Mushrooms can help resolve our waste disposal problems. Why are we ignoring them?

So I'm sat in an LGA EEHT Board meeting (don't ask) and the matter under discussion is waste management. You know about this stuff as it has been all over the telly - bans on straws, the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, those pesky Chinese saying they won't take our rubbish any more, and hand-wringing greens tutting about our sinful consumer lifestyles. We're listening to a report about technology, waste streams and something called the "circular economy". I have to tell you it isn't gripping but that, since we're all councillors, the matter of collecting, recycling and disposing of the rubbish we all produce is a core part of what we do - local councils empty the bins.

Funny thing is that all I could think of was mushrooms. And I regret not raising the subject at the meeting since, as you all should know, fungi contain the salvation for our planet including dealing with pollution:

Certain species, such as the oyster mushroom, produce enzymes that digest the hydrocarbons in petroleum. Some can absorb heavy metals like mercury and even digest polyurethane plastics. Scientists are also experimenting to see if certain types of fungi might be able to absorb radiation after nuclear disasters.

Yet in all the meetings, the reports, the debates on waste the matter of mushrooms never arises. I wonder why?

...cultivating the right type of mushroom on soiled nappies can break down 90% of the material they are made of within two months. Within four, they are degraded completely. What is more, she says, despite their unsavoury diet the fungi in question, Pleurotus ostreatus (better known as oyster mushrooms), are safe to eat. To prove the point she has, indeed, eaten them.

Fungi Mutarium is a prototype that grows edible fungal biomass, mainly the mycelium, as a novel food product. Fungi is cultivated on specifically designed agar shapes that the designers called "FU". Agar is a seaweed based gelatin substitute and acts, mixed with starch and sugar, as a nutrient base for the fungi. The "FUs" are filled with plastics. The fungi is then inserted, it digests the plastic and overgrows the whole substrate. The shape of the "FU" is designed so that it holds the plastic and to offer the fungi a lot of surface to grow on.

Several organisms demonstrated the ability to efficiently degrade PUR (synthetic polymer polyester polyurethane) in both solid and liquid suspensions. Particularly robust activity was observed among several isolates in the genus Pestalotiopsis, although it was not a universal feature of this genus. Two Pestalotiopsis microspora isolates were uniquely able to grow on PUR as the sole carbon source under both aerobic and anaerobic conditions.

By feeding agricultural waste to Mycelium (the webs of thread-like mushroom roots) under correct conditions, the waste is turned into a material that can be moulded into any shape, having similar properties to Styrofoam – a polymer-based material made from Polystyrene.

Mushrooms can be used to clean up oil spills, accelerate landfill decomposition, as a structural base for lightweight panels, and as a means to extract rare minerals from trash. Yet there seems to be little or no significant research into the commercialisation of these systems. I may be that they don't scale up but I suspect that waste managers - including councils - don't want to be the first to say "we're going to grow oyster mushrooms on our landfill" because they're worried everyone would point and laugh.

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Friday Fungus: Squatting on Planet Mushroom

Us humans think the planet we live on is ours. A plaything gifted to us by gods filled with good things for us to use. We've colonised much of Earth, built great cities, roads, walls, canals - the world is shaped by humanity. We dominate. Or that's what we believe.

Think again. We're squatters on Planet Mushroom:

Fungi are present almost everywhere, in a spectacular array of shapes, sizes and colours, and performing a wide variety of different activities. In 1991 David Hawksworth, a mycologist at Kew estimated the world's fungal diversity at 1.5 million species (equal to the estimated number of all known other living organisms). This was thought at the time to be a radical over estimate, but now other researchers have proposed figures in excess of 13 million. Fungi perform essential roles in every terrestrial, and many aquatic, ecosystems, eg. decomposing dead organic matter to release nutrients, supporting plant life on poor soils by improving the absorption of nutrients when they form mycorrhizal associations with roots, living inside plants as endophytes and forming symbiotic partnerships with algae to form lichens. Any deterioration in fungal populations and diversity can therefore have a considerable impact on ecosystem health, in fact, the loss of lichens from an area is often used as an indication of poor air quality.

We wouldn't be here - there'd be no life - if it weren't for fungi. Plants and animals depend on fungi - without mycorrhizal symbiosis many of our tree species would die. The forests, the grass steppes and even our gardens are grown atop a network of mycelium. The grandest example of this mushroom world is Oregon's honey mushroom:

Next time you purchase white button mushrooms at the grocery store, just remember, they may be cute and bite-size but they have a relative out west that occupies some 2,384 acres (965 hectares) of soil in Oregon's Blue Mountains. Put another way, this humongous fungus would encompass 1,665 football fields, or nearly four square miles (10 square kilometers) of turf.

