Mycophilia, p.7
Mycophilia, page 7
Mycelia (the plural form of mycelium) that have grown from separate spores can fuse together in a kind of nonfruiting joining. And one mycelium may be able to take advantage of the helpful genes it encounters in the mycelium it fuses with right away. Unlike animals, which transfer genetic material by inheritance, from parent to child, fungi can benefit from the useful genes of its partner immediately upon fusion. Once the two fungi have fused, they may be able to access genes they can promptly utilize, like those that may increase the fungi’s ability to adapt to current environmental challenges, defeat a new threat, or digest something they haven’t encountered before.
Sometimes, when two different mycelia from the same species encounter each other, they don’t fuse but rather become hostile and compete for resources. Individual fungi can communicate with each other via pheromones, the secreted chemicals that trigger social reactions in animals, plants, and fungi. If they recognize a competitor, they can inject toxic chemicals into the substrate in order to repulse competitive species. They can even invade a competing fungus and suck its hyphae dry of nutrients.
In general, a mushroom grows when two primary mycelium, containing the genetic payload of two different spore sources, fuse to produce a secondary mycelium. It is the secondary mycelium that produces mushrooms. There are a few factors involved in what triggers a fungus to fruit (and they vary in importance in different fungi), like when the secondary mycelium reaches a critical mass, or a certain nutritional peak, or when it has to, because its environmental conditions degrade.*
Two primary mycelia (A) fuse to produce a secondary mycelium (B)
For whatever reason that sparks the mushroom-making process, the hyphae wind around each other at a nexus, creating a dense node, like a knot in your hair. Selected hyphal threads, functioning cooperatively, produce different parts of the mushroom. Different hyphae in the mycelium are specialized for different duties, like cap building or stem building. The nexus becomes a primordium, a dense little nubbin of preformed mushroom that (in many cases) contains all its cells, and the primordium develops quickly into a proper mushroom. Then the reproductive structures of the mushroom produce spores with one set of chromosomes that reflect genes from both strains of the fungi that were involved in its making.
If only that were all there was to it. The truth is, there is very little you can say definitively about fungal sex. Fungi don’t even abide by the two-parent model. Scientists have counted as many as nine individual mycelial parents involved in the making of a single mushroom. And the primary/secondary mycelia paradigm only applies to fungi that produce mushrooms. Other fungi produce asexual spores on single-celled spore-bearing structures, like the molds. Some produce spores on the hyphae. And many don’t make spores at all. Some multiply by fragmenting—that’s when a hypha breaks in half (either by accident or on purpose) and both halves go on to live. Many unicellular fungi (mostly yeasts) just pop off daughters like bubbly warts (it’s called budding). It’s kind of hard to wrap your mind around, and much is still unknown.
There was a pub attached to the pool area at the Four Points Sheraton, and over beers at the bar I became friends with Bart Buyck, the Russula expert. We played hooky from the foray one afternoon to visit the drizzly Wellfleet Oysterfest. He’s Belgian-French, small and wiry and tough like a jockey, but also rather Euro chic: He wears his jeans tight and his hair long. While we slurped down oysters (raw, roasted with butter sauce, and Rockefeller), Bart pointed out a very important thing about mushrooms that I hadn’t understood at all.
He explained that mushrooms grow two ways: indeterminately, meaning the mushrooms are producing new cells from a new growing edge all the time, their shapes influenced by grasses or whatever else is in their environment, and determinate, which are mushrooms that don’t grow like a plant, but rather, they swell. When it rains, those little primordia of fused hyphae suck up moisture from the mycelium and enlarge, and as the mushroom expands it pushes up out of the soil. All the genetic material and the full count of cells that the mushroom will have upon maturity are present when the mushroom is a primordium. But while the number of cells doesn’t change, the cells themselves get bigger, kind of like one of those superthin sponges that expand to enormous size. When a determinant mushroom, like a porcini, is mature, it is 90 percent water. (Humans, by the way, are 78 percent water.)
