The Allure of Fungi

THE ALLURE OF

FUNGI

For Rosie

THE ALLURE OF

FUNGI

Alison Pouliot

© Alison Pouliot 2018

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Front cover: Mycena sp., Otways Forest

Title page: Lamellae of a Hygrophorus sp.

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Acknowledgement

CSIRO acknowledges the Traditional Owners of the lands that we live and work on across Australia and pays its respect to Elders past and present. CSIRO recognises that Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples have made and will continue to make extraordinary contributions to all aspects of Australian life including culture, economy and science.

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Contents

Acknowledgements

Prologue

Chapter 1An introduction to entangled worlds

Beyond mushrooms to mycelium

Thinking, un-thinking, re-thinking fungi

Fungal places – from Down Under to the Swiss Alps

Seeking fungi

What’s inside?

Photo essayThe mycelial matrix

Image captions

Chapter 2Meeting mushrooms

First fungal acquaintances

Describing the undefinable

Biological umbrellas

From goblets to lattice balls

Lichenised life on the edge

Extremist specialists

What fungi do – alliance as norm

Rethinking parasites

Fungal rotters

Photo essayEndless forms most bizarre

Image captions

Chapter 3Life in the subterrain

Different hemispheres, different fungi

Undesirable dwellings – dirt, litter and dung

In not on

Litter and literacy

Disco in a cow pat

A cargo of the uncanny

Displaced fungi

Retreating underground

Photo essayFungal grub and fungal havens

Image captions

Chapter 4A stubbly bun skirmish

Mushrooming from shady obscurity

From moushrimpes to mucerons

Of toads and toadstools

Articulating fungi

Idiomatic mushrooms

Ergonomic fungi

A meander of mycelia

Words to conserve

Metaphorical mushrooms

Re-chanting the fungal lexicon

Photo essayBiological umbrellas

Image captions

Chapter 5Wicked wild mushrooms – a morality tale

Thievish and voracious beggars – origin myths

Rotting and disgusting – unsettling traits

Fairy cakes and trompettes de la mort

The death cap arrives in Australia

Sniffing out safety – toying with toxic mushrooms

Indeterminate and morphologically bizarre

Trouble from elsewhere – conservation and invaders

Photo essayRecycling worlds

Image captions

Chapter 6Organising fungi

The last of the natural historians

The desire to divide

Bounded and boundless – individuality and plurality

Why names matter

Naming and claiming – scientific and vernacular names

Tallying fungi

What makes a mushroom?

Photo essayUndersides

Image captions

Chapter 7Knowing fungi otherwise

A farmer’s way of knowing

Aboriginal knowing

Feeling like a mushroom – sensory knowing

Fine-tuning to fungi

Fungal olfaction – reigniting smell

Getting back in touch

Slow motion mushrooms

Photo essayCollecting

Image captions

Chapter 8Foraging and foraying

Train-stopping mushrooms

Fungologists seeking funguses – foraying for fungi

Strange and new-fangled meates – foraging for fungi

On morel grounds

High altitude hunting

Wild desires and treacherous gratifications

Rethinking fungal expertise

Photo essayLichenised lives

Image captions

Chapter 9A call for fungal wisdom

Fungi in a changing world

A fiscal fungal fantasy

Lists and the list-less

Reassessing biodiversity

Looking with the heart – from managing to caring

Re-enchanting the fungal imagination

Endnotes

Bibliography

Index

Acknowledgements

People didn’t just assist with this book, they are the book. Their contributions inspired and shaped it. I have simply collected and interpreted their perceptions and impressions, stories and anecdotes, as a means to understand fungi. All have challenged me to reconsider and reimagine these organisms in new ways.

The book culminated from research I conducted for my PhD thesis. I was fortunate to have two exceptional supervisors in environmental historian Libby Robin and mycologist Tom May. Although not her usual terrain, Libby leapt into fungal realms and encouraged me to push every boundary and challenge conventional thinking. Tom was endlessly patient with my unorthodox take on fungi and prompted me to delve deeper into mycological worlds that at times seemed abstract and ungraspable.