The discovery of this giant Armillaria ostoyae in 1998 heralded a new record holder for the title of the world's largest known organism, believed by most to be the 110-foot- (33.5-meter-) long, 200-ton blue whale. Based on its current growth rate, the fungus is estimated to be 2,400 years old but could be as ancient as 8,650 years, which would earn it a place among the oldest living organisms as well.

We have a pretty negative relationship with our mushroom masters - they cause disease, they rot things, they poison us and are a symbol of dark, unpleasant places. If you set a google alert for fungi, you'll get a pile of stories about fungal infections complete with gory detail and hard-to-look-at pictures. Plus stories about how bats, frogs and bananas are heading for extinction - destroyed by fungi.

But then without fungi there's no bread and no beer, no blue cheese and your salami rots. Wherever we look, inside and outside, there are members of the fungal kingdom - molds, lichens, yeasts and mushrooms. They are the dominant and most significant lifeform on the planet, they clean stuff up, cure illness and keep plants alive. They even help store carbon:

"Natural fluxes of carbon between the land and atmosphere are enormous and play a crucial role in regulating the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and, in turn, Earth's climate," said Colin Averill, lead author on the study and graduate student in the College of Natural Sciences at UT Austin. "This analysis clearly establishes that the different types of symbiotic fungi that colonize plant roots exert major control on the global carbon cycle, which has not been fully appreciated or demonstrated until now."

We truly are living in a world filled with fungi yet we know so little about them and treat the presence of this great kingdom as something to be fought against rather than something to be understood. Sadly there are no undergraduate courses in mycology and precious few postgraduate courses (mostly medical mycology - pretty damned important given the issues with antibiotics). With the result that we're literally running out of mycologists.

Here we are squatting on Planet Mushroom and we know next to nothing about our kindly hosts!

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Trade deals are more likely to be about fruit and fungus than tariffs

Yesterday New Zealand suspended exports of Kiwi Fruit to China. Not because of some new form of vegetable-based trade war but for reasons of biosecurity:

New Zealand has suspended its lucrative kiwifruit exports to China after authorities there say that on some shipments they found a type of fungus that can cause the fruit to rot.

Kiwifruit exporter Zespri said in a statement Friday it hopes to have new pre-shipping protocols in place within days so it can resume exports.

We should note that China has a bit of a dodgy track record on using health concerns and biosecurity issues as a weapon in trade battles - most notably over the cordyceps mushrooms (the weird parasitic fungus sometimes called Himalayan Viagra) - and there's a hint of some of this activity here:

New Zealand Trade Minister Todd McClay said last month he had been made aware of reports claiming China could take retaliatory trade action if New Zealand investigated allegations of steel dumping there.

But regardless of these issues, it's important that we appreciate how sensitive biosecurity is for many agricultural products. We laugh and joke about giant poisonous spiders in banana shipments but by far the biggest problem is the spread of fungal contamination. We should remember that fruit and vegetable production is often in a cloned, genetic monoculture - the starkest example of this is those bananas (with or without spiders):

A type of Fusarium wilt appeared this year in Australia’s main banana-growing state after spreading to Asia and Africa. While the fungus has been around since the 1990s and has yet to affect top exporter Ecuador, Fresh Del Monte Produce Inc. called it a potential “big nightmare.” The United Nations says the disease threatens supply, and Latin American growers are taking steps to limit the risk.

Every single banana is a clone of the same Cavandish banana plant - they are genetically identical and have no protection against Panama Disease, a fungal infection that is spread via contaminated soil. It is no joke for a multi-billion dollar industry (and don't give me any fair trade nonsense - those small plantations have worse biosecurity than big plantations) as it could be wiped out. As an aside here, it's worth noting that the EU's criminal opposition to GMOs might prevent a solution to the banana crisis that's being developed in East Africa.

To take a third example: Egypt is the world's biggest grain importer but has, until recently, consistently prevented imports with even the slightest trace of the fungus ergot. Without going into too much detail this makes it nearly impossible to import grain from anywhere with a damp climate. After a flurry of negotiations - and remember Egypt needs this grain to feed its huge urban population - a fix was found:

Egypt, which rejected several wheat cargoes this year for fungus contamination, is set to instruct officials to follow international standards that permit a small amount of the fungus known as ergot in imports.

The Cabinet on Tuesday backed allowing shipments containing 0.05 percent ergot and Agriculture Ministry spokesman Eid Hawash said an official decree ordering the quarantine office to accept that level may be issued Wednesday.

All this stuff has become - because of the Brexit vote - rather more significant for the UK. In the Egypt example, officials were applying a law (itself derived from UN FAO regulations) dating back to 2001 rather than more recent ones. And we should remember that the problem doesn't just relate to the exporting nations - in many ways imports matter just as much. The impact of grain shortages in Egypt would be higher food prices in Cairo and Alexandria - with all the dire possibilities this might bring.

