Mushroom hunters can't stop finding mysterious fungi | Hacker News Reader

Mushroom hunters can't stop finding mysterious fungi

nytimes.com

165 pointsHooke116 comments

Reminds me. I saw a bizarre fungus growing on an old Airport audio speaker left in storage. The speaker was a 5 foot high metallic tower. And this 4 inch high alien looking thing was growing on it. It had attached itself via a beautiful root like system of tenticles to the metal surface. Some one tried to kick it off and it was so tightly fused to the metal it broke the stem but the root system stayed fused. So they then scraped it off with like a chisel and there was a hole in the metal underneath. It looked like it was eating the metal. These were ancient speakers so that metalic frame was quite thick and heavy and it was really freaky to see how it had been sort of dissolved away. That storage unit hadnt been opened in 2 months. So the growth couldnt have been very old either. Left us all wondering what things would have looked like if no one had bothered to open the unit.

I hope someone here knows what this is because that sounds really cool

My best guess is that the hole was there before the mushroom grew. It is hard to find a biological species that need so much iron in their metabolism to the point it evolved something that can dissolve pure metal in a matter of 1-2 months. Irons are often used in enzymes and usually the ratio is around a few iron atoms bounded in a structure of thousands or tens of thousands of carbons and hydrogen atoms. To use so much iron implied that mushroom is literally chock full of special enzymes and I doubt it actually is.

More likely, something broke a hole there and the mushroom grew on it and capitalized on the broken edges to scavenge some extra irons but it did not punch that hole by itself.

I dont know what metal that was but there was a grey coat of paint on it. Sometimes they coat the metal to prevent rusting or whatever, but the rusting happens under the coating anyway. So maybe possible the underlying metal was rusting and the fungus was feasting on the coating. It was quite a humid space.

cordyceps ant zombie fungus which inspired "last of us" tv series

https://www.youtube.com/shorts/w1ibC4lf4Dw

Your story reminded me of one of my own:

A few years back I was helping clear out my parents’ garage, as they were having plumbing issues and needed a path cleared for the plumber. Eventually I come across a strange looking box with some weird brown tubes poking out of it. I look up at the ceiling, and see the waste pipe from a toilet. There was not only a hole in the ceiling, but a huge hole in the top of the waste pipe.

Turns out that strange box was full of newspapers that had had raw sewage dripping onto it for who knows how long. Those “brown tubes” were actually some sort of fungus, and when I looked closer, it was quite literally spewing out spores. It looked like steam.

I was horrified at the idea of this fungus surviving on nothing but sewage and ran to grab a respirator before rushing the thing into a compost bin. Wish I’d taken a photo, but my mind was elsewhere at the time.

Scary. Its really fascinating how they have such capacity to spread into every nook they can find. We spent a lot of time wondering how such an exotic looking thing, showed up in basically an urban closed off area (barely any windows) where you rarely see any kind of fungus growing. Must be producing a ton of spores.

Oh man, this would make a cool Dr. House episode resolution.

Or the end of the intro for last of us 3

The strange fungus is probably engineeriei cubifarmiculi.

These also grow inside electronic devices and nasa facilities.

It might be some form of metal corrosion. The change from metal to metal oxide can be accompanied by an increase in volume which can lead to some very fanciful structures.

I have seen Aluminum turn into what looks like phyllo dough when near a coastline, exposed to salt air. The edge of a 1/2 inch thick sheet was fanned out, split and flaking away.

Are you sure that wasn't iron/steel? I've seen long term degradation of the sort you describe with those, but IME aluminum tends to get pitted and chalky.

Yeah this, was it "orange"?

I'm a member of the Illinois Mycological Association, where we do occasional surveys accompanied by biologists. They frequently take back tens of items for DNA sequencing.

If you're out there looking at a mushroom and think you know what it is, but aren't exactly 100% confident - remember that researchers who dedicate their academic career to fungi are frequently stymied by things found in a 2 hour walk with a few handfuls of volunteers: it might not be what you expect!

