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Mushroom hunters can't stop finding mysterious fungi
- Bowes-Lyon 2y agohttps://archive.ph/ZMqxg https://archive.ph/ZMqxg
- carabiner 2y agoI know someone who bought a big mushroom at pike place market that was really expensive. Maybe it was a king bolete. Anyway he cut it open at home, and it was full of worms.
- bqmjjx0kac 2y agoThat's just the next phase of the mysterious mushroom's life cycle!
- idiotsecant 2y agoA lot of foraged mushrooms are just chock full of bugs and the ones that aren't are usually full of bug feces. I like hunting for them but I stick to cultivated for eating.
- Joel_Mckay 2y agoYup, some also contain parasitic fungi that are infesting a host mushroom. Thus, even experienced pickers may run risks foraging wild samples. The cloning/cultivation/identification process is an important part of safety, and should be done by an experienced mycologist. An ounce of prevention is better than kidney and liver failure... as they say. We are lucky, as local farmers here produce fresh Flammulina filiformis (Enoki) for hot-and-sour soups etc. Have a wonderful day, =3
- ceedan 2y agoI’ve been told by a hobbyist "There are many old mushroom hunters, and there are many bold mushroom hunters, but there are not many old and bold mushroom hunters”
- s1artibartfast 2y agoA colorful lie. The oldest and best mushroom hunters have a hint of jaundice to their eyes.
- knowaveragejoe 2y agoIs this a literal example?
- s1artibartfast 2y agoIm not sure if I know what you mean by example. I'm not talking about myself. I know some old and wise mushroom hunters. Some of the best take informed risks. Talk to pros, authorities in the field, and major authors, and they all have some crazy stories. The safest option is always to stay home and watch TV.
- hinkley 2y agoDeep Vein Thrombosis. Even the couch is not safe. Every day we are dying. Some faster than others.
- Joel_Mckay 2y ago"Most men die at 27, we just bury them at 72." (Mark Twain) =3
- idiotsecant 2y agoYou will note that mark twain did not die in a skydiving jetboat accident at 27 years of age.
- Joel_Mckay 2y agoHe had quite a life, and the pen name hints at where he started. =3
- s1artibartfast 2y agohypomyces are not especially dangerous and sometimes desirable, as in the case of lobster mushrooms. life is full of risks but undetected parasitic fungi are extremely low on the list. If you know enough to pick edible mushrooms, you can learn not to eat rotten mushrooms. The complexity is on par with not eating moldy bread or rotten eggs, not rocket surgery.
- Joel_Mckay 2y agoLike everything in life, there are some who choose to gamble on the unknown... and eventually become a cautionary tale. The recommendation of using repeated sample clones as part of the identification process for agricultural purposes is recommended in Paul Stamets books. He makes several fairly good arguments why you shouldn't gamble with something capable of rapid genetic changes, bioaccumulation, and affecting your immune system in unpredictable ways. Have a great day, and keep safe out there =) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aNSHZG9blQQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aNSHZG9blQQ
- s1artibartfast 2y agoIf Paul Stamets avoids eating wild mushrooms out of fear of hypomyces, I retract my statement! I too recommend staying home and away from dangerous wild mushrooms. Better safe than sorry.
- Joel_Mckay 2y agoYou created an informal fallacy for your own entertainment. Anyone can "Try Anything Once", but a few forget to ask if they should... Good luck, =)
- s1artibartfast 2y agoI think you are making things up. Intelligent and experienced people typically think through the consequences of their actions. This is not the same thing as being completely risk adverse
- vidarh 2y agoAnd a lot grow fast enough that as long as you pick young specimens, it's rare to find bugs as they won't have had much time. E.g. chanterelles are usually big enough to pick in 2-3 days. When I used to pick them growing up, we'd usually avoid the older ones, as they weren't worth the hassle of cleaning and cutting away bad parts. Bugs is mostly a problem when picking bigger/slower growing ones. That's not to say it doesn't happen with others, but it's not really an issue. The problem with sticking to cultivation is how few mushroom types are reliably cultivated at anything approaching reasonable prices. Most of the options cultivated at scale bore me.