If you're sad enough (like me) to have news alerts set for fungi then you'll see the concerns about spreading fungal infections - from ones killing bats or amphibians through worries like ash die-back to the concerns we see above about negative impacts on biosecurity and public health. When we talk about 'trade negotiations', we need to understand that these aren't about striking deals between one country and another (such 'deals' are just grandstanding for politicians). Negotiations are about agreeing rules that permit trade while protecting against the possible negative affects of that trade and getting consistent regulation on things like how much hallucinogenic mycotoxin it's OK to have in a bushel of wheat.

It also means that botanists - and mycologists - are as important as lawyers or economists in getting the best deals for the UK!

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There will soon be no bananas

Probably. Here from a fantastic article on fungi in The New Yorker:

A particular strain of Fusarium, Tropical Race One, rendered the original globalized banana variety, the Gros Michel, commercially extinct in the first half of the twentieth century. Fortunately, the banana variety that fills our grocery stores today, the Cavendish, was resistant to Tropical Race One, and it eventually replaced the Gros Michel, although not before widespread banana shortages. Unfortunately, the Cavendish is not resistant to Tropical Race Four. The strain emerged in Taiwan in the late nineteen-sixties and has subsequently destroyed the banana industry in China, Indonesia, and Malaysia, and put a significant dent in the Australian harvest. Once a plantation is infected, there is no way to save the banana trees, and, because the fungus remains in the soil, the land cannot be used to raise bananas again. The only way to combat F. oxysporum f. sp. cubense is to make sure that it does not spread.

This really isn't a joke. If this Tropical Race Four variety of Fusarium oxysporum reaches the Americas it is simply a matter of time before we have no bananas. As is clear - there is no resistant variety of banana to replace the Cavendish.

Enjoy the friendly yellow fruit while you can.

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Friday Fungus: On the shocking absence of mushrooms in Neal Stephenson's 'Seveneves'

I'm a lot of a fan of Neal Stephenson's writing - he is among the most creative and innovative of modern SF writers. And 'Seveneves' is no exception as it tells the story of man's survival after the moon, inexplicably, blows up.

As ever with Stephenson, the writing is dense reflecting how much he's researched the ideas presented. Indeed, for non-physicists wanting to get their heads round the science and maths of orbits, the book is fantastic. But if your head doesn't want to get round Lagrange points and orbital decay the story still carries you along as a few thousand intrepid folk struggle to create a means of survival in space. And Stephenson knows his audience:

“We're not hunter-gatherers anymore. We're all living like patients in the intensive care unit of a hospital. What keeps us alive isn't bravery, or athleticism, or any of those other skills that were valuable in a caveman society. It's our ability to master complex technological skills. It is our ability to be nerds. We need to breed nerds.”

So up there in space (and, as a sideline, in caves under Alaska too) the human survivors have to eat. Indeed, it's the lack of food that does for one section of the space-dwellers, turning them into cannibals. The mention of how this started is a beautifully snarky reference to the culture of blogging and social media:

“Tav started it,” Aïda said. “He ate his own leg. Soft cannibalism, he called it. Legs are of no use in space. He blogged it. Then it went viral.”

The main source of food Stephenson gives us up in space is algae grown hydroponically in the little spaceships (delightfully named 'arklets'). And this is fine except that it's rather limiting. It's true that algae - as plants - have the additional advantage of helping with the atmosphere but it's a lot harder to get the necessary nutrients from this source than from another option - fungi. Yet, for some reason, this option isn't even considered even though the intensive production of fungi as meat substitutes is a well established science:

Mycoprotein is made in 40 metre high fermenters which run continuously for five weeks at a time.
The fermenter is sterilised and filled with a water and glucose solution. Then a batch of fusarium venenatum, the fungi at the heart of Mycoprotein, is introduced.

Once the organism has started to grow a continuous feed of nutrients, including potassium, magnesium and phosphate as well as trace elements, are added to the solution. The pH balance, temperature, nutrient concentration and oxygen are all constantly adjusted in order to achieve the optimum growth rate.

The organism and nutrients combine to form Mycoprotein solids and these are removed continuously from the fermenter after an average residence time of five to six hours. Once removed the Mycoprotein is heated to 65°C to breakdown the nucleic acid. Water is then removed in centrifuges, leaving the Mycoprotein looking rather like pastry dough.

If you were really setting up to survive in space entirely 'off-grid', I'd expect someone to suggest the role of fungi in making that possible. There's little about the process described above that couldn't be replicated off the planet. And for all you mushroom haters - you'd get used to it!

