[Kaijo]

It's an especially acute problem for fungi. Fungi defy easy collection. With most animals and plants one can envisage conservation strategies to preserve lineages in artificial conditions. Breeding programmes, seed banks, tissue culture... But whole swathes of the fungal kindgom have such complex ecological requirements and sensitivities that isolating and growing them outside their natural habitat presents huge technical challenges. Even if you can coax them into culture, getting them to complete their life cycle is another matter entirely. And even with our best preservation methods, cultures that are not maintained as breeding populations have an expiry date. I have had a lot of frustration retrieving fungi of conservation interest from culture collections, supposed repositories of biodiversity, that turned out to be hopelessly senescent.