- s1artibartfast 2y agosounds like he got scammed. Buggy mushrooms are still edible, but high end culinary mushrooms are typically low bug. He should have asked them them to cut it open. Source: amateur hunter. Probably collect 2-300 lbs of Boletes/year. I eat a lot of bugs.
- erikerikson 2y ago"Enhanced protein content"
- w-ll 2y agoAlan Rockefeller has a great Instagram also did a trip with `Crime Pays But Botany Doesn't` recently.
- inhumantsar 2y agogreat name for a great channel.
- elsonrodriguez 2y agoAlan is wonderful and is almost a co-host of Crime Pays at this point.
- wh313 2y agoUnlocked article: https://www.nytimes.com/2024/06/11/science/mushroom-hunters-dna.html?unlocked_article_code=1.zU0.ugtc.rOVGWTy6YzXl&smid=url-share https://www.nytimes.com/2024/06/11/science/mushroom-hunters-...
- zeagle 2y agoThank you!
- xipho 2y agoReplace "Mushroom" with insects, fish, bacteria, and viruses, and many other branches of the network-of-life. Inventorying our Earth is far from done.
- boomboomsubban 2y agoYep. For example, 25% of classified animals are beetles, and entomologists think we've classified under half of existent beetle species. Possibly as low as 1/5.
- defrost 2y agoYes and no .. for example we've barely scratched the depths of new species on the ocean floor, but we likely won't have to worry about that in a year or so when Gerard Barron starts strip mining nodules that form the base of the food chain of life we've only recently discovered. https://www.unisq.edu.au/study/why-unisq/unisq-stories/testimonials/gerard https://www.unisq.edu.au/study/why-unisq/unisq-stories/testi... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Metals_Company https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Metals_Company
- TechDebtDevin 2y agoRead The Séance Chapter in Thomas Pynchons, Gravity's Rainbow.. It's a great description of how the Capatalist Cartel think about the extraction of Earth's resources.
- defrost 2y agoCheers for the suggestion, I personally read the book, attended the concert [1], and learnt more about capitalist resource extraction attitudes from meeting the Vogons [2] when working on mapping [3] than I did from Pynchon's filtered Rathenau [4]. First hand beats fiction. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vXhzJK352NI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vXhzJK352NI [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gina_Rinehart https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gina_Rinehart https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clive_Palmer https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clive_Palmer https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Koch_family https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Koch_family et al. [3] https://www.spglobal.com/marketintelligence/en/campaigns/metals-mining https://www.spglobal.com/marketintelligence/en/campaigns/met... [4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walther_Rathenau https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walther_Rathenau
- autoexec 2y agoThis is what kills me about the destruction of the rainforests and old growth forests. We're constantly finding new things in our own backyards. There's no telling what we've lost/are losing or how it could have been used to benefit us.
- rgrieselhuber 2y agoThis is because of the reductionist myth that all organic matter is fungible. It’s always “well we plant new trees, so what’s the problem?”
- autoexec 2y agoThat's one of those lies I suspect the tellers don't actually believe, they just expect the masses to be uneducated enough to fall for it. I have to give them credit though because it seems to be working for them
- luggageproblem 2y ago>>> Across the road from my cabin was a huge clear-cut--hundreds of acres of massive spruce stumps interspersed with tiny Douglas firs--products of what they call "Reforestation," which I guess makes the spindly firs en masse a "Reforest," which makes an individual spindly fir a "Refir," which means you could say that Weyerhauser, who owns the joint, has Refir Madness, since they think that sawing down 200-foot-tall spruces and replacing them with puling 2-foot Refirs is no different from farming beans or corn or alfalfa. They even call the towering spires they wipe from the Earth's face forever a "crop"--as if they'd planted the virgin forest! But I'm just a fisherman and may be missing some deeper significance in their nomenclature and stranger treatment of primordial trees. from The River Why
- 14 2y agoCan’t even have toilet paper without the logging industry. Housing would be pretty savage if we had to build everything out of rocks and mud. I strongly believe that any currently old growth forests should be protected but everything else really is just a crop.