During the two decades before writing this book, I held over 300 fungus forays, workshops and seminars in Australia and Europe. They were attended by over 5000 people. Many of them contributed in countless ways, introducing me to new ideas about fungi and making me reconsider old ones. For mycological and conservation advice I am grateful to Tom May, Anders Dahlberg, Nirmal Harsh, Walter Jehne, Dave and Lyn Munro, Liz Holden, Boris Ivancevic, Alan Rayner, Pam Catcheside, Silvia Feusi, Lyn Boddy, Beatrice Senn-Irlet, Johan Möllegard, Mattias Andersson, Helena Wallqvist, Georges Meyer, Simone Louwhoff, Paul George, David Ratkowsky, Jo Taylor, Maria Lawrynowicz, Katie Syme, Paul Cannon, Martyn Ainsworth, Åke Strid, Michael Krikorev, Dave Minter, Tatyana Svetasheva, Nik Money, Bengt Boström, Katrin Jyrgens, Begoña Aguirre-Hudson, Vera Hayova, John Walter and Claudia Perini.

Regarding ethnomycological, historical and linguistic contributions, I am especially grateful to Heino Lepp for providing so much Australian historical mycological material and gently advising me when I made mycological mix-ups and to Anders Hirell for generously sharing his knowledge of Swedish foraging history. Others include Virgil and Jurrie Hubregste, Minna Santaoja, Ivan Inderbitzin, Sofia Lund, Gunilla Kärrfelt, Arnaud Barras, Pat and Ed Grey, Gary Fine and Sveta Yamin-Pasternak.

I was fortunate to share my 1000 days in the forest with dedicated field companions who uncomplainingly braved tick-thick terrain or the voracious appetites of leeches. Others endured rainstorms, sandstorms and snowstorms, floods and fires, bogged vehicles, discomforts and uncertainties that are the reality of fieldwork. Many others in turn sheltered me from all of these in my peripatetic lifestyle with no fixed (Australian) address during the extent of this research. In particular, I thank Valérie Chételat, Barbara Thüler, Jenny Robinson, Willie Bedford, Bernadette Hince, Christian Merz, Cathy Newing, Kath Lynch and Andrew Quinlan.

Many people contributed insights and advice or participated in other untold ways including: Gayle Osborne, Jill McFarlane, Judy Crocker, Cameron Muir, Bronwyn Lay, Jakob Näslund, Teresio Valsesia, Freya Mathews, Maria Di Palma, Marj May, Elsie Howard, Larry Melican, Angelica Elliot, Marco Armiero, Mandy Martin, Guy Fitzhardinge, Maunu Häyrynen, Kaisa Häkkinen, Anna Svensson, Tom Griffiths, Diane Erceg, Sharon Willoughby, Blanche Higgins, Linda Cusack, Dimity Hawkins, Cath Keaney, Jon Mathieu, Rachel Legge, Sue Walter, Armin Hollenstein, David Tiller, Trisha Carroll, Maree Keating, Julie von Platen, Peter Kerr, Roy Lovel, Alison Cowan and Sue McClements. I thank editor Anne Findlay and the CSIRO Publishing team, especially Lauren Webb, Tracey Kudis and John Manger, for their astute and sensitive work.

Valérie Chételat encouraged and inspired me every single day of the process and provided endless photographic expertise. My family – Rosie, Max, David and Michael – have supported me in every venture I have ever taken on. Finally, and with great sadness, I acknowledge those who contributed to this book, but did not get to see it through to completion: Rosie Pouliot, Simone Chételat, Pippa Rudd, Thelma Argall, Bill Alderman and Doug Ralph.

To all these Homo sapiens I am deeply grateful. However, less often acknowledged in such research are the rotting logs, the forests, woodlands, deserts and swamps. None of these appear in the bibliography so I thought they at least deserve a special mention in the acknowledgements. This book could not have been written anywhere but in these places. Over the course of this research, billions (that is not a typo) of trees have been razed, wetlands drained and other habitats demolished. These are lost fungal places too. Each day I woke up to the realities of pervasive ecocide and human injustices. Each day I woke up and recognised the privilege of spending my days researching and writing about things that matter to me. It often felt like an indulgence to be writing about fungi rather than actively resisting these perverse acts of environmental destruction. I hope this book might be a lever for reimagining fungi and other ways of being in the world, to improve possibilities not just for fungi to flourish, but all life.

