Two of the country’s most amazing mushroom festivals are happening in Oregon next Sunday. The Oregon Mycological Society’s Fall Mushroom Show takes place at the World Forestry Center in Portland. And the Mount Pisgah Arboretum in the Eugene area holds its annual Mushroom Festival.
OMS fall mushroom show
My Chicago buddies and I have a positive genius for scheduling these walks when it’s going to rain. In fact, twice it has started to rain while we were driving to the woods, so we had to stop at a gas station and buy ponchos.
This is by way of introduction to my first mushroom video on this blog. Mushroom photography is great, but there are times when a still photo just can’t capture the magnificence of the spectacle.
Here are some inky cap mushrooms from my first trip to this Michigan forest. Growing in the rain is ideal for them, because they have plenty of available water to put into the chemical reaction that dissolves their caps – and also to grow, pushing up leaves in clusters. You can see them here in all stages of growth and deliquescence.
inkies in the rain
Midwestern waxy caps
group of Hygrocybes
translucent Hygrocybe
Michigan oyster log
Beech Rooters galore
Well, their skepticism in the field worked out well for me, because I got to bring home a full paper lunch bag of caps, more than I ever have found at one time before (they each took only a few). I had one tomato left from my dad’s garden, and one lovely peach from the farmer’s market; so I made a salad of the peach and tomato and some smoked whitefish and the beech rooters and it was really heavenly.
mushroom-peach-whitefish salad
Over the past weekend, I returned to the annual Rogerson Foray of the Connecticut-Westchester Mycological Association (COMA), the first mushroom club I ever joined. It’s a great chance to see familiar faces and cool mushrooms. I’m just posting a few photos right now; I’ll put up some more over the winter.
Connie, Igor and a bolete
One of my favorite mushrooms is Lactarius chelidonium. It often shows some of the blues that its close relative L. indigo is famous for, but it gets greener and often shows some pink or orange as it gets older, and it thus has the distinction of being mistaken for both L. indigo and L. deliciosus. And that is something I love about it – you can never find two of them that are the same color.
Lactarius chelidonium – from above
The latex of this species is yellow… perhaps a dirty or brownish yellow. Peck gave the species its name because this reminded him of the yellow latex of the celandine flower, which is in the genus Chelidonium. Here you can see that their color varies subtly underneath as well:
Lactarius chelidonium — gills
Another striking and much more unusual mushroom that came in at the foray was Crepidotus cinnabarinus, found by John Michelotti. Although this mushroom is rarely collected, it’s not clear how rare it actually is, since it often fruits inside crevices in bark – it’s often only visible as a fleck of red inside a crack in the branch.
Crepidotus cinnabarinus gills
COMA peeps with chicken
Most of us have found Xylarias at one time or another. And most of us have books that list two species: X. polymorpha (dead man’s fingers) and X. hypoxylon (candlesnuff fungus, a name that makes no sense to me). Over the past decade, X. longipes (for things that look like dead man’s fingers but are larger and especially fatter) has entered the oral tradition of mushroom clubs, but is still not in many books. But we still find many confusing things – in fact, we sometimes find three or four things that look like clearly different species on the same walk, which makes it kind of embarrassing to only have three names to choose from for the whole country.
Although X. polymorpha is the one called “dead man’s fingers”, X. hypoxylon can also resemble a hand, as shown here.
Photo by John Denk
My introduction to the more extreme difficulties with Xylaria came from conversations with Maggie Rogers in 2004. She had a little thicket some kind of thin, black rods growing under her apple tree every year. She decided to have them identified and sent some samples to Jack Rogers (no relation), the esteemed xylariologist at Washington State University. He told her that they were immature, and could not be identified without mature spores. He suggested that she send more in a couple of weeks. She did, and he said that unfortunately she’d have to try again in another couple of weeks. After a bit of this, she finally managed to collect mature specimens and he was able to tell her that “they’re either something that was described from Siberia in 1901, or they’re new to science.”
