T543.4. Birth from fungus (WTF - Weird Things in Folktales)

Welcome to my A to Z Challenge blog series titled WTF - Weird Things in Folktales! Find the introduction post (explaining the theme) here. Find all other participating blogs in the comments of each day's post on the main blog! You can also follow us on Twitter and Facebook.

T is the Motif Index stands for Sex (I'll never understand why he could not just make the initials line up...). Also, love ("T92.1. - The triangle plot and its solutions"). Marriage. Chastity. Incest. But no actual sex acts, so if you were hoping for something dirty, you are out of luck. What we do have, however, is all kinds of miraculous births and conceptions. For example:

T543.4. Birth from fungus

This tale from the Ekoi people in Nigeria and Cameroon is called The Fungus Daughter. It starts with a classic folktale motif: A childless couple wishes for a child.

The husband goes out into the bush and searches for a child. Instead, he finds a giant "ebbuya ball" (a sort of puff fungus), and, hoping it would turn into a child, carries it home in his bag. And lo and behold, the fungus indeed turns into a lovely daughter.
When the girl is old enough, she is sent to the fatting-house (a place of seclusion where she is supposed to fatten up to be healthy and attractive). A slave girl is supposed to care for her, but she refuses: "You are not the proper daughter of those whom you call parents. You are nothing but an ebbuya ball!"
Hearing these unkind words, the fungus girl returns to the bush, and turns back into a puffball. Her parents find out from a servant boy what happened, and the father goes out to search the bush for ebbuya balls again - but none of them turns into a child ever again. The story claims that if she had not been hurt by unkind words, people could still get children from puffballs.

Fungus children are children too.

(Read the story here.)

Runner-ups
T10.3. Girl continually falling in love
T11.4.4. Love through seeing marks of lady’s teeth in fruit which she has bitten
T76. Princess calls her suitors ugly names
T85.3. The Pot of Basil. Mistress keeps murdered lover‘s skull in flower-pot
T99.1. Death from excess of women
T117.5. Marriage with a tree
T126.2. Marriage of mountain and cockle-shell
T146.2. Woman requires thirty men
T322.1. Woman kicks lecherous monk down the stairs
T333.5. Hero cuts off head and wraps it in napkin so he will not be tempted by sight of virgins
T511.3.2. Conception from eating spinach
T511.8.3. Conception from eating mess of fairy pottage
T511.8.5. Woman impregnated after accidentally partaking of crane‘s dung
T515.1. Impregnation through lustful glance
T517.3. Conception through ear
T525.2. Impregnation by a comet
T532.1.3. Impregnation by leaf of lettuce
T532.10. Conception from hiss of cobra
T552.2.1. Child born bearing lizard in each hand
T581.2.2. Blind wives fall into a pool where they give birth to children
T583.1.1. Pains of woman in childbirth repeated in person of the man
T586.5.1. Woman bears child every month
T589.1. Co-operative birth. Each of two wives bears a half-boy. They are placed together and form a real boy