Proponents hope interest in fungi will mushroom
Many species critical to composition as well as decomposition of Penn's Woods
It was not the heart of mushroom season. It was a cold afternoon in the middle of March. The woods were largely dormant; the ground still frozen and covered with dead leaves. But even in this largely barren setting, John Plischke III could demonstrate that it truly is a fungus-filled world -- and that's a good thing.
Plischke picked up a small piece of wood on the trail that looked like it had been smudged with green chalk. The green mark, though, was actually a fungus. Appropriately enough, it was called "green stain."
 Korf's Gyromitra (Gyromitra korfii) is found in hardwood forests or mixed woods. Photo courtesy of John Plischke III |
"If it was fruiting, it would have little green colored cups on the mushroom, but when it disappears, it colors the wood this green color," said Plischke, club mycologist with the Western Pennsylvania Mushroom Club. "In the olden days, they used to cut the sticks of wood and use it as inlays for furniture to give it a nice green color."
| Fungus: Friend To The Forest |
Not far away, was the birch polypore, a tough, brown, kidney-shaped fungus growing on a tree. It was, Plischke explained, one of several fungi found on the "iceman" -- the well-preserved 5,000-year-old corpse discovered in a melting glacier in the Alps in 1991. "They suspect he carried it around to fight a stomach parasite that he had. When he ate this mushroom, it made his stomach feel better."
A few yards away, he stopped and pulled another brown fungi off the side of a tree. "Here's another one found on the iceman," he said. "It's called the tinder polypore." Plischke pulled out a lighter and let the flame touch the inside of the fungi, which began to smolder. "It could smolder all night," he said, explaining its value to the iceman. "He used this to transport fire."
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People have been making use of fungi for thousands of years, for everything from tasty toppings on a pizza, to the creation of the life-saving drug penicillin. But their most important -- and most unheralded -- role may be in maintaining functioning ecosystems.
Some types of fungus are essential for extracting nutrients from the soil so they can be taken up by the roots of trees. Others decompose organic material so the nutrients can be reused by other organisms. Without fungus, many trees in the forests would grow poorly, if at all.
To draw attention to their critical role, the Department of Conservation and Natural Resources' Wild Resource Conservation Program has chosen to highlight the state's fungi on its annual poster and 2006 patches.
"Fungi play a vital role in forest ecology and in Pennsylvania's agricultural economy, yet few people understand their unique life cycle and appreciate their astonishing variety," said Sara Nicholas, executive director of the Department of Conservation and Natural Resources' Wild Resource Conservation Program. "We chose the fungal kingdom to shed some well- deserved light on this humble but important taxonomic group."
Fungi could use the attention.
Habitat loss may threaten the state's fungi diversity -- as it does most other wild resources -- according to a 1995 report, "Conserving Pennsylvania's Native Biological Diversity." But the report warned that fungi are plagued with an equally troublesome threat: ignorance. There are almost no trained field mycologists -- fungi scientists -- in the state. Further, hardly any of the educational institutions in the entire country have the expertise to train such specialists.
  Yellow Orange Fly Agaric (Amanita muscaria var. formosa) and Yellow Morel (Morchella esculenta) Photos by John Plischke III |
"The likely paucity of future mycologists, in combination with the present lack of identification and cataloging of species already in collections, presents a serious threat to future understanding and conservation of Pennsylvania's fungal diversity," said the report, which was produced by the Pennsylvania Biological Survey, a scientific organization aimed at increasing the understanding of the state's natural diversity.
If anything, the situation has since gotten worse. There are so few "professional" mycologists that all of the members of the PABS committee responsible for Pennsylvania's fungi are "amateurs," including Plischke, who chairs the committee.
"I couldn't get anyone else," said Jerry Hassinger, PABS president. Most mycologists today are either involved in growing mushrooms commercially, or researching fungal pest species that threaten crops or pose other problems for humans. Few are trained to study fungi biodiversity, or understand the roles that fungi play in maintaining ecosystems. In Pennsylvania, no agency even has explicit responsibility for monitoring and managing wild fungi.
