Ep. 125: Community Assembly & Fungi that Live in Flower Nectar (feat. Prof. Tadashi Fukami)

Today on Mushroom Hour we have the distinct pleasure of being joined by Professor Tadashi Fukami – head of Stanford University’s Fukami Lab. Professor Fukami is an expert on community ecology and along with supporting his students and lab members, his primary interest is to understand historical contingency in community assembly. He is broadly interested in how species interact with one another in ecosystems and enjoys working with other lab members on the variety of projects that they bring to the lab. He earned his PhD at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, with Jim Drake and Dan Simberloff. He was then a postdoctoral fellow at Manaaki Whenua - Landcare Research in New Zealand and Assistant Professor at the University of Hawaii at Manoa before joining the Stanford faculty in 2008. He sheds light on how communities assemble, even at microbe-sized ecologies, and has revealed amazing insights about fungal ecologies and interactions with other organisms that many of us have never even heard of.   

TOPICS COVERED:   

• Embracing Nature Outside Tokyo   
• Coming to America   
• Fundamentals of Community Assembly   
• Historical Contingency in Community Assembly   
• Isolating Ecological Islands   
• Microbial Community Ecology   
• Rules of Community Assembly?   
• Understanding Community Assembly in Restoring Ecosystems   
• Flowers, Fallen Logs and the Human Body as Ecological Communities   
• Yeast Fungi Living in Flower Nectar   
• Monkeyflower Nectar Biome   
• Plant Pollinator Mutualistic Interactions   
• Applied Agricultural Uses of Understanding Nectar Microbiome   
• Metacommunities   

EPISODE RESOURCES:    

• Prof Tadashi Fukami Staff Page: https://profiles.stanford.edu/tadashi-fukami    
• Fukami Lab Website: https://web.stanford.edu/~fukamit/   
• Prof. Tad Fukami Research: https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Tadashi-Fukami    
• Prof. James Drake Research: https://www.researchgate.net/scientific-contributions/James-A-Drake-2044716847