Prologue

Between 2012 and 2016, I spent 1000 days in the forest to search for the answer to one question – why are fungi regarded so differently from other forms of life?

The answer to this question provides the possibility for fungi to be recognised as vital to functioning ecosystems and to be included in biodiversity conservation. However, it also offers something else – the opportunity to think differently not just about fungi, but the natural world more broadly. For some people, fungi might seem like a strange choice of organisms to pursue. While mushrooms are fascinating and aesthetic, it is their mycelia – the underground connective feeding webs – that provide another way to consider the natural world. Taking inspiration from the mycelial tangle, the book presents a fungal lens as a means to attune to the dynamism and diversity of natural systems. My 1000 days in the forest were spent with both fungi and the people who are drawn to them. The choice to conduct the research directly in the forest stems from my view that fungi, indeed all organisms, can only properly be understood through direct sensorial experience of them, deep within their environments.

This is an account of human–fungus relationships and how fungi are perceived and understood. It expands on the usual stories we hear and tell about fungi and creates a space for other forms of knowledge, allowing these marginalised organisms to emerge through the cracks of human awareness and concern. It elucidates the differences between definitive and expansive perceptions of the natural world and highlights the need for broader awareness and an enhanced language with which to understand it.

The book comes together through a collection of voices in stories and anecdotes, histories and science. While it has an Australian focus, it has been enriched by ideas gleaned across hemispheres and cultures. Through a combination of text and visual essays working in counterpoint, I reflect on how aesthetic, sensate experience deepened by scientific knowledge offers the best possibilities for understanding fungi, the forest and human interactions with them. At a time when Australia is shifting from a traditionally mycophobic (fungus-fearing) position towards greater interest in fungi, new questions arise about their place in the living world. Through their verve and vigour, fungi provide both a catalyst and a mirror to rethink environmental issues during an era of rapid change.

Opposite: Gray shags (Coprinus cinereus) roll up their caps to expose their spore-laden lamellae.

Chapter 1

An introduction to entangled worlds

Low mists span the hills of Victoria’s Great Dividing Range. The crops are now harvested and surpluses pickled and bottled. A handful of remaining wildflowers flash their last blooms of colour. Slipping through the slanting light of the Wombat Forest, our senses awaken to the change of seasons. Autumn. All is subtly muted, softened. Dampness subdues the usual crack of sticks and leaf litter underfoot. Birdcall and the buzz of insects diminish with the cooling air. And it smells different. Distinctively different. At first it seems the forest is winding down for the winter. However, something stirs beneath the leaf litter, beneath the soil. With extraordinary reproductive zeal, fungi reveal their whereabouts as their sporebodies push through the forest floor. We have come to meet with mushrooms.¹

‘Look!’ exclaims Angelica, my five-year-old companion. We squat down beside a Russula. Vermillion red, its cap maps tiny peregrinations – slid, rasped and bitten through by unknown wayfarers. Each trail traces a tiny journey in search of shelter or food. Angelica flips onto her stomach and peers under its cap. ‘Look!’ she exclaims again, pinching off a slug with her fingers, its stalked eyes rapidly contracting. I open my field guide. There are at least a dozen reddish russulas. Angelica examines the images, sliding a slug-slimed finger across each. ‘Nup, it’s none of ’em’, she asserts dismissively and continues prodding the slug. I ask her how she can be so sure. She shoots me a pitying look then explains how none has a slug or the same pattern of holes. She is right. The field guide meticulously illustrates idealised specimens, depicting morphological features for identification. But each is also an isolated entity, concealing larger stories of interactions with unseen creatures, of connecting ecosystems, underpinning the forest’s existence, our existence, life.

This is an inquiry into fungi. Into people. Fungi and people. Kingdoms, ecosystems, landscapes, underworlds. It focuses less on individual species and more on relationships. Between fungi and fungi. Fungi and plants. Fungi and animals including Homo sapiens. Fungi and soil. Fungi and life. Complex entanglements, interrelations, circulations. In particular, I explore the histories that shape the ways fungi are understood and valued. Over the years, I have interacted with people who interact with fungi, including mycologists (those who study the science of fungi) and mycophagists (those who eat fungi), farmers and field naturalists, aesthetes and artists, conservationists and rangers, and those who seek fungi for reasons beyond food or science. Through their impressions of the natural and cultural histories of fungi, I have sought to understand why these organisms are regarded so differently from other forms of life. My hope is to provide a stimulus for the more appropriate inclusion of fungi within the bigger picture of nature, biodiversity and conservation. A more fungal way of thinking might even awaken a new ecological consciousness to enrich the ways we interact with the natural world.

