Mycophilia, p.8
Mycophilia, page 8
I made a point of attending Britt’s lecture the next day, which was called “Incredible, Edible Fungi” but mostly consisted of weird anecdotes like the time some audience members ate hallucinogenic laughing jims before his talk on the Amanita genera and couldn’t stop cracking up, and how many mushroom-related car accidents there are each year due to people looking out their car window for mushrooms and hitting electrical poles. I went to Ken Litchfield’s lecture as well: “The Domestication and Training of Native Mushrooms for Wildlife Stewardship, Companionship, and Fun” (the lecture where he freaked out the audience by chewing on a piece of death cap). Ken reminds me of Jed Clampett: He’s skinny and sinewy and uses lots of colorful metaphors in his conversation. He roused the audience to think like a mushroom, and pointed out we live in a cubical world, except for the bowls we eat in and the bowls we defecate in, and finally suggesting we were very much like mushrooms, though at times it sounded like he was referring to ex-girlfriends: “Some are parasitic, and want you to give them things, some are saprobes—even vegans eat dead things—and others are opportunists where their thing is a hybrid thing.” But of course he was trying to get us to understand how different fungi live and what kind of relationships they have with their environment.
Fungi live in their food. Their nutrition is their habitat, and the way they get nutrition defines their role in any given ecosystem. After the San Francisco foray, I became increasingly dedicated to the study of mycology, but I was hitting some serious snags when it came to fungal lifestyles. It seemed like fungi would live one way until they lived another way instead, which I found very confusing. It was as if a cow suddenly became a predator like a lion. It was clear I needed help, and so I signed up for the largest conference in the country, the North American Mycological Association foray in Colorado.
I also had a secret motivation for going to the NAMA conference: I was really hoping to reconnect with the amateur and expert mycologists I’d met in California. Indeed, my fascination with mushrooms had become a fascination with mushroom people.
* * *
*Systematics, a word often confused with cladistics, is the study of the diversity of life. Cladistics is one of the ways of looking at systematics. Taxonomy is the science of classifying organisms.
*Hyperosmia, which, unless you are a wine connoisseur, is considered a medical condition, is also a side effect of psilocybin, the hallucinogenic chemical in Psilocybe mushrooms.
*The stinkhorn is distinctly phallus shaped. One of the stinkhorn species is called Phallus impudicus, or impudent phallus. Another species, Mutinus caninus, looks just like a dog penis. And still another, Dictyophora duplicata, if picked in the young button stage, will likely develop an erection by the time you get it home. English maidens were warned about touching them, but the Chinese cultivate them—when the spore mass is removed, the mushroom is edible—and serve them braised in broth to foreign dignitaries. It’s a symbol of power. When he was secretary of state, Henry Kissinger ate one.
*Mackler’s analogy might seem excessive, but massive spore production is consistent in nature: Human males produce, on average, 85 million sperm per day per testicle starting around age 13, and one ejaculation releases an average of 100 to 200 million sperm cells.
*There are also strange impetuses for mushroom fruiting: A Japanese study looking to reproduce a phenomenon observed in the field, that shiitake mushrooms fruited prolifically after the ground had been hit by lightning, has found that exposing the substrate of various species of fungi to an electrical charge of 50,000 to 100,000 volts for one 10-millionth of a second will double the volume of fruiting. This may be an evolutionary adaptation. Because lightning poses a survival hazard, and may deliver a dead tree for dinner, it leads to accelerated fruiting.
*”Tyrian purple” is still made by some manufacturers, from another species of snail, Purpura lapillus. The secretions of 10,000 snails make 1 gram of dye.
*Scientists name lichen for the dominant fungal partner, not the symbiotic photosynthesizer.
*The mycologist Roland Thaxter spent his life studying fungi that live passively on insects and identified 1,500 species.
