Fungus? In my tea leaves?

[aigolocym]

Today I thought I'd make some green tea. I had some Pi Lo Chun green tea that had been sitting in a container in the pantry for about a year that I needed to finish, so I brewed some. While the leaves floated around in the hot water, I noticed some little white "hairs" on a few of them, which I had never noticed before. I thought at first that they were tiny bubbles, but the dry leaves had the hairs, too. So I thought they might have always been there, just part of the plant, but then it struck me that they might be a fungus, since the tea had been in the pantry for so long.

 

I tried Googling "fungus growing on tea leaves" and found an article that talked about the contamination of tea leaves and coffee with fungus. It said the fungi could be completely harmless, affecting only the taste of the tea, or they might produce mycotoxins, which would be nearly impossible to remove from the tea (through boiling, etc.) and lethal even in extremely small amounts (like 1 part per million). The article is here: http://www.entrepren.../183311855.html

Obviously that was somewhat disconcerting, and I haven't dared taste the tea.

 

So, for all the mycologists out there, I have 3 questions:

 

1. Is it even a fungus?

 

2. If it is, can you identify what kind and tell me if it's dangerous?

 

3. If you can't, is there some way I can identify it myself? I would be more than happy to run a few tests on it in the labs at my high school, though their resources may be limited when it comes to identifying fungal species. :/

 

If you'd like pictures, I could post some, but I can't guarantee they'll be very high quality.

[Blahah]

This is unlikely to be a fungus. Pi Lo Chun tea is prized for the attractive white hairs on the leaves, so it is more likely that you're just seeing is the wispy hairs of the leaves themselves.

 

This is what it should look like: http://upload.wikime...ing_2007%29.jpg

 

It is possible to get leaves which are contaminated with fungal pathogens harvested and included in a product on the shelf, but the likelihood that a dangerous quantity of mycotoxins would be found in them is extremely small. If nothing else, many others would likely have died before you and you'd be able to easily locate a report on the internet.

 

If you're still interested in doing some experiments with your tea leaves, you can put a pinch of them in a petri dish with enough warm water to rehydrate the leaves. After a few hours take a drop of the liquid, or cut a thin section of tea leaf, and look at it under a microscope with the 100x objective and an oil droplet. You'll probably see lots of filamentous bacteria swimming around, and some spirochaetes too perhaps. Fun to watch. Tea leaves, despite their antimicrobials, actually contain very high microbial load (all harmless bacteria and some harmless fungal species).

 

If you still think it's a fungus after comparing with the photo above, post the best pictures you can produce of your tea leaves and I'll get it identified by our mycologists (I work at Royal Botanical Gardens Kew, we have a very good mycology dept).

Edited February 12, 2011 by Blahah