The extraordinary lives of fungi are explored through a collection of voices in anecdotes, histories and science gleaned across the world and across societies. Their accounts come alive through direct engagement with fungi in their habitats – forests, woodlands, grasslands, deserts, backyards and unexpected places. I have tried to reflect fungi in their various guises, not just to classify them, but also to convey their lyrical essence. In doing so I hope to inform and inspire care, so that to exclude fungi from concepts of nature or conservation might seem as perverse to the reader as it did to me, motivating me to write this account.

Beyond mushrooms to mycelium

Without fungi, life is radically diminished. Fungi regulate the biosphere and support Earth’s ecological functioning. Yet the exceptionally few mushrooms with the capacity to dismantle human livers or kidneys are the ones deemed worthy of attention by a spectacle-obsessed press. This is most apparent in the English-speaking world. Shark attacks sell newspapers splendidly, but once the swimming season ends, any notion of gently easing into autumn is quickly expunged by lethal fungal substitutes: ‘Killer mushrooms invade picnic spots’; ‘Potential killers stalk Victoria’s fields’; ‘Wild fungi death trap’; ‘Beware the killer mushrooms’, warn the Australian newspapers. Forget sharks and brace yourself for survival on this threateningly fungal continent. Fungi are seldom considered newsworthy within spheres of human concern except, it seems, when intentionally stalking their human victims.

English language speakers’ common aversion to fungi has long been recognised. Negative portrayals of fungi arise not only through public ignorance and misunderstanding, but also through the scientific focus on their destructive ability. This is unsurprising given the potential of fungi to wreak havoc on crops and bodies, albeit usually in direct response to poor human management. Such ways of thinking about fungi overshadow their many values and human dependence on their existence. In 1957, the controversial ethnomycologist (a person who studies the human use of fungi) Robert Wasson popularised the terms ‘mycophilia’ and ‘mycophobia’, referring to the love and fear of fungi. Although Australia’s sparse mycological history and negative press portrayals of fungi are typical of English-speaking nations, attitudes to fungi today might not be as polarised as Wasson supposed. As interest grows in both fungal ecology and foraging for edible mushrooms, Australia is shifting from a traditionally mycophobic position towards a greater spectrum of attitudes. It is an exciting transitional time, although there is still a good way to go until fungi are appreciated as a vital part of life. But just for a moment, imagine how things could have been different for fungi, as well as for Homo sapiens.

Had biology taken another route to understanding nature – a route that valued interactions as much as individual identities – the living world might have been perceived in an entirely other way. Darwin’s oft-quoted description of foliage on his ‘tangled bank’ in the concluding paragraph of On the Origin of Species (1859) acknowledged the inherent interdependency of species. Whether metaphorical or real, his tangled bank could be considered as an early precursor to the concept of ‘ecosystems’ coined by British botanist Arthur Roy Clapham in the early 1930s. The idea of interdependencies between organisms is not new, and less formulated concepts go back more than two millennia to Theophrastus. However, the human need to define boundaries is the premise of hierarchical taxonomic schemes of classification and is fundamental to the way many people think. Consequently, the autonomy of species had more sway than ideas about interactions and set the foundations for the path of biology. However, imagine opening a biology textbook, or say a gardening book, and there on the first page loomed an enticing illustration of a mycelium as the archetype of the living organism. If fungi were considered as representational of biology, current concepts of nature might be very different. Such an approach begins with recognising nature as systems of relations, rather than being premised on separation and cataloguing. It acknowledges the fluid nature of life processes. Thinking of mycelia as the biological prototype advances the idea of Natural Selection underpinned by competition, to one that includes cooperation and complementation as ways of understanding interactions. This way of thinking helps shift limited conceptions of fungi as isolated sporebodies or species, to the sophisticated and cooperative biological collective of mycelia. Consider the organisational and communication networks of human societies that course beneath the soil – the fibre optics of the Internet, electrical cables, sewerage systems, train networks and tunnel roads. It becomes startlingly obvious how they mirror mycelia. As human threats push species to extinction, the need to better understand relationships and processes might override Linnaean routines for naming.