Chapter 3
MUTUALISTS, DECOMPOSERS, AND PARASITES
The North American Mycological Association (NAMA) foray, which is held in early August, is like the NEMF foray in that it is a serious scientific conference for amateurs with great speakers and bad food. Before NAMA was NAMA, it was the People-to-People Committee on Fungi, affiliated with the People-to-People Nature Committee, a mid-’50s organization that tried to enhance understanding and friendship through education and cultural exchange. There are 69 affiliated member clubs, three regional clubs, six Canadian clubs, and one Mexican club, the Myco Aficionados of Mexico. NAMA is composed of toxicology, cultivation, education, mycophagy, photography, and dyeing and papermaking committees, among others. It publishes a newsletter, The Mycophile, and a peer review journal called McIlvainea, as well as indexes of all sorts on the Web. They are busy.
I attended NAMA’s 50th anniversary foray at the Snow Mountain Ranch/YMCA Camp near Winter Park, Colorado, the summer of 2010, a collection of ski dorm/ranch-style institutional buildings plunked in a high, wide, treeless valley in the Rocky Mountains. It was like the landscape was nude: just rock and sagebrush and time on display. The camp is surrounded by the kind of lumpy mountains skiers love, and behind them, intense red rock peaks. There was a sign in front of the most picturesque vista that announced the view was Exclusive Photographic Property and those wishing a photo should contact a given phone number. But the forests on the ski slopes were very brown, dead from pine bark beetle infestation, which didn’t bode well for either photographers or mushroom hunters.
I arrived at my dorm in the early evening. It looked like a big chicken coop, with exits at the ends. It took a while for me to finally realize the room numbers started at the top of the building, so mine, which was high digit, was on the ground floor. Considering this was a church camp, I guess counting from the top and working your way down had a sort of logic. My roommates had already arrived, their bags laying claim to the two beds against either wall. Mine, a bunk bed, was between them. About 200 members attended the NAMA event that year, and I was rather excited because by then I was feeling a bit less the outsider. When I stopped by the vendors area on the way to the opening program at the lecture hall (the usual fungal-themed T-shirts, mushroom-decorated coffee mugs, dried edible mushrooms, mushroom identification books), I saw Britt Bunyard, editor of Fungi magazine, whom I’d met in San Francisco. Behind his stacks of magazines, Britt was surreptitiously pouring plastic cups of sherry. I took one gratefully.
The opening ceremony of NAMA consisted of an introduction by the hosting club—this year it was the Colorado Mycological Association—and the usual round of introductions and volunteer thank-yous and tips about recycling and getting lost in the woods and reminders not to collect mushrooms growing on mining tailings. There were a number of mycologists in the audience, and the khaki-clad, hand-lens-wielding, middle-aged to senior group I’d encountered before, psychiatrists and schoolteachers, Wall Street biggies and grocers, half of whom started to nod off as soon as the lights dimmed for the slideshow presented by an earnest forest service officer in a crisp beige uniform. He stood up to describe the forest habitat we were in: Fifty percent of the region’s 100- to 200-year-old lodgepole pines were dead, and he recommended we not park our cars under any of them. He also recommended we keep an ax or saw in our vehicles to remove fallen trees across the road. “You guys are so INTO this!” he said suddenly, and a half-dozen people abruptly lifted their heads off their neighbor’s shoulder to look around and see what had happened.
Most people went to bed right after the introduction was over, but I headed to Britt’s room, where I’d heard some folks were partying it up among the bunk beds. Britt had appetizers and dips and crackers and a wide selection of booze lined up on the windowsill, and he poured drinks and offered “snacky snacks” to the various people who wandered in. It was like boarding school, except everybody had a PhD (except me). Britt is something of a naughty Garrison Keillor. Just beneath his midwestern farm charm and humility, he’s as feisty and sharp as a Manhattan real estate broker. When I arrived, Michael Beug, a legendary professor of mycology from Evergreen College, was swishing and sniffing and sipping his own Cabernet Franc from a paper cup. Elinoar Shavit, a well-respected amateur mycologist, who is compact and tidy in her person, self-assured and feisty, and her husband, Eyal, were engaged in animated conversation, half in English, half in Hebrew. I met Larry Evans, a kind of troubadour mushroom picker and expert amateur mycologist, who was trying to corral the women into singing backup while he rumbled the lyrics to his song “Chanterelle” (“No,” he corrected us, “you sing it like this” and in a high voice he trilled “ChannnnteRELLE!”); and Denis Benjamin, a brilliant, prickly medical doctor and expert on medicinal mushrooms who sat stiffly on the edge of a bed, brandy in hand, and told me that people are susceptible to the claims of medicinal mushrooms because of fear of death. Others were there, too, presidents of mycological clubs elsewhere in the country; Virgina, a lovely young master’s student prone to writing chivalrous poetry about mushroom hunting; and myself, all in black, as per my homeland. Everyone was very friendly toward me and extremely rowdy with each other. I felt like the new kid at school who’d finally penetrated the in crowd, and I was so eager to show my gratitude that I invited the entire group to stop by my cabin in Colorado on their way to the Telluride Mushroom Festival.