How do they know if a mushroom is toxic?

First, be cock-sure in your own ability to do something as simple and straightforward as identifying mushroom species because of your innate ability to recall every minutia of the field guides and your astonishing powers of perception and attention to detail. Then analyze closely the cap shape, scales, the gill/teeth/ridges/pore patterns in the cap underside including shape, width, spacing, depth, and color, the ridges, and the stalk, including a partial veil and/or annulus. Proclaim confidently when you have determined with 100% assurance that you know precisely what species of mushroom you have in your hand, because you are a mushroom genius.

At that point you can take a few bites. If you end up needing a liver transplant, then you know it was toxic.

Spore prints can be a huge help in identifying also!

There are some mushrooms that have very few known lookalikes (varies by geo/region), which have a handful of strong identifying factors. Morels, oysters, and a few others come to mind, where if you can confidently confirm these factors, you can be reasonably sure that you’ve identified them correctly.

That said, people sometimes convince themselves of these factors, especially when they haven’t had much experience identifying them before.

I do know a number of members of the IMA that have been there longer than me, and don’t forage at all!

I’m not an expert in the bio/chem side or really anything to do with mushrooms/fungi, but some families of mushrooms have commonly associated toxins. None of the below should be considered advice or recommendation or relied on in any way.

Amanitas often have a deadly toxin known as Amatoxin, for example.

Some others are sometimes reclassified from toxic to “sort-of-toxic” or “unknown.”

Common mushrooms like Morels can have their toxins cooked out (throw out the cooking water!), while others like Amatoxins will persist.

Still others affect some people, but not others - and some toxins induce negative effects in the presence of other chemicals in the system, like Inky Caps and Alcohol - the combination of which can be deadly, or not, depending on a number of factors.

My understanding of the situation overall is: it’s complicated.

Unlocked article: https://www.nytimes.com/2024/06/11/science/mushroom-hunters-...

Thank you!

Warning from an old Usenet fungus newsgroup: "If you collect fungi to eat you should always take three samples: one for the pot, one for the doctor and one for the coroner."

Or "There are bold mushroom foragers, and there are old mushroom foragers. But there are no bold, old mushroom foragers."

'All Fungi are edible. Some fungi are only edible once.' — Terry Pratchett

My partner has anxiety problems and did not entirely appreciate when I told her where a raw sample of the mushrooms I planted, harvested and positively IDed (stropharia) were in the fridge before I ate a small piece of them. And then the next day when I re-iterated it before eating a bowl of soup containing the mushrooms.

I think I need to sit her down and explain the Precautionary Principle again. I'm 99.999% sure but who knows what happens if I'm wrong so here's the sample for the toxicologist.

I understand now why mushroom hunters have their favorite spots. If you've seen chantrelles in the same spot for years and have never seen any doppelgangers in the area, you're a little more sure that what you have is actually chantrelles.

Chanterelles are not a great example as their look-alikes are easily distinguishable. Furthermore, they exist in symbiosis/parasitism with particular tree roots as a host. When you return to the same spot you’re harvesting new fruiting bodies of the same organism that you visited last time.

And yet most edible mushrooms do have these associations. Even saprophytic species will take a number of years to devour a nurse log, so that fallen oak or doug-fir will feed you many times.

And then there are truffles...

I don’t understand this comment for some reason… what am I not getting as the point? I don’t know my mushrooms.

Alan Rockefeller has a great Instagram also did a trip with `Crime Pays But Botany Doesn't` recently.

great name for a great channel.

Alan is wonderful and is almost a co-host of Crime Pays at this point.

Ironically all of the macro fungi displayed in this article are very well known and common

Yes, there may be a large amount of undescribed fungal species diversity, but most of it doesn't take the form of distinctive, visibly novel macroscopic structures. A lot of new species descriptions are of cryptic species, species only distinguishable to an expert eye, entirely microbial species, unremarkable little brown things, species only known from sequences in enviromental samples, and so on. I have spent years rambling around tropical forests and have only had a handful of "what the hell is that?" moments that turned out to be truly unusual.

