their heads. All the girls and boys conform to stereotypically gendered forms of beauty. No muscular girls. No fat characters. No short boys. No feminine girls. No trans or gender neutral characters. What's up with that?

On that note it really feels like Shannon Messenger is becoming J K Rowling just a little. There are no openly gay or queer characters after eight and a half books so something smells a little funky there.

The crystal palaces. Where do they get all that crap from? There's a reason these are precious stones.

The nobility. Everyone acts like it's super exclusive but like, there has to be one mentor for each kid at Foxfire, because classes are individual, and there has to be hundreds of kids. So there's hundreds of nobility whose only job is to teach kids. Not even go on missions or emissary work or whatever.

This is just edition one everyone strap yourselves in.

I feel very mushroom biased some of these funguary posts I have spent hours compiling research and formatting it nicely, I've even used paper sources and cited studies on a some of them, then for some like the Crepidotus I can't find anything interesting, spend five minutes on it, and give up.

I'm sorry T-T

I promise I'm trying my best, some of these fungi are just basic

Not oyster mushroom though, love that one <3

Funguary Day 16: Mycena Chlorophos

Mycena Chlorophos is what's known as a foxfire fungus- a fungus that glows at night. The mushroom regulates its glow through a circadian rhythm, at night the levels of the chemical compound and enzymes that react to produce the bioluminescence peak. 

It is theorized that the light it emits at night is to attract beetles and other insects that might help spread the spores similar to how flowers use scents and colors to attract pollinators

Once an experiment was ran by Olson in which two cultures of the biter oyster, another foxfire fungi, were grown and placed on a completely dark box under constant conditions. He left them alone for a week with a camera sensitive enough to pick up their bioluminescence. What the camera showed was that the mycelium grew in an irregular circle, with the glow more intense at the center than at the edges. After a couple days there was a sudden shift, in one of the cultures a wave of bioluminescence passed over the network from one edge to the other. A day later a similar wave passed over the second culture. Though the fungi were kept in the dark for several more weeks, the flare up never occurred again. Years later, Olson still did not know what had caused the sudden flare.

See the rest of my posts for funguary here!

Mythic Mail Letters From Japan book secrets: 👺Today’s Easter egg (super top secret hidden gem) is this illustrated postcard featuring the Bura-Bura, or haunted paper lantern. The characters that make his eyes and nose are called “henohenomoheji” using Japanese hiragana. It’s a little joke that these characters look like a face when arranged on paper. The eyes are “no”, the nose is “mo”. Not pictured are “he” for the eyebrows and mouth and “ji” for the outline of the face. ✨Link to the book in my bio✨ . #burabura #haunted #hauntedattraction #foxfire #kitsune #indiebooks #indiebook #mythicmail #mythicalcreatures #yokai #yokaiwatch #yokaiart #japan #traveljapan #japantravel #japanesefolklore #japanesemonster #snailmaillove #indiebookstore #indieauthors #indieauthorsofinstagram #supportindieauthors #mythology #japanesemythology #japaneseculture #mythical (at Calaveras County, California) https://www.instagram.com/p/CTfRhasJ8or/?utm_medium=tumblr

AAAAAAAAAA

OH MY GOSH ITS SO TINY

It looks like a gumdrop. I wanna smoosh it so bad but it wouldn’t recover so I won’t.

Here’s the paper that describes this species holotype!! Mycena subcyanocephala from Latin, literally “little blue-head” (don’t quote me on that, it’s been a few years since I reviewed my Latin). It’s a new species, so we don’t know much about it yet. BUT they belong to the Mycena genus, which is potentially one of the coolest fungi clades around!! It’s one of the most prolific genera of fungi, and is native to nearly every continent! They’re also some of the smallest mushrooms in the world. They tend to be no bigger than a few centimeters in cap diameter, so many species have cute common names like “pixie’s parasol”!

And if you thought being a common sort of mushroom made them boring, you’d be sorely mistaken because they’re one of the genera that contains bioluminescent species!!! Of the 500 known species, around 58 glow with this absolutely ethereal, chemically-generated glow called foxfire. They do this by introducing oxygen to luciferin, a protein that produces light when this reaction occurs using the enzyme luciferase as a reaction site. Absolutely magical!! I wonder if our littol gumdrop friend is one of the 58!!

I don’t wanna bore y’all with a lecture on bioluminescence, even though it’s one of THE COOLEST things in nature (and that’s saying a lot), so have some pictures of foxfire instead <3333

(pssssssstt thanks for sharing your shroom pics with me @blithe-imperial-underling and @imperial-strategist )

You can learn more about Mycena here (sorry it’s just Wikipedia, it was kinda hard to find an overview article quickly) and you can learn more about bioluminescence in fungi here!

You are correct, @theartgremlin​. I am always watching, and I found your biology lesson very interesting. My aide has a particular interest in mycology, and she was intrigued when I forwarded the information I intercepted about the microscopic predators from your planet. She shared an interesting bit of fungi with me as a result. This is one she thought I would appreciate due to its coloring resembling those of my old GAR legion.

But I should have known by the look on her face that Lieutenant Blithe had more to show me than just that one holopic. The next image she showed me was even better. Just like your microscopic worms, it was the size of this organism that was the most interesting.

The orginal post containing these extraordinary images can be found here.