Crossword clues for puffball
puffball
Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English
The Collaborative International Dictionary
Wiktionary
n. Any of various fungi that produce a cloud of brown dust-like spores from their mature fruiting body.
WordNet
n. any of various fungi of the family Lycoperdaceae whose round fruiting body discharges a cloud of spores when mature [syn: true puffball]
any of various fungi of the genus Scleroderma having hard-skinned subterranean fruiting bodies resembling truffles [syn: earthball, false truffle, hard-skinned puffball]
Wikipedia
A puffball is a member of any of several groups of fungi in the division Basidiomycota. The puffballs were previously treated as a taxonomic group called the Gasteromycetes or Gasteromycetidae, but they are now known to be a polyphyletic assemblage. The distinguishing feature of all puffballs is that they do not have an open cap with spore-bearing gills. Instead, spores are produced internally, in a spheroidal fruitbody called a gasterothecium (gasteroid ('stomach-like') basidiocarp). As the spores mature, they form a mass called a gleba in the centre of the fruitbody that is often of a distinctive color and texture. The basidiocarp remains closed until after the spores have been released from the basidia. Eventually, it develops an aperture, or dries, becomes brittle, and splits, and the spores escape. The spores of puffballs are statismospores rather than ballistospores, meaning they are not actively shot off the basidium. The fungi are called puffballs because clouds of brown dust-like spores are emitted when the mature fruitbody bursts, or in response to impacts such as those of falling raindrops. Puffballs and similar forms are thought to have evolved convergently (that is, in numerous independent events) from Hymenomycetes by gasteromycetation, through secotioid stages. Thus, 'Gasteromycetes' and 'Gasteromycetidae' are now considered to be descriptive, morphological terms (more properly gasteroid or gasteromycetes, to avoid taxonomic implications) but not valid cladistic terms.
Puffballs encompass several genera, including Calvatia, Calbovista and Lycoperdon. True puffballs do not have a visible stalk (stem).
Stalked puffballs do have a stalk that supports the gleba. None of the stalked puffballs are edible as they are tough and woody mushrooms. The Hymenogastrales and Enteridium lycoperdon, a slime mold, are the false puffballs. A gleba which is powdery on maturity is a feature of true puffballs, stalked puffballs and earthstars. False puffballs are hard like rock or brittle. All false puffballs are inedible, as they are tough and bitter to taste. The genus Scleroderma, which has a young purple gleba, should also be avoided.
Puffballs were traditionally used in Tibet for making ink by burning them, grinding the ash, then putting them in water and adding glue liquid and "a nye shing ma decoction", which, when pressed for a long time, made a black dark substance that was used as ink.
Puffball is a 2007 supernatural drama film directed by Nicolas Roeg. It is based on the novel by Fay Weldon adapted by her son Dan Weldon. The film was partially funded through the UK Film Council's New Cinema Fund.
The film had its premiere at the 2007 Montreal Film Festival. The film was later released in Canada on 28 October 2007, and saw a limited release in the United States on 29 February 2008.
Puffball is a 1980 supernatural drama novel by English author Fay Weldon.
Usage examples of "puffball".
Not a seashore, as would be normal, but the wall of water that would be the undersea, stretching up to the few small clouds like puffballs in the Drowned Land, here looking like large, softheaded pins, holding the wall erect and keeping the sea from flooding these two ocean-buried lands.
Julia turned Blackie around the last corner, and there the houses were, two in a long row of bioforms, pumpkins, beanstalks, squash, a Chinese lantern, a puffball, the layer of plastic that strengthened its inflated skin glinting slickly in the rain.
Not on a world where giant teddy-bear mounds became motile fangs and claws, fumbling tree-climbers turned their nostrils into drills, and cute fuzzy Puffballs slung poison-filled quills at curious investigators.
The sky was clear today, with only a few white puffballs of cloud floating here and there, and no threat of a storm.
They were stopped three times by policemen, once for driving only twenty miles an hour on the thruway, a second time for driving over eighty miles an hour, while a third police car overtook them with sirens shrieking because Sister Hyacinthe had seen skullcap and puffballs growing beside the thruway and parked to gather a few plants.
Julia turned Blackie around the last corner, and there the houses were, two in a long row of bioforms, pumpkins, beanstalks, squash, a Chinese lantern, a puffball, the layer of plastic that strengthened its inflated skin glinting slickly in the rain.
Sister Hyacinthe knelt beside the man, crushed the puffball over the unpleasant hole in his arm and carefully wrapped the warm comfrey poultice around the arm.
Puffballs are fungi, the only fungi the Indians ever trusted-the spores clot the blood-comfrey has allantoin in it.
The gi-i-wa puffball of the Mixtecs, the sacred mushroom known as teonancatl (divine flesh) by the Aztecs, the tree fungus of the Yurimagua of Peru, the hex potion ayahuasca distilled by the Zaparo from the banisteriopsis vine as described by Villavicencio (1858) - all can be said to produce alkaloid exudates similar, chemically, to that obtained from Atropa belladonna.
He dared to lift his head and look down, in time to see the avalanche reach the base of the couloir and make glittering puffballs as it buried the bergschrund.
There were puzzle trees, distorted cotton-candy jungles, the much smaller puffballs that Carlot had pointed out for him (“fisher jungles”), and greenery that was totally unfamiliar.
They weren't there when I settled down to sleep, but they were there when I woke up: a ring of morbid fruiting bodies - small black mushrooms or puffballs - already rotting and bursting open at the slightest movement, releasing their scarlet spores.
She was wearing a very expensive pink T-shirt, pinched from Maud at half-term, over which all her friends had written messages in biro, a puffball skirt, laddered tights and black clumpy stompers, and was now eating muesli out of a cup with a teaspoon.
Fungi, the group that includes mushrooms, molds, mildews, yeasts, and puffballs, were nearly always treated as botanical objects, though in fact almost nothing about them—how they reproduce and respire, how they build themselves—matches anything in the plant world.
Fungi are everywhere and come in many forms—as mushrooms, molds, mildews, yeasts, and puffballs, to name but a sampling—and they exist in volumes that most of us little suspect.