The first time I found a bird's nest fungus in my yard I felt like an explorer. Same for watching the various slime molds that appear and disappear at various points of the year.

I caught a ladybug in the house and while taking it outside I noticed it had something on it, best I can tell it was some type of Laboulbeniales, a parasitic fungus. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laboulbeniales

If they were obvious they would already be known would they not?

The world 'remarkable' implies that people will be hard pressed not to communicate about it. You don't see an aminita muscaria and not tell someone about it. Clown red mushroom with white spots? Of course you're gonna tell someone, and of course it will have a name if it didn't already.

There are "obviously" new species that do still crop up because undescribed biodiversity is concentrated in little-surveyed tracts of remote tropical rainforest, and the visible spore-producing structures of those fungi might only appear rarely under poorly-understood environmental triggers. So no, they are not all already known about. "Obvious" species new to science are still being described from such locations. Two examples from recent decades I have seen myself, Chlorogaster dipterocarpi, Spongiforma squarepantsii... I know of many more from taxonomic journals. Also I have found some spectacuar mycoheterotrophic plants in the genus Thismia that were only very recently described. Also, there is a high diversity of secotioid hypogeous fungi many of which are "obvious", but you have to be digging around in the soil looking for them to find them, so they are still poorly known.

NYTimes.

I know the ones in the top pic. They're pretty rubbery and tasteless and harmless but you can boil them, then squeeze them, and boil them in sugar and make candies out of them.

There are a bunch of different type of coral fungi. Not all are edible.

All are harmless, whether or not you would enjoy eating them is a totally different question.

It's not so mysteriesus, when the gang shown up with their van and doggy treats. Skooby snacks is obviously slang for weird hulicinagens.

Is anyone else seeing the first photo caption in Spanish for some reason? I did a double-take, had to check to make sure the language settings were correct.

There’s fungi that eats radiation. That always gets me for some reason.

Plants eat radiation too, just with a bigger wavelength. So it's kinda photosynthesis on a roentgen-wavelength

Yes, sure.

This is what kills me about the destruction of the rainforests and old growth forests. We're constantly finding new things in our own backyards. There's no telling what we've lost/are losing or how it could have been used to benefit us.

This is because of the reductionist myth that all organic matter is fungible. It’s always “well we plant new trees, so what’s the problem?”

That's one of those lies I suspect the tellers don't actually believe, they just expect the masses to be uneducated enough to fall for it. I have to give them credit though because it seems to be working for them

>>> Across the road from my cabin was a huge clear-cut--hundreds of acres of massive spruce stumps interspersed with tiny Douglas firs--products of what they call "Reforestation," which I guess makes the spindly firs en masse a "Reforest," which makes an individual spindly fir a "Refir," which means you could say that Weyerhauser, who owns the joint, has Refir Madness, since they think that sawing down 200-foot-tall spruces and replacing them with puling 2-foot Refirs is no different from farming beans or corn or alfalfa. They even call the towering spires they wipe from the Earth's face forever a "crop"--as if they'd planted the virgin forest! But I'm just a fisherman and may be missing some deeper significance in their nomenclature and stranger treatment of primordial trees.

from The River Why

Can’t even have toilet paper without the logging industry. Housing would be pretty savage if we had to build everything out of rocks and mud. I strongly believe that any currently old growth forests should be protected but everything else really is just a crop.

If you consider concrete and cement to be rocks and mud, no, outside of NA, most of the world uses stones and mud just fine.

~~atleast an angry drunk can't punch through my wall~~

Having lived in both constructions, for the American environs, wood-built houses are vastly superior to cement ones.

Wood construction is better insulating, easier to repair, easier overhaul as the times inevitably change, naturally regulates temperature, adapts better to different weathers, flexes more and thus adapts to stress better, requires fewer and less stringent inspections, fails less catastrophically, has a smaller carbon footprint, is cheaper and easier to source, and is easier to transport.

