Sometimes it's just too hot to eat, even if you're a mushroom - and that could help curb climate change.

Just as some people lose their appetites in warm weather, mushrooms and other fungi that feast on dead vegetation in the soil in dry northern areas like Alaska and Siberia eat less and produce less climate-warming carbon dioxide when the temperature climbs, researchers reported. "The temperature is reducing their ability to eat the carbon in the soil," said Steven Allison of the University of California, Irvine. "These are fungi that live up in Alaska, which is typically a pretty cold place, so they may not be adapted to deal with these higher temperatures.

The dry mushrooms' ability to decrease carbon emissions might offset 10 per cent of the entire amount of carbon dioxide released by human activities, Mr Allison said.

Because the fungi in the dry northern areas are off their feed, they process less of the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide, leaving more of it locked in the soil and less of it in the atmosphere, Allison and his colleagues wrote in the journal Global Change Biology.