For this reason, mycologists don’t call the mushroom stem a stem but rather a stipe. While it does support the cap, mycologists think the main reason mushrooms have stipes (which are composed of sterile hyphal tissue) is to elevate them higher, to better disperse their spores.
Likewise, the cap is not really called a cap, though most guidebooks and all restaurants use that terminology. The horizontal spore-bearing part of the mushroom is called the pileus. There are also plenty of mushroom species that don’t have a stipe: They are simply all pileus, like oyster mushrooms, or spore-bearing structures, like truffles and puffballs. Some species expand slowly, over many days. Others can expand in a matter of hours; even expand, sporulate, and decompose in a day. This unusual quality of expanding, sometimes so quickly it seems sudden, has led to the use of the word mushroom to describe something that expands or swells, like a mushrooming debt, or a mushroom, the gang slang for an innocent bystander who pops up unexpectedly.
While some mushrooms seem to appear overnight, others grow for years, like the shelf mushrooms. Many polypores (also known as bracket or shelf fungi, and their fruiting bodies are called conks) are perennial. You will find them attached to the same dying or dead tree year after year, having fruited from mycelium living within the tree’s carcass. They will continue to be nourished by the mycelium until it dies. Polypore is an umbrella term for a variety of mushrooms, usually tough, leathery shelflike mushrooms that grow on trees or logs or roots. Some are edible, some are used for medicinal purposes, and none are thought to be deadly poisonous (although many can cause GI upset). Many are rot resistant, and some species can live to be quite old.
They can also be huge, even becoming a platform for a mini ecosystem. Bridgeoporus nobilissimus is called the noble polypore. Only a handful of specimens of this huge, inedible mushroom, which can weigh more than 300 pounds and be more than 3 feet across, are known to exist, all in Washington and Oregon. It looks like the basin of a birdbath filled with furry organic matter, and grows at the base of old-growth noble fir trees. This rapidly disappearing species is capable of sustaining plant life like tree seedlings, ferns, moss, algae, and even other fungi on its pileus. The noble polypore, which typically lives for 25 to 30 years (that’s the mushroom—not the mycelium, which of course can be incredibly old), is the first fungus to be listed as an endangered species.
The NEMF conference included a lecture on evolution by Gary Lincoff, dressed up like Darwin in breeches and vest; an extremely complicated board game that sought to introduce players to the fungal tree of life; and a vendors area that included the moody still lifes of a lithe, melancholic painter of mushrooms. There was also a mushroom cooking class that used all of the collected mushrooms, even the coveted matsutake, which grows on the Cape. This thoroughly pissed off the fellow who’d found most of them and clearly hadn’t given his permission for his matsies to be eaten by the mob. I’d seen him a few times over the weekend, and he had impressed me as a very mellow, chai-tea kind of guy, but mushroomers can be bipolar when it comes to their haul. He certainly was: He stomped around the hotel in search of someone in authority to complain to, leaving indignant muddy boot tracks up and down the carpeted corridors.
I gave Bart a ride back to New York City, and he listened very patiently as I tried to express how excited I was about all the stuff I had learned at the foray. For 5 hours. At least, he seemed patient. It was sometimes hard to tell if his eyes were open behind his bangs.
In early December, the Mycological Society of San Francisco puts on their Fungus Fair, and the year I went it was held at the Lawrence Hall of Science, in the Berkeley Hills overlooking the bay. I’d never really spent much time in San Francisco before this trip, except for one weekend on the back of a college friend’s Ninja motorcycle during which I had my eyes closed the whole time, but now I understand what the big deal is. This was the kind of place where even the most grody-looking off-the-grid type is quick to comment if the Chardonnay he is sucking through his teeth is overoaked or not. Once I saw the Berkeley Bowl grocery store, with its giant bins of cheap, fresh chanterelles, matsutake, and porcini mushrooms, I was a goner: just $3 million short of buying an uninsulated bungalow in North Berkeley. I mean, the Google map of the area actually has Chez Panisse on it, as if the restaurant were an airport or an auditorium.