When I got back to my room, my roommates were asleep, their backs turned away, allowing me the only privacy I had. I silently undressed in the dark and slipped into bed. When I woke up the next morning, it took me a moment to figure out where I was. I looked up at the underside of the bunk above me at the scrawled adolescent graffiti. “I am gay,” it read. “My name is Wan.”
The programs held at the NAMA conference were a lot more technical than those I’d attended elsewhere. For example, “Laccaria in the Rocky Mountain Alpine Zone: Field Notes and an Introduction to DNA-Based Taxonomy,” “Cortinarius Identification Basics and Note Taking,” and “Proper Use of Microscopes and How to Keep Yours Clean” were among the offerings. I sat in on Michael Kuo’s talk on morels. He prefaced his comments by stating he was “just an English teacher,” which suggested to me he’d been reproached by some cranky pro. I learned that morels are living fossils, like horseshoe crabs, and so opportunistic they can lifestyle in vastly different ways. At the same time, some species are evolving so quickly, at least in terms of their DNA, that it begs the question of what constitutes a morel at all. I attended Michael Beug’s—the winemaker—roundtable on toxicology, which mostly consisted of up-to-date news on poisonings: Barium in Chinese mushrooms may cause sudden cardiac arrest; people mistaking the deadly Amanita smithiana with the delicious matsutake mushroom; the feasibility of an icky-sounding procedure called bile duct drainage after amatoxin poisoning to remove the toxin before it is recycled back through the body; and the deaths of young men who were killed by police but designated as Amanita muscaria poisonings, in particular, a poor fellow who ate the mushroom and then jumped naked on a police car, whereupon the cops fired. In the evening, Gary Lincoff told stories of 50 years of NAMA pranks, like the time someone hung a foul-smelling stinkhorn outside his window, the year the camp was infested with chiggers, and the year a guy woke up dead.
But it was Tom Volk’s lecture that I had really come to NAMA for: “Fungi of the Forest: The Good, the Bad, and the Not So Attractive,” a review of the different lifestyles of fungi.
Fungi are everywhere and they figure prominently in the healthy functioning of plants and forests and ecosystems, but they are also seriously destructive agents to property, crops, and human and animal health. When I started to understand how fungi live, I began to appreciate that every single life, be it an insect or a mushroom or a tree, lives in a web of interdependencies with other creatures, and as a result, each was way more complex and much more beautiful than I had ever imagined. And fungi play a key role in it all.
Fungi function as links in the food chain of nature, supplying nutrients from the soil to the plant (and via plants to animals), and removing nutrients from dead plants, other fungi, and animals, and returning them to the soil. (Bacteria and mechanical forces like weather have a role in this, too, of course.) Other fungi perform important duties in terms of evolution (duties that are also performed by bacteria): Some weed out weak plants, fungi, and animals; others provide an evolutionary advantage, functioning as a virtual immune system for the host plant.
