Introduction to Fungi

Kandis Elliot ▪ Mo Fayyaz University of Wisconsin, Madison

For senior artist Kandis Elliot, postermaking is one of the best tasks of the job. Her series of educational posters started 4 years ago, when greenhouse and garden director Mo Fayyaz of the University of Wisconsin (UW), Madison, asked for a fruit poster. Introduction to Fungi is just the latest—and one of the hardest, because the botany department lacks a mycologist. And Elliot didn't want to settle for a simple mushroom poster. “There's a gazillion of those things,” Elliot says. “We wanted something that shows fungi as mushrooms but something more than mushrooms. Your beer, your wine, and your bread. The stuff on the back of your fridge.”

The beer and wine are easy enough to spot in the center of this poster. Other specimens include gourmet delicacies, such as truffles and the mold on bleu cheese, and the less savory stinkhorns, whose stench attracts carrion beetles to disperse their spores. It also features some unfriendly fungi, such as the culprit behind white-nose syndrome, a mysterious white fungus that grows on hibernating bats and seems to kill them by leading to starvation.

“The fungi poster was a clear winner. That was just amazing,” says panel of judges member Alisa Zapp Machalek. Besides the imagery, the fact that it was about fungi had an appeal of its own. “There's sort of an innate intrigue factor. If it was different kinds of apples, even though I love apples, I don't know that it would hold our attention as much.” “It's very appealing to the layperson,” says panel of judges member Corinne Sandone. “There's nothing that hard. It's very accessible.”

That's valuable praise for Elliot, who says squeezing all the information in was one of the hardest parts. “There's like 25 pounds of information on a 5-pound poster, and you want to put it in some kind of logical order,” she says. “There is order in there, but you kind of have to search for it.”