After seeing all those good mushrooms for sale at the market, I decided to forfeit the walks in the University of California Botanical Garden and spend more time at the lectures. I ended up passing a lot of time in the gift shop, admiring the iridescent silk garments that were dyed with mushrooms—colors strange but natural at the same time, like the colors inside a mussel shell. They were dyed by Dorothy Beebee, a honeybee of a woman with a soft gray Gibson girl bun who wore a hand-knitted shawl composed of the most lovely, delicate mushroom-dyed colors: all shades of the shady woods. When she turned around to burrow in a bin of silken fabrics for me, her shawl made her look like a very fine hen.
Dorothy is one of the country’s leading experts on mushroom dyes. She learned her craft from Miriam Rice, who, since the late 1960s, has been experimenting with mushrooms for color and is generally considered the mother of mushroom dyeing … in the United States at least. In 1974, Miriam published the first book on the subject, Let’s Try Mushrooms for Color, and Dorothy did the illustrations. Since then, mushroom dyeing has grown, if not mushroomed. In 1976, the Mendocino County Museum in Willits, California, put up an exhibit called Natural Dyeing with Fungi, the “first known exhibit of mushroom dyed fiber art in the world,” and thereafter, every 2 to 3 years, an International Fungi & Fibre Symposium is held somewhere. There is almost always a mushroom dyeing class or lecture at mushroom fairs and festivals.
Records of mushroom-based dyes are sparse, but dyeing with lichens has a long history. The most famous example is orchil purple, produced from a rock lichen. Orchil purple was used as an underdye for Tyrian purple, a color produced from the secretions of a snail, and then as mollusk supplies dwindled, orchil became the primary dye. Tyrian purple has been associated since Biblical times with power, wealth, and royalty. (It went out of fashion around the 8th century.)* But by the early 20th century, pretty much all commercial dyeing utilized synthetic dyes—probably a good thing, as harvesting lichen means killing the organism, in contrast to harvesting mushrooms, where the fruit of the fungus is removed but the fungus itself stays intact to fruit again another day.
Strictly speaking, lichens are not fungi. They are a composite of a fungus or multiple fungi and a photosynthetic partner, primarily a unicellular green alga or a photosynthetic bacterium. The fungus enslaves the photosynthetic cells by merging with the cell at numerous points or swallowing it whole, in effect retaining the photosynthesizer as a kind of in-house food producer of sugars. The algae part of lichen is only 5 to 10 percent of the whole—most of it is fungus. Lichen can live in the most extreme environments—bare rock, hot deserts, the Arctic, the seashore, even in space (for 16 days in a European unmanned spacecraft). They grow, said the mycologist Bryce Kendrick, “wherever the air is clean.”
If there are no lichens growing in your city, it is probably because of air pollution. They grow incredibly slowly, only 1 to 4 millimeters per year radially. Some lichen colonies are said to be 4,500 years old, and new lichen species are constantly being discovered. One, Caloplaca obamae found on Santa Rosa Island in 2007 in California, is named after President Barack Obama. The fungal partner in lichen creates a vegetative structure of hyphae in which the algae live. It makes sexual and asexual reproductive structures and accesses water and minerals to feed the whole. A fifth of all fungi are in lichens.* But lichens get short shrift at the fungus fairs because they’re not mushrooms, although they traditionally get a seat at the table.
All colors in the spectrum can be achieved with mushroom dyes, although most that Miriam tested produced yellows, golds, oranges, rusts, and into burnt sienna and various shades of browns, but some, from the (occasionally lethal) Cortinarius mushrooms, produce vivid rose, burgundy, and violet hues. There are organic compounds in some mushrooms called chromophores—molecules that absorb certain wavelengths of visible light and, when properly treated, those colors can be retained by fabrics like cotton and silk.
