Uninvited Guests: Part 1

[Editor's Note: The following was excerpted from Nicholas P. Money, Carpet Monsters and Killer Spores: A Natural History of Toxic Mold (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), 178 pages. ISBN 0195172272. $29.95.]

Is not the air we breathe charged with them in the declining part of the year? Do we not receive them into our Lungs with every breath we draw? - James Bolton, Filices Britannicae (1790)

Most fungi are pigmented, and the majority of the pigments impart a duskiness to the walls of fungal cells that protects these otherwise diaphanous microbes from hazards in their environment. Stachybotrys owes its …