This is a common story in mycology. The literature is scattered and incomplete, as are the type specimens used as references for species concepts. This is further complicated by the fact that older species descriptions (and by “older” I mean… older than 1970 or so!) are often not detailed enough to provide a determination by modern standards as to whether you have the same thing or not. This problem increases the farther back you go. In order to know how to treat Maggie’s Xylaria, Jack would have had to track down the original specimen collected in 1901, write a complete, modern description of it, and ascertain its relationship to Maggie’s Xylaria. If the original 1901 specimen could not be found, Jack would have had to travel to Siberia (or recruit someone over there) to look for a Xylaria fitting the 1901 description in its original environment. If this could be found, he would declare it the new type specimen for this species, write it up as above, and again ascertain its relationship with Maggie’s collection.
Needless to say, this holds things up a great deal.
Roo Vandegrift, giving a presentation to the Cascades Mycological Society.
Photo by Angela Stevens.
Roo Vandegrift, a mycologist based at the University of Oregon, hopes to change things a bit. In pursuing his study of Xylarias in Ecuador, he has had to chase down quite a few leads about Xylarias in the wider world (much as Jack Rogers would have to check out that Siberian Xylaria in order to know what to call the one growing in Oregon). He is looking to return to Ecuador to take a closer look at its Xylarias, and to tease out additional species from the ones that are known.
Xylaria globosa, a tropical species that exudes red droplets. Photo by Danny Newman
He hopes to write them up in a book with detailed descriptions and excellent images, such as the photo of X. globosa shown here, by Danny Newman. If you contribute to the project, you can also get Xylaria-themed swag, such as the Xylaria bandanna shown here. You can read more about the project, and how you can support it, here. If you can, please do help out. If not, enjoy the photos and drawings, and the discussion of the challenges of Xylaria and of doing taxonomy nowadays. I guarantee you will learn something.
Xylaria bandana, one of the swag items you can get for supporting Roo’s Xylaria taxonomy project.
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Photo credits:
1) Lichen on a log; Miller; 1962. Yellowstone National Park
http://home.nps.gov/features/yell/slidefile/plants/lichen/Images/08234.jpg
http://home.nps.gov/features/yell/slidefile/plants/lichen/Page-1.htm
2) Graphis scripta by Lairich Rig
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:A_lichen_-_Graphis_scripta_-_geograph.org.uk_-_1282172.jpg
3) Xanthoria parietina by Taka
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xanthoria_parietina#/media/File:Xanthoria_parietina_%2806_03_31%29.jpg
A quartet of eminent mycologists at the Knoxville 1968 MSA meeting. From left to right, Albert Pilát, talking to Ernst Both; and Alexander Smith talking to Walter Snell. Photo courtesy of Dr. Wayne Gall.
I started to draft a message to the Wikipedia folks, and then noticed this sentence in the header of Wally’s article:
“Following this brief baseball career he became a successful mycologist who worked primarily at Brown University for the next 60 years.”
Woah.
It really was him!
I knew of Snell mainly as an expert on the boletes, one half of the “Snell and Dick” team. Esther Dick had been a graduate student of his, and they married after Snell’s wife Adelaide died in 1975. Snell was born in 1889, and would live for five more years.
When I was growing up, this book was just called “Snell and Dick”
The Snell and Dick magnum opus was The Boleti of Northeastern North America, published in 1970. For many years it was the standard reference work on boletes. In college, when a local mycologist retired and sold his library, I managed to snap up his copy, which I still have. As of the moment that I’m writing these words, it sells on Amazon starting at $137, even though I’m not sure how useful it is anymore. It is illustrated with watercolor paintings by Snell, who taught himself the skill in grade school, about 70 years before the publication of the book.
It’s a funny thing, the way our society handles obscure vocations like mycology: his baseball “career” of six major league games and two seasons of part-time play in the minor leagues gets about twice as much space as his career in mycology in the Wikipedia article – a ratio of column inches to years at the job of about 250 to one.