These functional descriptions are ultimately nutritional descriptions. Since fungi live in their food, their food is their habitat. Mycologists have organized the types of relationships fungi have with their food three ways: mutualists, which are composed of mycorrhizal fungi (from the Greek, myco = fungus and rhizal = root) and endophytic fungi (from the Greek, endo = inside and phyte = plant) as well as lichens; saprophytes (from the Greek, sapro = rotten and phyte = plant); and parasites (in Greek, parásitos is a person who eats at someone else’s table). Mycorrhizal fungi live in and on the roots of 90 percent of all plants, helping them access nutrients from the soil in exchange for photosynthesized sugars. Endophytic fungi live in between the cells of the stems and leaves of all plants, possibly providing immune services to the plant. Saprophytic fungi feed upon dead, dying, or decaying organic matter. They are the scavengers and recyclers of their ecosystems. Pathogenic fungi are parasites. They are predators of other organisms. Most are too tiny to see but can cause great damage to crops and forests and people. Commensal fungi are parasites as well. They use other organisms as a leg up, but they aren’t pathogenic: They don’t seem to do any harm (although some, when the host is somehow weakened, can become pathogenic and raid the host for food). An example of a commensal fungal/host relationship is the strange little Laboulbeniales. These tiny fungi look like miniscule pins. They parasitize and feed on the chitin of arachnids (like spiders and beetles) but are considered by mycologists to be benign. They are host specific and very specialized, the most cited example being a species that grow only on the left side of a beetle’s shell, having adapted to patterns of beetle mating behavior.
But these lifestyle descriptions are not hard and fast: Some fungi, like morels, seem to swing as saprophytes (decayers) or mycorrhizae of some sort (where the fungus and its host have a mutually beneficial relationship). Other fungi may combine lifestyles, starting out as endophytes and then switching to a saprophytic mode once the host starts to fail or dies. You can’t define a fungus exclusively by its lifestyle: Rather, the fungus determines the lifestyle, and an attempt to lock these organisms into tidy categories is crazy-making. “These are categories that we made up,” said Volk. “But in actuality, there is a continuum among the lifestyles.”
There are a number of fungi that live in mutualist relationships in which a balance of interests occurs between two organisms. Lichen has a mutualist relationship with photosynthesizing algae and bacteria (although it is rather hard to see how a fungus enslaving an alga cell to produce food is actually mutualistic—the fungi/algae relationship seems to me more like the rancher/cow relationship—but maybe the fungus provides the alga with a safe place to live). And there are also commensal relationships, where the fungus may not be doing the host any good or any harm, either—the raison d’etre of some yeasts in our body, for example, is unknown and may be commensal. But mycorrhizal fungi are the princes of mutualism. “Fungi can’t make their own food,” said Gary Lincoff. “So they made a strategic choice to team up with plants.”
Ninety percent of natural land plants are thought to have mycorrhizal fungi partners. It’s a masterpiece of evolution: Mycorrhizal fungi break down nutrients like phosphorus, carbon, water, and nitrogen into a readily assimilative form and deliver them to the plant in return for sugar produced by the plant via photosynthesis. The fungus needs sugar for energy and to launch its spores, and the tree needs nutrients because (despite what I learned in school) tree roots don’t do the job adequately. Tree roots primarily anchor the tree in the soil. While tree roots will absorb moisture if watered and nutrients if fertilized, it is the mycorrhizal fungus growing on and in the tree roots that provides the tree with the lion’s share of its nutrition and water. Mycorrhizal fungi significantly expand the reach of plant roots, and by extending the root system, increase the tree’s nutrient and water uptake.
In the wild, mycorrhizal fungi are key to not just the health of single trees but to healthy forest ecosystems. A single fungal genotype or clone can colonize the roots and maintain the nutritional requirements of many trees at once. And multiple fungi can colonize the roots of all or most of the trees in a forest. The hyphae, those threadlike strings of cells that are the fungus, function as pathways for shuttling nutrients, water, and organic compounds around the forest. The mycologist Paul Stamets believes that mycorrhizal fungi function as a giant communications network between multiple trees in a forest—he calls it “nature’s Internet.” Others have described this linkage as the “architecture of the wood-wide web.”
Weaker plants are able to tap into this network, too, like hitchhikers on a nutritional superhighway. Young seedlings struggling to grow in the shadow of established trees tap into the larger, older tree’s fungal network to improve their nutritional uptake. This network exists to benefit not only established trees and seedlings of the same species but also trees from different species, and at different stages of development. So one multitasking fungus, its hyphae attached to the roots of multiple trees in the forest, can simultaneously provide a different nutritional load as needed to different trees. It’s a couture service.