The next consideration - admittedly one Stephenson doesn't set out in scientific detail - is how to 're-terraform' the earth after it's surface had been scorched for four thousand years. Here, again the role of fungi (and to be fair those algae) is significant:

Mushrooms have been around for tens of millions of years and their activities are indispensable for the operation of the biosphere. Through their relationships with plants and animals, mushrooms are essential for forest and grassland ecology, climate control and atmospheric chemistry, water purification, and the maintenance of biodiversity. This first point, about the ecological significance of mushrooms, is obvious, yet the 16,000 described species of mushroom-forming fungi are members of the most poorly understood kingdom of life. The second point requires a dash of lateral thinking. Because humans evolved in ecosystems dependent upon mushrooms there would be no us without mushrooms. And no matter how superior we feel, humans remain dependent upon the continual activity of these fungi. The relationship isn’t reciprocal: without us there would definitely be mushrooms.

So, if you're going to create a human-friendly environment on a planet, the starting point has to be fungi because without those fungi it's not a human-friendly environment.

None of this distracts from the book. As James Lovegrove in the FT puts it:

Seveneves is a superhuman achievement, dense, eloquent, exhaustive, exhilarating, powerful, utterly readable, and ultimately uplifting. Stephenson imagines the worst that can happen, and insists that we can make the best of it. It’s the end of the world as we know it, and he feels fine.

I just think it would have been even better with mushrooms.

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Friday Fungus: Terroir - or how fungi make your wine taste different

The idea of 'terroir' is well-known to wine buffs and is most commonly described as:

In a larger context, wine tasters try to define terroir as the specificity of place, which has come to include not only the soil in a region, but also the climate, the weather, the aspect of the vineyards and anything else that can possibly differentiate one piece of land from another.

The same grape grown in a different place will produce similar but distinct wine. And the wine buffs will talk about soil, climate, aspect and even the phases of the moon in trying to explain what this all means. Funnily enough they never mention mushrooms let alone fungi. Well they should:

Professor White offers a scientific, if unromantic explanation of terroir: wine character can be determined by the rate of water and nutrient uptake by the vine, and different types of soils will affect this rate — with microorganisms playing an important role in this process.

He describes how the mycorrhizal fungi in the soil form a symbiotic relationship with the vine’s roots. “The mycelium of the fungus grows within the root itself,” he says. “And some of the hyphae grow out into the surrounding soil, extending the root surface available and enhancing the uptake of water and nutrients such as phosphorus.”

The degree to which these fungi are around plus the different varieties will affect the rate of water and nutrient intake - ergo changing the flavour of the wine. And there's more because those other (and rather important to making alcohol) fungi, yeasts will vary from location to location:

“The wild yeasts that come in to the winery from the vineyard with the grapes can influence a wine’s character, particularly at the start of a spontaneous ferment,” says Paul Chambers, research manager in biosciences at the Australian Wine Research Institute in Adelaide. “And there’s mounting evidence that the complexity of microflora of each vineyard varies from region to region.”

Terroir is a romantic notion filled with the idea of a place's history, its uniqueness - the concept is part of wine's mystique. Yet the reality is that microbial variations and the different fungi knocking around the patch are the reasons for that difference rather than just soil, climate or aspect (and let's be clear that the phases of the moon stuff is nonsense).

Another way in which fungi make our lives (and the wine) wonderful!

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Friday Fungus: Penicillium salamii - the sausage fungus

You all know dear readers that molds and fungi are essential in artisan food production. You may also know that one role for these chaps is in the curing of meat (one or two of you may never eat salami again though):

Generally, salami uses Penicillium nalgiovense--a white, edible mold--in the meat curing process. When the salami is cased, spiced, and ready to go, meat producers introduce the mold to seal in flavors and keep other potentially dangerous molds out.

Using DNA sequencing, the team identified two fungi living on the cured meats they analysed: Penicillium nalgiovense, the typical mold, and another mold that seemed to be related to Penicillium olsonii. But it wasn’t exactly the same.

 So now you know that the white outside layer on the salami you bought on that market stall yesterday is an edible mold - indeed it's several types of edible mold. Those researchers have found a little visitor to the sausage - a mold they didn't know about. And they've called it Penicillium salamii - sausage mold.

And why not!

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Friday Fungus - why fungi are so important

Stinkhorn

It's probably true that we wouldn't be here were in not for fungi - it was the mushroom brotherhood that first colonised the land helping to pave the way for plants, insects and eventually us higher order animals. OK it was a long time ago but fungi remain central to our life on the planet. And death:

“For most people, fungal disease means a bit of athlete’s foot or a manky-looking toe nail. These maybe irritating and unsightly but fungi can do far worse. Fungi kill more people than malaria and tuberculosis worldwide.  They destroy about a third of all arable food crops. Some species have led to the extinction of many animal and plant species – sometimes even before the species has even been discovered. Fungi were on the earth long before plants and other life forms. They readily adapt to increasing globalization and climate change and we need to rise to the challenge to deal with the threats posed by these versatile and intriguing organisms.”