"There are two problems that we have," Hassinger said. "One is that the universities aren't teaching it, and two, if the universities taught it, nobody is hiring them. Why should kids be interested other than as amateurs?" That doesn't mean that fungi are in bad hands. As is the case with birders, some of the best fungi finders in the state are amateurs, Hassinger noted.
For instance, Plischke estimates he can identify more than 1,000 species by sight, and more when viewed under a microscope. He's been called to the hospital to help identify poisonous mushrooms that people have eaten. And he has almost single-handedly taken on the task of updating the state's official fungi list, spending hours each week combing the database: tossing out duplicate entries and recording species not previously listed.
Right now, the list contains about 8,000 fungi species, but that is a number sure to grow. "In Pennsylvania, at least 25 percent of the mushroom species haven't been identified," Plischke said. But in another sign of the low priority accorded fungi, there is no official "home" for new mushrooms when they are discovered. When a unique plant or insect is found in Pennsylvania, a "voucher" specimen is usually collected and carefully stored in a museum collection so researchers in the future can verify the species, should any question arise.
No institution in the state bothers to keep fungi on file. When the PABS report was written a decade ago, there were four significant herbarium collections maintained in Pennsylvania, either by museums or universities. All have since shipped their collections someplace else. That means no one can verify species claimed to have been collected here in the past without traveling around the country to do so.
"We should at least have someplace to store them," Plischke said. "We have been finding a lot of stuff and there is no place to put it. Usually it is discarded."
With names like destroying angel, dead man's fingers and corpse finder -- and including such unsavory characters as mildew and slime molds -- it's no wonder that fungi don't top the public's list of natural marvels. Further, many fungi are mostly underground. The mushrooms that sprout through the soil are often only the flowering part of a much larger organism.
 Green-headed Jelly Baby (Leotia viscosa) Photo by John Plischke III |
The common honey mushroom, Armillaria ostoyae, can stretch for miles. In fact the largest organism on Earth is a 3.5-mile-long honey mushroom that covers an area of more than 1,600 football fields in Oregon -- almost entirely underground. That's one humongous fungus.
As the iceman knew, fungi do a lot for people, too. The yeast that makes bread rise is a fungus. Penicillin, derived from a mold, Penicillium notatum, was the first effective antibiotic derived for medical use. Because of its development, and other antibiotics, deaths in the United States from infectious bacterial diseases are only one-twentieth of what they were a century ago.
And, of course, they top pizzas, can be sauteed, fried, eaten raw or served a host of other ways. It is the food aspect that gets most people's attention, according to Plischke, who gives frequent fungi presentations and leads mushroom hikes across the state. "Most of the people want mushrooms they can eat -- 90 percent of the people who find something say, Ôcan I eat it?' That's what they care about."
Of course, that's just the start of the lesson. Because once people learn the edible species, they also need to learn the poisonous species -- and the look-alikes that pose as edible species. Plischke estimates that about a tenth of the species in the state are edible, a tenth are poisonous and the rest are unpalatable or unknown.
His hope is that this interest will lead to more people joining mushroom clubs, taking to the woods and participating in the search to identify the state's fungi.
Finding new types of mushrooms in the state is still "pretty common," Plischke said. Yet a comprehensive statewide survey is unlikely anytime soon -- and not just because there are few trained fungi finders.
While fungi are almost everywhere, they may not always be obvious. Some specific types of fungi will spring forth only from the bodies of certain insects or caterpillars. Many live primarily underground, and "flower" only when conditions are right. Others are microscopic.
"There's a dead oak log near my house and I look at it every week or so. Over the past year, I have seen more than 20 types of mushrooms growing on the dead log," Plischke said. Each comes up at different times, and under different conditions.
Some may be associated with a tree, and pop above the ground only as the tree begins to die, and they need to release spores to find a new host. So a comprehensive mushroom survey would be a daunting task. "You have to be there 12 months out of the year," Plischke said, "and certain mushrooms might fruit only once every 10 years."
 Orange Mycena (Mycena leaiana) Photo by John Plischke III |
So Plischke goes into the woods every week, all year long, looking for mushrooms. He always finds something.
To learn about mushrooms in Pennsylvania, a good starting point is the web site of the Western Pennsylvania Mushroom Club: www.wpamushroomclub.org