Puffballs

Apart from being edible—and delicious at that—dried spores were used as diaper rash "talcum powder" by the First Nations of BC. Spores were also found to staunch bloodflow when placed on a wound. At one time the brownish spores were used as a photographic flash powder. A large puffball can contain as many as 7500 billion spores. If each of these spores were to grow to maturity the next generation would form a fungus colony some 800 times the size of the earth.

Illustration by Manami Kimura