That's Professor Rosemary Barnes from Cardiff University's Institute of Infection and Immunity and is a specialist in fungal infections. She also points out that the bad fungi are a very small part of the total fungal world - just 600 out of two million known species are disease-causing with just 30 causing 99% of these diseases. Plus, of course, fungi are saving lives as well:

Antimicrobial resistant (AMR) bacteria pose a very real threat to the world, one that a highly concerned World Health Organization (WHO) has kept in its radar for years. Now a team of researchers has identified a new natural antibiotic in horse dung-dwelling fungus, offering up secrets that might help us avoid or at least understand an encroaching AMR world crisis.

Those clever fungi have worked out how to adapt rapidly as the bacteria adapt and change. And this flexibility can be synthesised in the laboratory - taking us a step towards having adaptive, responsive antibiotics rather than the dead end (and also fungal in origin) drugs we know are such a problem.

Maybe we need more mycologists?

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'Of Mycelium and Men' - thoughts on the evolution of fungi...

Steve Manthorp wanted me to call this 'Of Mycelium and Men' and it's such a good title I have shamelessly thieved the idea. The posting is prompted by two things - the announcement of a project to study the evolutionary history of fungi by the US National Science Foundation and my recent reading of Jeff Vandermeer's 'City of Saints and Madmen'.

The research project first - it looks at zygomycetes which are believed to be among the first terrestrial fungi forms and perhaps a critical factor in the development of land plants. Zygomycetes are filamentous molds similar to those we see sometimes on old bread or fruit that is starting to rot. Anyhow, we don't know much about them - Jason Stajich, an associate professor of plant pathology and microbiology at the University of California, Riverside, explains:

"Despite zygomycetes' critical ecological roles and importance to human civilization, they remain understudied and their evolutionary relationships are still not well understood," Stajich said. "This is likely a result of some of the difficulty in culturing many of the species, but also because, in general, too few researchers have been studying them."

The research will examine the symbiotic and parasitic relationships between these early forms of fungi and the plants and animals on which they host - and hosted. And it's here that the 'City of Saints and Madmen' came to mind. the book - a collection of short stories set in a fictional city called Ambergris - has at its heart the uneasy relationship between man and mushrooms. The city is a human settlement placed in the heart of an older, grander and more complex city built by super-evolved mushroom-like humanoids, the 'Grey Caps'.

Perhaps, by design or accident, Vandermeer hit on a strange truth - fungi are an overlooked essence in the development of sophisticated life but we see the myco-world as parasitic, feeding on death and decay rather than creating and enhancing. So our response to the mushroom is fear and repulsion:

Manzikert found the gray cap repellent, resembling as it did, he is quoted as saying, "both child and mushroom", and if not for his fear of retaliation from a presumed ruling body of unknown strength, the Cappan would have run the native through with his sword."

In a weird way Vandermeer's fantasy echoes the research Prof. Stajich and his colleagues are undertaking:

 resolving these earliest branches in the fungal genealogy scientists can study what the likely characteristics of ancestral fungi were, and determine what traits emerged first and were necessary as part of the transitions of life from aquatic to terrestrial ecosystems.

Read more at: http://phys.org/news/2014-09-evolutionary-history-fungi.html#jCp

...by resolving these earliest branches in the fungal genealogy scientists can study what the likely characteristics of ancestral fungi were, and determine what traits emerged first and were necessary as part of the transitions of life from aquatic to terrestrial ecosystems.

Perhaps, from out of all this we get a glimpse of a future mushroom world!

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Friday fungus: No blue cheese isn't going away...

Penicillium roqueforti - the fungus that makes blue cheese blue

This afternoon Kathryn tripped into the dining room where I was lounging with a book (or rather in these hi-tech times, a kindle) to tell me about the great ploughman's lunch her and Jethro had enjoyed at The George. And more specifically to wave a piece of Yorkshire Blue cheese in my direction - this was because the rest of my family don't like this particular example of the gift that fungi bring to our cuisine.

However, the Co-op has issued a press release saying that Stilton (and I guess other blue cheeses) are 'under threat' because:

Consumption by those under 30 years of age has slumped by 23 per cent and few people under the age of 25 would consider buying it regularly. But cheese experts are warning that if the trend continues it could mean that Blue Stilton, which has been in production in the UK for almost 300 years, would only be available overseas. 

Now I applaud the cuteness of this PR campaign - for that's precisely what this is about.  And if it means that there's more talk of the blue cheese that is brilliant. Apparently the poor kids have been told not to eat mouldy food - so they don't eat Stilton!

The mold in Stilton is Penicillium roqueforti - probably the only fungus with a facebook page - and it's been around a long time (the French folk put bread in caves to catch it before adding it to the cheese). Penicillium roqueforti is a common saprotrophic fungus from the family Trichocomaceae. Widespread in nature, it can be isolated from soil, decaying organic matter, and plants - and we've been using it since at least 500AD and possibly longer.