Although many scientists advocate the significance of symbioses, the biological autonomy of species still governs much scientific thinking, research funding and conservation. To define something only by its identity risks underestimating its interrelations. As long as we reduce organisms to ‘objects’ or ‘bounded entities’ we are prone to thinking about them as ‘things’ rather than in the context of their processes. Mycology (the scientific study of fungi) has revealed the staggering diversity and complexities of fungi, but less attention has been given to mycelial fungi as living systems. This is not an attack on mycology and its revelations, but a call towards the depth and mystery of the fungal kingdom. Returning to the forest floor, I am not suggesting we throw away our field guides. Recognising something as different and being able to name it imbues it with meaning and significance. It is not possible to refer to what a fungus is without identifying it and categorising it in some way, to differentiate it from another fungus, or a numbat. I simply ask why identity has historically overshadowed relationships and processes and show how it perpetuates limited ideas about nature. Rethinking fungi involves a switch from regarding a sporebody as a thing, subject to naming, plucking or representation, to acknowledging interactive processes. Ideas about the fluidity of nature abound in the thinking of many indigenous cultures including those of Aboriginal Australians. The concept of ‘Country’, for example, recognises this continuity. Country is multidimensional, representing more than species, land or water. It has future and past, exists in and through time. It is life. Country is an all-embracing notion of belonging, being owned by place and connection. Aboriginal ideas of animals as part of kin, rather than as taxonomic species, upend European approaches to biodiversity conservation that rely on defining individual species.

Mushrooms provide an obvious tangible link to humanity. However, the bigger fungal picture unfolds in the dynamism of their mycelia. Mycelia are characteristically connective, versatile, complex, heterogeneous, changeable and resilient. Mycelia, rather than just sporebodies, offer a compelling framework to contemplate the full potential of fungi. Most plants rely on mutually beneficial symbioses with fungi for their survival. This tangle of relationships is central to life and evolution, not an alternative or secondary strategy. Although symbioses were long considered an anomaly, they are now regarded as foundational and a general mechanism of evolutionary innovation. Or perhaps think of it this way – what organism do you know of that lives in isolation from others? Despite our need to separate and categorise, organisms are not autonomous. Life is symbiotic.

Thinking, un-thinking, re-thinking fungi

I do not recall eating mushrooms in my Australian childhood. I am not sure why they never appeared on my dinner plate, but suspect they were too ‘foreign’ or ‘undefinable’ for my mother to contemplate buying. They were not meat, and they were not quite vegetable and she was certainly not about to go digging for them in the dirt. The fact is, it had never actually occurred to me to eat them. I had seen the benign and insipid mushrooms (Agaricus bisporus) in the supermarket but somehow never linked them with the incredible representations of fungal life in the bush. I knew neither was animal or vegetable, but the similarity between the supermarket mushrooms and those in the bush ended there. Those in the wild were life forms of sheer beauty and bizarreness. Their aesthetics intensified my curiosity. I wanted to know why they looked like they did and what they were doing.

My most immediate concern was that I had no idea how to walk in the bush. I was terrified of treading on things. Every footstep crushed stuff; tiny lichens and mushrooms, mosses and sundews, spiders sleeping inside curled leaves. There was no space to tread. How heavy did I need to be before the fungal webs of mycelia beneath the leaf litter would be destroyed? What was blatantly obvious even to a child’s mind – or perhaps because I had a child’s mind – was that everything in the bush was connected. Connectivities were more obvious than the distinctiveness of things. Clambering about in the bush triggered a lifelong urge to document these unseen microcosms in the hope they might not get trodden on and their connections severed. In this book I aim to present a more inclusive concept of fungi by proposing a shift in thinking – from thinking of sporebodies as discrete entities, to considering fungi as sophisticated entangled systems. I also propose a challenge for their inclusion within what is valued. I see it as a transition from thinking about fungi (inserting them in human consciousness) to un-thinking fungi (in the limited ways they have been perceived historically) to re-thinking fungi (within broader contexts and dimensions).

The fungal folk (as I am calling the people who have special relations with fungi) I have met offer insights from diverse cultural backgrounds