ABSTRACT
The mission of this volume, now in its third edition, has been and continues to be an attempt to integrate research on fungi with mainstream ecological concepts. It is somewhat analogous to the desire of ecologists in the 1960s and 1970s to make ecological models and predictions as precise and as accurate as those in physics (McIntosh, 1985). Ecologists were said to suffer from “physics envy”; maybe mycologists suffer from “ecology envy.” This pecking order can be extended further: few mycologists study freshwater fungi, and in the second edition of this book, Suberkropp (1992) stated that “the purpose of this chapter is to examine the advantages offered by the aquatic hyphomycete community for the study of fungal ecology.” The implied assumption is that research on fungi (aquatic hyphomycetes) is important primarily when it addresses topics also pursued by scientists specializing in plants or animals (other fungi), or insofar as its results can be extrapolated to other groups of organisms. While few would go that far, it is nevertheless essential that mycologists contribute to the debates on how ecosystems are organized. Fungi are key players in nature, and it cannot be assumed that results and concepts derived from plants and animals can easily be transferred to fungi.