That's interesting, can you elaborate? I was under the impression that the main benefit of wood+sheetrock was cost and speed of construction.

Updated my comment with details

Tl;dr, basically it’s just real cheap.

I've been watching a lot of real estate videos on YouTube, and it boggles my mind that people pay seven, even eight digit figures for houses made of wood. It's obviously rational (or so many people wouldn't do it), but it is really, really hard to drop the prejudice coming from my part of the world that Wooden = Flimsy & Cheap.

Wood constructed houses have one of the arguably worst thermal profiles because of their extremely low thermal mass. Basically, they heat up quickly and cool down quickly. In most of Europe and North America you want the opposite: a structure that evens out high temperature throughout the day, and radiates warmth at night. Brick, stone, or clay do that very successfully. Think of an old stone church at a warm summer day: it's comfortably cool inside, completely without AC

>Wood constructed houses have one of the arguably worst thermal profiles

I can't find any research backing this claim. The exact opposite appears to be true. Stone remains cold all winter and hot all summer. And it's expensive to heat and cool.

In addition, wood can be renewable and has a much smaller carbon footprint than mining and quarrying.

I'm still stuck on dirt-crete (concrete made from dirt and/or saw dust) walls after seeing the vibrant aircrete community on YouTube. It looks like an excellent solution for walls. Thermal mass, air entrained, cheap materials, easy to shape.

If your daily high or low temperature is still twenty Kelvin below or above a comfortable temperature, insulation is far more important than thermal mass.

That is good for temperate climates in the right season when there is a big difference between day and night. It's a terrible design for consistently hot or cold places. i.e. Norway in the winter you're running some kind of heating (coupled with insulation) around the clock. A large thermal mass would just be constantly sapping that energy away. In Spanish summers a large thermal mass just means you don't get to take advantage of the slight cooling you get at night.

> Wood construction [...] requires fewer and less stringent inspections

I would expect the opposite. I don't have to worry about the concrete of my home rotting because of a water infiltration, or being eaten by termites.

Rotting is a lot easier to spot than structural failures and cracks slowly building inside concrete walls. Wood beams can be repaired more easily and individually than concrete if they do rot. Finally, modern woods are less prone to rotting due to treatment.

What would be a better option than wood for construction? Yes now days we have other products I suppose but wood previously and arguable long into the future is simply the best option. Forests for the history of man kind burn down and grow back and logging though could outpace the growing back is vital to society as it exists.

I think it'd be a false dichotomy to suggest that if we weren't clear cutting rainforests and old growth forests with abandon we couldn't have wood for construction and would need to "build everything out of rocks and mud". I think that it's likely possible to harvest wood for construction sustainably and responsibly, but what we're doing today isn't that.

Well where do you think we would get the wood from? Where I am from, considered the logging capital of the world, it is sustainable. We also have very regulated industry that is managed by environmental bodies separate from the logging owners. People are so emotional about trees being cut down but I believe it is much like those who say oil industry is bad but continue to use products like plastic wrap and buy cheap plastic made fabrics in their clothing just as logging means housing, toilet paper, the boxes your items are shipped in, the paper we write on, the pallets your appliances are shipped on and on and on. Wood is a vital part of society like it or not and being emotional and disagreeing with that point is equal to head in the sand mentality. Perhaps where you are from logging hasn’t traditionally been managed well but where I am from it is vital to the economy and management is absolutely critical that it remains long term viable business. Even after over a hundred years of logging in my area I am still surrounded by endless forests that one could get lost in and never found. That is not by fluke it is by the fact that like any other crop, forests are too a crop.

> forests are too a crop.

“When you understand that under capitalism a forest has no value until it's cut down, you begin to understand the root of our ecological crises.”

- Adam Idek Hastie

Density and quality of construction lumber has noticeably dropped over the past century. I doubt that there are anywhere that logging is managed in a regenerative way, just “sustainable” to the degree in which we measure that.