On the other hand, his SABR (baseball statistics) biography is by far the most detailed account of his life. I’ve linked to it below, along with the Wikipedia article and his official MSA obituary by David McLoughlin (who I met as the resident myco-guru in the department at the University of Minnesota).
Still, that Wikipedia article is mighty skimpy, and it’s the most public face for him now. Maybe I’ll have to add a few mycological details. In the meantime, he’s probably the only professional mycologist to have served as the athletic director of a Division I school.
http://sabr.org/bioproj/person/a8e3cebc
I’ve been interested in doing some work with mushroom data for quite a while now, and only over the past year or so have I managed to discover tools that would let me do what I want. I thought it might make a nice pilot project to do some statistics on mushroom edibility, since I get asked about this – how many mushrooms are poisonous? and how many are edible? – surprisingly often.
When I put up the original Mushroom the Journal website, I devised a system of automatically cross-linking author and mushroom names that were mentioned in articles, so I have 2037 species of fungi in the database that I used to generate those pages. I figured I’d work my way through them, add edibility ratings to the fungi in the database, and see what the numbers say.
Mushroom edibility has some rather strange problems of terminology, abetted by the untrustworthiness and cover-your-behnd-ness of many field guides. For instance, many field guides use the term “inedible” for “I don’t want you to eat this, but I don’t have the slightest good reason for that.” They will also sometimes use the phrase “not recommended,” which you’ll notice is not an actual kind of edibility. In my treatment, I reserve the term “inedible” for things that have a textural reason for not being edible: various polypores that are to hard or tough to eat, for example.
On the poisonous side of things, I distinguished between mushrooms that are “slightly poisonous” (will make you throw up, sometimes for quite a while), “seriously poisonous” (potentially life-threatening) and “deadly.”
There are also quite a few situations where we really don’t know the edibility of a mushroom, but we presume that it’s poisonous because it’s closely related to a poisonous one. For example, some Lepidellas like Amanita smithiana and Amanita thiersii have emerged over the past decade as being seriously poisonous; so we presume that at least some of the other Lepidellas out there are poisonous in a similar way.
Likewise, there are some Clitocybes that are “known” to cause stomach upset, and there are others that look very similar but haven’t been specifically tagged as being poisonous.1 So these get tagged as “presumed mildly poisonous.”
I actually invented a category “choice non-standard” for things that are very good but haven’t made it into the field guides yet. I also placed the lingzhi polypores in this group, as they’re not choice edibles in the usual field guide sense, but they are highly prized by some people.
“Tough” is another category that might need some explaining. These are mushrooms that are definitely known to be edible, but are also too tough for normal cooking methods – they need to be stewed or baked for a long time. Pleurotus dryinus and non-young Meripilus giganteus fall into this category. Similar is “Edible when young” – Bondarzewia berkeleyii, for example, is eaten by quite a few people when it’s still in the “lumpy fingers emerging from the ground” stage. At that point in its development, it shows its biological identity with Lactarius by giving milk when cut, and having something of the same consistency as them. But when it gets older, it gets very rubbery and develops a disgusting odor.
The category “tastes too bad” I used for mushrooms that are acknowledged as not poisonous but taste too bad for most people to be able to eat them – for instance Russula krombholzii or Amanita citrina. It’s possible that this category could have been combined with “inedible” – and perhaps for some statistical purposes I will – but as far as basic categories are concerned, this seemed to be a clear distinction that may have some value.
So far, I’ve only found the time to assign edibility ratings to 442 mushrooms, but that’s still something of a decent sample size and I thought I’d share my preliminary findings with you.
Let’s take a look at our selection of mushrooms, graphed in order of edibility.