There will always be folk who don't like the powerful flavours of blue cheeses, just as there are plenty of people who'd rather have a bland processed cheese. But I don't believe for a second that we won't be able to buy Stilton and other blue cheeses in England.

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Friday Fungus: A sad tale - and probably a wise warning

Dogs have a terrible habit of eating almost everything:

Devastated Fred Marchment and his wife were walking with their three dogs at Danebury Hill Fort, a beauty spot near their home in the village of Upper Clatford, near Andover, Hants. Their springer spaniel-collie cross dog Jake, who was just under two years old, scampered excitedly into the woods and ate some poisonous fungi.

"We shouted at him to stop but it was too late - within three hours he died. It was horrible. We are really upset" said Fred. "There's fungi and toadstools everywhere. It's been so damp and warm, they are all over the place even though it's nearly Christmas."

The distraught family are warning other dog owners to take care and make sure their pets don't eat deadly fungi growing wild in the woods and meadows. 

The best advice is not to let your dogs eat mushrooms - the story doesn't make clear what mushroom this poor dog ate. Judging by the speed of reaction it sounds like a death cap - but dogs could react badly to fungi that wouldn't make humans ill.

A sad tale  - as the story relates there are a lot of mushrooms around at the moment including many of the edible species like oysters and assorted field mushrooms but we are as ever advised to be careful and to make absolutely sure we know what we're eating.

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Friday Fungus Extra: Mapping Magic Mushrooms

Fly agaric (Amanita muscaria) in woods above Ogden reservoir near Halifax, September 2011

Nice little piece in today's Sunday Telegraph on the success of common fungi in our changing climate:

Popular edible varieties such as the the chanterelle and porcini mushrooms are among those found to have changed where they grow, meaning they will become easier to find in the countryside.

Other species such as the distinctive jelly ear mushroom, Auricularia auricula-judge used to be found growing on the branches of elder trees, but researchers have now found them on 20 other plants.

Scientists are not certain exactly why the fungi have started to change their hosts but believe changes in the climate may be responsible. 

And the source of the piece is Dr Alan Gange, a mycologist at Royal Holloway, University of London who is asking the public to help map how common fungi are spread. And the good doctor's focus is on Amanita muscaria - the fly agaric (which the article does insist is poisonous presumably to avoid any reference to halucinogenic drugs):

He added: "The season for the Fly Agaric is about to begin – it usually fruits from late September to late October.

"This research is important from the scientific point of view – if fungi are moving around the environment, this has all sorts of implications for forestry practices and ecosystem functioning."

To report your sightings of the Fly Agaric please email Dr Gange on flyagaric@rhul.ac.uk

Off you go then!

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Friday Fungus: didn't see the dryad though!

 

Pretty sure this is dryad's saddle (Polyporus squamosus) - although I'm happy to be corrected. We're told that you can make paper from these polypores although Grethic's adventures there were not entirely successful.

However it is more attractive than this darling:

No idea - other than it's a jelly fungus - what this is but somehow I doubt its edibility!

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Friday Fungus: Mushrooms for dessert

I've been promising you so mushroom puddings for a while - but there's no point in reinventing the wheel. I know having mushrooms for your dessert seems odd but The Mushroom Channel (a truly wondrous resource for fungi fanantics) has featured one from Gourmet Fury - Mushroom Cardamom Rice Pudding with Dulce de Leche! (if you're really, really lazy rather than making dulce de leche the hard way just buy a can of Carnation Caramel!)

Enjoy!

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Friday Fungus: don't just eat your mushrooms raw - marinade them!

My natural instinct when told that something is bad for me (usually by some self-appointed nutritionist or a jumped up, ill-informed health fascist) is to tell them to bathe their heads in guano until they’re thought of a better livelihood. However, you trust me don’t you? I’m going to give you some advice on eating mushrooms raw.

“The mycochitin composition of mushroom cell walls, as opposed to cellulose walls of plant cells, is difficult for humans to digest. Our stomachs resent indigestible items, and often forcibly reject them without further ado. The cooking process helps break down fungal cell walls, rendering mushroom flesh not only more readily digestible, but also releasing significant nutritional value contained within the cells.”

As is the case with most raw vegetables, mushrooms contain substances that “may be carcinogenic” (and if you’re really worried about this don’t eat that raw celery and keep those radishes out of your salad). The article from which the quote above – and the carcinogen warning – comes is pretty unequivocal: don’t eat mushrooms raw.

For my part, I don’t wholly agree. I certainly wouldn’t recommend building your diet around raw mushrooms and would advise against eating field collected wild mushrooms raw (although the Italians routinely do this and seem to live long, happy and healthy lives in the main). But the domesticated shop mushrooms are fine for most folk – just make sure they’re clean and don’t feed them to people with over-sensitive tummies.