- 3lit3krew 2y agoI know the ones in the top pic. They're pretty rubbery and tasteless and harmless but you can boil them, then squeeze them, and boil them in sugar and make candies out of them.
- accumulator 2y agoIronically all of the macro fungi displayed in this article are very well known and common
- Kaijo 2y agoYes, there may be a large amount of undescribed fungal species diversity, but most of it doesn't take the form of distinctive, visibly novel macroscopic structures. A lot of new species descriptions are of cryptic species, species only distinguishable to an expert eye, entirely microbial species, unremarkable little brown things, species only known from sequences in enviromental samples, and so on. I have spent years rambling around tropical forests and have only had a handful of "what the hell is that?" moments that turned out to be truly unusual.
- dendrite9 2y agoThe first time I found a bird's nest fungus in my yard I felt like an explorer. Same for watching the various slime molds that appear and disappear at various points of the year. I caught a ladybug in the house and while taking it outside I noticed it had something on it, best I can tell it was some type of Laboulbeniales, a parasitic fungus. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laboulbeniales https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laboulbeniales
- hinkley 2y agoIf they were obvious they would already be known would they not? The world 'remarkable' implies that people will be hard pressed not to communicate about it. You don't see an aminita muscaria and not tell someone about it. Clown red mushroom with white spots? Of course you're gonna tell someone, and of course it will have a name if it didn't already.
- Kaijo 2y agoThere are "obviously" new species that do still crop up because undescribed biodiversity is concentrated in little-surveyed tracts of remote tropical rainforest, and the visible spore-producing structures of those fungi might only appear rarely under poorly-understood environmental triggers. So no, they are not all already known about. "Obvious" species new to science are still being described from such locations. Two examples from recent decades I have seen myself, Chlorogaster dipterocarpi, Spongiforma squarepantsii... I know of many more from taxonomic journals. Also I have found some spectacuar mycoheterotrophic plants in the genus Thismia that were only very recently described. Also, there is a high diversity of secotioid hypogeous fungi many of which are "obvious", but you have to be digging around in the soil looking for them to find them, so they are still poorly known.
- jc6 2y agoReminds me. I saw a bizarre fungus growing on an old Airport audio speaker left in storage. The speaker was a 5 foot high metallic tower. And this 4 inch high alien looking thing was growing on it. It had attached itself via a beautiful root like system of tenticles to the metal surface. Some one tried to kick it off and it was so tightly fused to the metal it broke the stem but the root system stayed fused. So they then scraped it off with like a chisel and there was a hole in the metal underneath. It looked like it was eating the metal. These were ancient speakers so that metalic frame was quite thick and heavy and it was really freaky to see how it had been sort of dissolved away. That storage unit hadnt been opened in 2 months. So the growth couldnt have been very old either. Left us all wondering what things would have looked like if no one had bothered to open the unit.
- lagniappe 2y agoI hope someone here knows what this is because that sounds really cool
- tomohelix 2y agoMy best guess is that the hole was there before the mushroom grew. It is hard to find a biological species that need so much iron in their metabolism to the point it evolved something that can dissolve pure metal in a matter of 1-2 months. Irons are often used in enzymes and usually the ratio is around a few iron atoms bounded in a structure of thousands or tens of thousands of carbons and hydrogen atoms. To use so much iron implied that mushroom is literally chock full of special enzymes and I doubt it actually is. More likely, something broke a hole there and the mushroom grew on it and capitalized on the broken edges to scavenge some extra irons but it did not punch that hole by itself.