When pressed for ballpark estimates in the past, I’ve suggested that edibility falls into a crude bell curve, or normal distribution: small numbers at the extremes of edibility or poisonousness, somewhat larger numbers at less extreme values, and a big pile of “everything else” in the middle. This is roughly the distribution that the data show. For instance, if we take everything that’s definitely edible (“tough” and everything to the left of it) and everything that we’re pretty sure is poisonous (“presumed mildly poisonous” and everything to its right) and compare them to the categories in between, we get the following table:
| edible | 120 | 27% |
| unclear | 244 | 55% |
| poisonous | 78 | 18% |
So yeah, there’s that big bump in the middle, but another interesting thing is that there are only about 2/3 as many poisonous mushrooms as edible ones. What’s more interesting is where the difference mostly lies. Let’s look at a set of individual match-ups, from the extremes on in:
| choice + choice non-standard | 43 | 7 | deadly |
| good | 35 | 35 | (presumed) + seriously poisonous |
| tasteless + tough | 42 | 35 | (presumed) + mildly poisonous |
The big difference in numbers is between the really good mushrooms and the deadly ones. The difference is all the more striking because I’ve been working on these mushrooms starting at the beginning at the alphabet (I’ve gotten about up to the end of the letter C) so this sample includes the Amanitas. We’ll see how this and the number of hallucinogens (watch out for the Ps!) develops as I work my way through the alphabet.
The other striking thing about these statistics is how many fungi are of unknown edibility. I mean, edibility has been a prime motivation for hunting mushrooms for time out of mind, and yet if you look at the largest categories here
you see that the largest three categories are different kinds of ignorance. And they are far larger than the other categories: the three of them average out to a value of 58, far above the first known category with its value of 37.
If we add up the mushrooms in the “known” categories vs the “unknown” ones:
| known | 190 | 43% |
| unknown | 252 | 57% |
Now, it isn’t a colossal difference, certainly. But I can’t think of another field where – at this stage in history – ignorance is actually in the majority in such a fundamental aspect of why humans are interested in this field.
I want to emphasize that the mushrooms in the categories of “insignificant” (=”too small to bother with”) and “microscopic” really are unknown. They really can go either way. For example, Galerinas were undoubtedly in the “insignificant” category until a NY mushroom-hunter in the 1970s decided that they were honey mushrooms. On the other hand, the micro-fungus Fusarium is a plant parasite, and its effects can be disgusting and bizarre enough to assume that it’s not edible. But the British have cultivated it in vats and eat it under the brand name Quorn – more evidence that anything the Brits consider edible probably is.
Again, it’s interesting to do individual match-ups between analogous pairs of categories:
| Known | Unknown | ||
| Seriously poisonous | 13 | 22 | Presumed seriously poisonous |
| Mildly poisonous | 5 | 30 | Presumed mildly poisonous |
| Edible but tasteless | 37 | 55 | Presumed harmless |
| 55 | 107 |
We don’t have any “presumed good” or “presumed choice” mushrooms because people have tried all of those already. We don’t have any “presumed deadly” ones, sadly, as the deadly category has been populated by personal experience. I may have to add that category when I hit the Gs and rank the Galerinas. But there aren’t going to be very many of them. The presumed poisonous categories are mostly populated by the Lepidellas and Clitocybes mentioned above, plus a surprising diversity of red-pored boletes that North America turns out to have.
Even in categories where we know whether the mushrooms are edible or not, there’s a problem with the trustworthiness of our reference material – look at the two highest categories of edibility. These are “choice” – which is a generally-agreed-on quality given in all the books – versus “choice non-standard”, which are really good mushrooms that the books waffle on.
For instance, here at the beginning of the alphabet, I’ve put a bunch of red-staining Agaricus species in the “choice non-standard” category. These are really really tasty mushrooms, but the books always hedge their endorsement of them, saying that “some people throw up” or some such nonsense. In fact, some people throw up with any species of Agaricus (except perhaps the Bitorques) but no one feels obliged to give a bunch of disclaimers about the other ones. But somehow, historically, some field guide must have mentioned someone having a problem with the red-stainers and everyone since has copied it.