My suggestion, if you want to enhance your salads with mushrooms, is to marinade them. Do this just as you would pieces of chicken, meat or vegetables – make the marinade (whatever you fancy but wine vinegar, good olive oil and herbs is a good starter or you might try lemon juice and rapeseed oil), chop up some sweet pepper, and mix the whole lot together and leave to stand for a few hours in the fridge.

Great in a salad with the juice as a dressing or just use as a condiment with cheese or cold meat. And don’t forget a big glass of Chianti!

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The Friday Fungus: Vegetarian? Don't eat mycoproteins, eat real mushrooms!

There’s always been one thing about vegetarianism I don’t understand – why some veggies seem dedicated to searching for something that, to paraphrase Douglas Adams, tastes almost, but not entirely, completely unlike meat. My advice – if you’re going to be a vegetarian for whatever reason – is to eat mushrooms instead. One’s like chicken-of-the-woods (pictured above) are substantial, protein-rich and so much tastier that artificial meat substitutes. And you can grow your own!

Which brings us to the vexed matter of mycoproteins – industrially-produced meat substitutes derived from the mold-like fungi fusarium venenatum. And, more or less, this is how it is turned into a meat substitute:

“Fusarium venenatum A3/5 was first chosen for development as a myco-protein in the late 1960s. It was intended as a protein source for humans and after 12 years of intensive testing, F. venenatum A3/5 was approved for sale as food by the Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food in the United Kingdom in 1984. Today, myco-protein is produced in two 150,000 l pressure-cycle fermenters in a continuous process which outputs around 300 kg biomass/h. The continuous process is typically operated for around 1,000 h.” Wiebe, Applied Microbiology & Biotechnology, 58/4

What vegetarians also need to know is that the actual meat substitute is only possible through use of egg albumen – so you can’t feed mycoprotein-based products to your vegan mates. In the USA a vigorous campaign a few years ago against the leading mycoprotein product Quorn suggested that it can cause violent stomach disorders. This piece by science writer Charles Hirschberg in Vegetarian Times sums up the selective and partial nature of this campaign and concludes that there’s no evidence suggesting any health risks associated with mycoproteins – or at least none that compare, for example, to the risks linked to eating nuts for some people.

My beef with mycoprotein isn’t that it’s bad for you but that it makes boring meat-substitute products when there is a great choice of natural foods out there for the vegetarian.

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Friday Fungus: Morels

As the Autumn months slip away our thoughts of mushrooms tend to fade – after all mushrooms are characteristic of those damp, misty times not of the clear, fresh bright days of Spring! But here’s a thought – look out for morels.

Although many gourmets extol the virtue of the morel, it does have something of an acquired taste – earthy is the phrase most often associated with these mushrooms. But they are great fresh and, like ceps, are readily and easily dried. Even if you’re buying them rather than collecting them yourself, take care to clean the morels well (or else the earthiness might be literal as well as invocative).

As ever Wild About Mushrooms is a great guide to these fungi and include a series of recipes for using the fresh morels (such as a selection of stuffed morel ideas – great for finger food if you have the patience). However, for a celebration of the morel this is the place to go – The Great Morel. The Wood Family Favorite on this site looks the business and it would work for any large mushrooms I suspect.

However I suggest (seeing as I’m lazy that way) morels sliced and sauteed with butter and served in a salad of spring onions, lamb’s lettuce and cucumber with a simple dressing or even just some good olive oil.

Enjoy!

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Friday Fungus:The Great Mushroom Clean-Up! How fungi are helping clear up our mess!

Fungi have many uses – not only are they great food and essential to the production of bread and beer but they have applications in the “bioremediation” of oil spills.

The problem with oil spills is that the detergents used to clean up the shoreline and shallows following these disasters can be as damaging as the oil itself. Indeed there is some evidence that the recovery of untreated shoreline is as rapid as the recovery of treated shoreline. This is where mushrooms – with a little help from matted hair – come into play:

“In the aftermath of the Cosco Busan oil spill in San Francisco Bay last November, woven mats of human hair were used to absorb the oil from the beaches. Oyster mushrooms were layered between the oil-soaked mats and allowed to work their magic.

In just 12 weeks, the mushrooms consumed the oil and the hair, turning the whole mess into soil. When you think about the fact that the hair waste from salons usually goes into landfill and that oil from oil spills is generally incinerated after it’s cleaned up, this is an improvement on a massive scale”

Pretty impressive stuff – both as an example of recycling and also as a use for mushrooms. The search for applications for this mycological marvel continued and in Fort Bragg, California an experiment got under way to see if mushrooms could be used to remove dioxins and other contaminants from the soil. The project is led by Paul E. Stamets (pictured above), author of “Mycelium Running: How Mushrooms Can Help Save the World.” The mushrooms used were local and applied naturally:

“Quick to caution against easy remedies — “I am not a panacea for all their problems” — he said he had hope for cleaning up dioxin and other hazardous substances on the site. “The less recalcitrant toxins could be broken down within 10 years.”
At least two dioxin-degrading species of mushroom indigenous to the Northern California coast could work, he said: turkey tail and oyster mushrooms. Turkey tails have ruffled edges and are made into medicinal tea. Oyster mushrooms have domed tops and are frequently found in Asian food.”