- jc6 2y agoI dont know what metal that was but there was a grey coat of paint on it. Sometimes they coat the metal to prevent rusting or whatever, but the rusting happens under the coating anyway. So maybe possible the underlying metal was rusting and the fungus was feasting on the coating. It was quite a humid space.
- tristramb 2y agoWarning from an old Usenet fungus newsgroup: "If you collect fungi to eat you should always take three samples: one for the pot, one for the doctor and one for the coroner."
- zikduruqe 2y agoOr "There are bold mushroom foragers, and there are old mushroom foragers. But there are no bold, old mushroom foragers."
- fanf2 2y ago'All Fungi are edible. Some fungi are only edible once.' — Terry Pratchett
- hinkley 2y agoMy partner has anxiety problems and did not entirely appreciate when I told her where a raw sample of the mushrooms I planted, harvested and positively IDed (stropharia) were in the fridge before I ate a small piece of them. And then the next day when I re-iterated it before eating a bowl of soup containing the mushrooms. I think I need to sit her down and explain the Precautionary Principle again. I'm 99.999% sure but who knows what happens if I'm wrong so here's the sample for the toxicologist. I understand now why mushroom hunters have their favorite spots. If you've seen chantrelles in the same spot for years and have never seen any doppelgangers in the area, you're a little more sure that what you have is actually chantrelles.
- robsh 2y agoChanterelles are not a great example as their look-alikes are easily distinguishable. Furthermore, they exist in symbiosis/parasitism with particular tree roots as a host. When you return to the same spot you’re harvesting new fruiting bodies of the same organism that you visited last time.
- hinkley 2y agoAnd yet most edible mushrooms do have these associations. Even saprophytic species will take a number of years to devour a nurse log, so that fallen oak or doug-fir will feed you many times. And then there are truffles...
- pimlottc 2y agoIs anyone else seeing the first photo caption in Spanish for some reason? I did a double-take, had to check to make sure the language settings were correct.
- MoOmer 2y agoI'm a member of the Illinois Mycological Association, where we do occasional surveys accompanied by biologists. They frequently take back tens of items for DNA sequencing. If you're out there looking at a mushroom and think you know what it is, but aren't exactly 100% confident - remember that researchers who dedicate their academic career to fungi are frequently stymied by things found in a 2 hour walk with a few handfuls of volunteers: it might not be what you expect!
- pyinstallwoes 2y agoHow do they know if a mushroom is toxic?
- steelframe 2y agoFirst, be cock-sure in your own ability to do something as simple and straightforward as identifying mushroom species because of your innate ability to recall every minutia of the field guides and your astonishing powers of perception and attention to detail. Then analyze closely the cap shape, scales, the gill/teeth/ridges/pore patterns in the cap underside including shape, width, spacing, depth, and color, the ridges, and the stalk, including a partial veil and/or annulus. Proclaim confidently when you have determined with 100% assurance that you know precisely what species of mushroom you have in your hand, because you are a mushroom genius. At that point you can take a few bites. If you end up needing a liver transplant, then you know it was toxic.
- MoOmer 2y agoSpore prints can be a huge help in identifying also! There are some mushrooms that have very few known lookalikes (varies by geo/region), which have a handful of strong identifying factors. Morels, oysters, and a few others come to mind, where if you can confidently confirm these factors, you can be reasonably sure that you’ve identified them correctly. That said, people sometimes convince themselves of these factors, especially when they haven’t had much experience identifying them before. I do know a number of members of the IMA that have been there longer than me, and don’t forage at all!
- pyinstallwoes 2y agoThere’s fungi that eats radiation. That always gets me for some reason.
- Arech 2y agoPlants eat radiation too, just with a bigger wavelength. So it's kinda photosynthesis on a roentgen-wavelength
- pyinstallwoes 2y agoYes, sure.
- P_I_Staker 2y agoIt's not so mysteriesus, when the gang shown up with their van and doggy treats. Skooby snacks is obviously slang for weird hulicinagens.