In my experience, they’re not found very often, so that might have something to do with it – a large and obvious population of people who eat them and don’t get sick might have swayed the official opinion. But there hasn’t been this widespread sampling, and so this official state of confusion has remained.
In any case, if we compare them head-to-head,
| Choice | 25 | 18 | Choice non-standard |
we see that the choice non-standard mushrooms are just a hair under ¾ the number of what we might call “officially choice” mushrooms. That’s not a majority of ignorance, certainly; but it’s not a ratio that any scientific field would be proud of.
Well, you know the standard scientific conclusion for mycology: “More work is needed!” I now have edibilities assigned for almost half the species in my database, but I’m also more wrapped up at the moment in other data endeavors, and also the editing of articles for the next issue of the magazine. I’ll give the edibility stats another shot once I get the next issue out in January. In any case, I hope this will be the beginning of a fruitful re-examination of our knowledge of mushroom edibility.
My first wild mushroom was a hen of the woods. It was big. I had to chop it into five pieces in order to get pieces that would fit on the postal scale that I used for… well, I have no idea anymore what I kept that scale for. Sometimes we are a puzzle to ourselves.
Anyway, the sum of the pieces came to 13 pounds.
This is me a few years after my first hen, with another large mushroom, Bondarzewia berkeleyii. This was was only about eight pounds.
As my guide, I was using a book called Mushrooms, Wild and Edible, by Vincent Marteka. It’s a great book for starting out. The book takes just a few edible mushrooms – one per season – and discusses them in quite some depth. It’s not the scientific stuff like you mostly read nowadays; it’s like sitting by the fire with someone who’s been hunting for years and years. It’s lore. It’s not like a field guide, where you get a little tiny picture and a bunch of numbers.
So I was out hunting for king boletes, because that was Marteka’s mushroom of interest for the fall (He gives morels in the spring, and chanterelles for the summertime). Now, if you’re wondering how I came to find a hen when I was looking for boletes, well… first of all it was hard to miss! But what he does is first of all he gives you a whole chapter on the mushroom of interest. Then he talks a bit about some other edible mushrooms of the season, with an attitude of “Well, keep an eye out in case this comes up.”
There I was, looking under the oak trees that ringed a park near my college, and there was the hen, waiting for me. Luckily, I had been wildly optimistic and brought along a house-mate’s gunny sack for possible retrieval of mushrooms. Nevertheless, having filled the gunny sack with this one hen, I felt I was sort of tempting fate to continue foraging, and climbed back down the hill to where the bus would take me home.
Cleaning the mushroom was an adventure – not that it was hard to clean, but that it harbored the largest centipede I have ever seen, before or since. Sometimes when you’re little, things look bigger than they really are; but I was pretty big back then and this thing was longer than my hand, which would make it around eight inches – and very combative at being disturbed. Luckily, I was cleaning the mushroom in the sink, and managed to direct it into the drain, and… well, I didn’t hear from it after that.
I brought one of those one-fifth chunks of the mushroom home with me on a holiday. I’m not sure which holiday it could have been, since it was still fresh and I mostly find it in September. But anyway, home it came with me, and there I was at the front door with my gym bag of clothes and a ten-gallon bucket. So my parents said “What’s in the bucket?” and there was no sense telling them, so I just pulled the towel off the bucket and tilted it to show them. Naturally, they then had to ask “what’s in the bucket” again. My dad later said it looked like a giant brown cauliflower from outer space.
I told them it was a mushroom, so they asked what I’d brought it home for and I said it was delicious and I was going to cook it in a soup for us. So my father asked “How do you know it’s edible?” and I didn’t waste any time trying to prove its species, I just said, “Well, I’ve already been eating it for a week.” Well, that was good enough for my dad, but my mom got rather outraged with him for being satisfied with that; and I had to go the route of showing them what it was from the book, and in the end the soup made them happy enough that they both declared me a wonderful mushroom-hunter.
And that was how I got started hunting wild mushrooms.
