Oyster Mushrooms and the Oil Spill (video)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ENPkgAEcDoY

Not only will these mushrooms absorb and detoxify oil, but they are tasty and edible after!

yesterday all about mushrooms. This could help, but it would take an awful lot of mushrooms to make a dent. Worth a try, though.

Depending on how easy it is to grow the mycelium of this strain, if we had volunteers from around the country cultivating mats of mycelium and transporting them down it just might be viable, hell of alt better than dispersants

The spores are there already; it's the conditions that have to be managed. If you add oil-soaked absorbent to media with active mycelial growth, the fungi will break the oil down. However, you need to be doing it on land, as the open ocean is not a good growth medium for most fungi.

Out in the water, bacteria are also present which will break down the oil, but they are limited by the amount of dissolved oxygen. On land, oil that washes up can be broken down in any rotting plant matter, but that rate is dependent on a bunch of other factors (oxygen, humidity, phosphorous, etc.) that are not being controlled.

Dispersants play a minor role in getting the oil to have a lot more surface area for attack by bacteria or fungi. Applied properly, a detergent can speed up the break down process. However, in the current spill, BP has managed to use the wrong dispersant formulation, applied in the wrong way, to amplify the problem instead of correct it.