Now there are some problems – this mushroom-based bioremediation is slow and many of the possible benefits remain unproven. However, given the amount of contaminated land and the environmental cost of current remediation methods (chiefly the removal of contaminated soil from the site and its dumping elsewhere), this mycological bioremediation represents real progress.

And Paul Stamets continues to make the case for the importance of fungi to the planet from his Fungi Perfecti business:

“Covering most all landmasses on the planet are huge masses of fine filaments of living cells from a kingdom barely explored. More than 8 miles of these cells, called mycelia, can permeate a cubic inch of soil. Fungal mats are now known as the largest biological entities on the planet, with some individuals covering more than 20,000 acres. Growing outwards at one quarter to two inches per day, the momentum of mycelial mass from a single mushroom species staggers the imagination. These silent mycelial tsunamis affect all biological systems upon which they are dependent. As they mature and die back, panoply of other fungi quickly come into play. Every ounce of soil does not host just one species, but literally thousands of species of fungi. Of the estimated 1–2 million species of fungi—about 150,000 species being mushrooms—we have catalogued only about 50,000, of which 14,000 have been identified with a species name. The genetic diversity of fungi is vast by design, and apparently crucial for life to continue.”

Put simply mushrooms are essential to the creation and maintenance of soil – we should cherish and encourage fungi. Without them the world would be a barren – and less tasty – place.

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Friday Fungus: Snow Mushrooms

Seemed appropriate given the current weather to talk about enoki - Japanese Snow Mushrooms (Flammulina velutipes). If you've an interest in Chinese or Japanese cookery you will have encountered these delicate mushrooms but I bet you didn't know they grow wild in the UK where we call them velvet shank. In the wild they do not look like the picture above but are yellowish brown and rather larger - the cultivated version is produced in huge quantities in the far east (over 100,000 tonnes annually).

The snow or winter mushroom description comes about because these fungi fruit very late and can survive a temperatures close to freezing. Golden Gourmet Mushrooms * describe them as follows:

"...enoki are found in the mountains often right at the snow-line growing in clusters on deciduous logs. Under outdoor conditions, wild specimens of this mushroom are short-stemmed with caps as wide as the stems are long. The lower portions of the stem have a darkened, velvety fuzz, hence the common name "The Velvet Stem" or "The Velvet Foot". Under artificial cultivation conditions first developed by Japanese growers, cultivated varieties of this mushrooms look entirely different. Manipulation of light, carbon dioxide and temperature conditions creates a beautiful bouquet of delicate, white, long-stemmed (4-5 inches), small-capped (1/3-1/2 inch) mushrooms."

*There's a recipe for smoked oysters, fried spinach and enoki on the Golden Gourmet web-site that looks good although I haven't tried it so can't vouch for it!

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The Friday Fungus: Fairy Rings

One of the most well known edible mushrooms – and one of the less popular – is Marasmius Oreades the fairy ring mushroom. Some of you may recall a lawn lover regaling you with the terrible trauma of removing the fairy ring from the otherwise pristine lawn (rather than leaving the ring there and eating the lovely little mushrooms every spring).

Elsewhere in Europe the rings or arcs made by this mushroom are the result of witches dancing, the depredations of dragons or the evil work of sorcerers. But in England, the rings were where the fairies and elves came to dance – and with this came risk. Falling asleep within a fairy ring was asking for trouble and for some even stepping inside the ring could result in dire consequences – blindness, miscarriage, disease and even death awaits the foolish.

By far the worst punishment – be warned you lovers of lawns – fell on those who ploughed up or dug up the ring. The wrath and vengeance of the fair folk would be visited on the miscreant and upon his descendants. Madness, loss, despair and other evil consequences befell such ploughmen. Of course, left well alone and allowed to flourish brought the boon of the fairies on the house and those living there with crops growing better, animals thriving and good fortune being a close companion of those good folk who tolerated the fairies.

Like all fresh mushrooms, fairy ring mushrooms are best not overcooked and, because these are springtime mushrooms, they work very well with a salad. But be warned – there are other slightly poisonous mushrooms that grow in rings so be careful. A good description and guide to identification is here on Atomic Shrimp. The Clitocybe dealbata mushrooms (which are very poisonous) grow in a similar ring but are different shapes having a more concave cap.