Next to the gift shop were the purveyors of mushrooms. The standout collections belonged to Todd Spanier, a work-the-room kind of guy who imports truffles. Todd sold hedgehogs and matsutakes, chanterelles and trumpets … the whole room was inundated in an earthy, woodsy aroma, made all the more intense when Todd ceremoniously uncovered an Italian white truffle wrapped in a paper towel, which drew a crowd in an instant, as if tugged by their noses. But most people hung out in the ID room, which was the most sciencey and what all the parents wanted their children to see, where long tables decorated with fanciful displays of a vast number of mushrooms amid bits of moss and leaves were manned by men in moustaches and khaki shorts that had the earnest vibe of middle school science teachers. We have lots of mushrooms in the East, but the splendor of the California collections was truly dazzling. I’d never seen so many different mushrooms in one place before.
Fungi are incredibly diverse and have found an ecological niche just about everywhere. For example, they live within a range of temperatures from below freezing to over 150 degrees Fahrenheit. They grow in the dark and in the light, on shoe polish and ink pads and in paint, on the Mir space station (indeed, 250 species of microorganisms, including fungi and bacteria, lived inside the spacecraft during the 20 years it was in operation), in the desert (like the desert truffle of the Middle East, which grows in sand), inside the cooling water systems of nuclear reactors, on your scalp (also known as dandruff), and underwater, in streams and rivers, lakes and oceans, and as symbionts of algae and marine plants. Fungi love to grow on cotton shirts but are less likely to grow on a silk blouse. Lots of fungi grow on manure. (As the mycologist Tom Volk wrote in the voice of Pilobolus, a dung decomposer: “You should be so grateful for what I can do. Without me, good friends, you’d be knee-deep in poo.”) The corpse finder mushroom grows on dead animals, including humans. In his book The National Audubon Society Field Guide to North American Mushrooms, Gary Lincoff reported that its presence has helped forensic workers locate human remains. Fungi grow on the body of mites,* on or between the cells of plants—all plants—in frozen Arctic tundra, on rocks (which may be residual from the days when rock was the primary substrate for ancient fungal lineages), on other fungi, inside insects, and in your lungs (for example, coccidioidomycosis is a fungal infection that attacks the lungs, spleen, kidneys, and brain in immune-deficient patients or immunocompetent hosts that have inhaled a sufficient number of spores). There are about a dozen reports of mushrooms, mostly Schizophyllum but also a few Coprinus, fruiting in the sinuses or soft palate of small children. There are fungi growing on the Lascaux cave walls in the Dordogne region of southwestern France, threatening the magnificent prehistoric paintings. (And have been since the early 1960s. Lichen are the reason why the caves were closed to the public in the first place.) There are also fungi growing on the prehistoric rock paintings in Australia, but in the case of the “Brad-shaw art,” as it is known, colored fungi have replaced the original paint, creating, in essence, a living canvas.
Throughout the Lawrence Hall event I’d seen big mountain men lumbering about, navigating around the sandwich boards with educational displays on medicinal mushrooms and microscopy, all of whom seemed to have copious amounts of hair wherever they could grow it and sporting plaid shirts and hiking boots. They were like bears trapped in the tidy halls of the Hall of Science, pacing about and looking for beer. But in the ID room they congregated. They were the fellows who had done most of the picking for the tables, and after exhibiting a serious interest in what they had to say about collecting mushrooms and mushroom habitats and the notorious Ranger Woody, whose specialty is handcuffing pickers in California’s Salt Point Park for picking off-limits, I managed to get invited to Michael Wood’s house that night for dinner. I was thrilled to be asked along.
When I arrived, the house was awash with chanting monks (on the stereo), and various members of the San Francisco Mycological Society were sitting around a long dining table, Michael at the head, a huge steaming platter of oxtails with mushrooms and open bottles of California wines of all sorts in front of him. As I sat down feeling very meek and grateful to be included, Britt Bunyard—the editor of Fungi magazine, a mix of highbrow and lowbrow mushroom business, and kind of a mix of highbrow and lowbrow himself; he’s supersmart but not beyond revealing he watches tacky TV sitcoms—turned to me and said, “Everything you hear at this table from now on is off the record.” (The admonition wasn’t really necessary: They mainly drank wine and ribbed each other.)