> It’s always “well we plant new trees, so what’s the problem?”

This is a perfectly reasonable response to complaints that are about the overall amount of forest rather then about "this particular forest is beautiful and unique and shouldn't ever be touched... just like every other forest".

Not really, secondary forest is known to be less diverse in terms of both plant, animal and fungi species.

It's not just that you can't exactly recreate the original, it's that what you're recreating is often just a shadow of the ecosystems that were destroyed.

Better a shadow than nothing, of course, but better not to have destroyed it in the first place.

James Scott writes at length about Germany's experience with "scientific forestry" in an early chapter of Seeing Like A State.

I highly recommend the book to ... well, everyone.

if anything is fungible, surely mushrooms are...

When the thing being avoided is more important then the thing being preserved because "what if", this same reasoning is called FOMO.

We need to consider them and do our best.

Neither should hypotheticals stop us nor should they be dismissed.

It's an especially acute problem for fungi. Fungi defy easy collection. With most animals and plants one can envisage conservation strategies to preserve lineages in artificial conditions. Breeding programmes, seed banks, tissue culture... But whole swathes of the fungal kindgom have such complex ecological requirements and sensitivities that isolating and growing them outside their natural habitat presents huge technical challenges. Even if you can coax them into culture, getting them to complete their life cycle is another matter entirely. And even with our best preservation methods, cultures that are not maintained as breeding populations have an expiry date. I have had a lot of frustration retrieving fungi of conservation interest from culture collections, supposed repositories of biodiversity, that turned out to be hopelessly senescent.

I think the upside of industrially grown wood is better than the upside of industrially grown meat. The biological services of an old forest are more than the material they yield.

Imagine cultured sheets of perfect n-ply plywood, quartersawn timber of any size, 3d lattices that create chairs and other furniture with no joinery... Lumber grown at sea on barges, taking water and nutrients from sea water, chasing the equatorial sun.

I want to read this book please.

https://fullgrown.co.uk/

> better than the upside of industrially grown meat.

Sure, besides ending the suffering of many millions of animals, wood is nice.

Habitat destruction for wild animals? Lab meat would also be nice.

I think its equally likely something would be toxic to humans

Replace "Mushroom" with insects, fish, bacteria, and viruses, and many other branches of the network-of-life. Inventorying our Earth is far from done.

Yes and no .. for example we've barely scratched the depths of new species on the ocean floor, but we likely won't have to worry about that in a year or so when Gerard Barron starts strip mining nodules that form the base of the food chain of life we've only recently discovered.

https://www.unisq.edu.au/study/why-unisq/unisq-stories/testi...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Metals_Company

Read The Séance Chapter in Thomas Pynchons, Gravity's Rainbow..

It's a great description of how the Capatalist Cartel think about the extraction of Earth's resources.

Cheers for the suggestion, I personally read the book, attended the concert [1], and learnt more about capitalist resource extraction attitudes from meeting the Vogons [2] when working on mapping [3] than I did from Pynchon's filtered Rathenau [4].

First hand beats fiction.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vXhzJK352NI

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gina_Rinehart https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clive_Palmer https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Koch_family et al.

[3] https://www.spglobal.com/marketintelligence/en/campaigns/met...

[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walther_Rathenau

> capitalist resource extraction attitudes

Please, extraction is such a divisive term; we prefer to call it recovery.

I believe the proper capitalist term is "primary resource".

Everybody wants cake, but nobody wants to crack an eggshell

Yep. For example, 25% of classified animals are beetles, and entomologists think we've classified under half of existent beetle species. Possibly as low as 1/5.

I know someone who bought a big mushroom at pike place market that was really expensive. Maybe it was a king bolete. Anyway he cut it open at home, and it was full of worms.

That's just the next phase of the mysterious mushroom's life cycle!

A lot of foraged mushrooms are just chock full of bugs and the ones that aren't are usually full of bug feces. I like hunting for them but I stick to cultivated for eating.

Yup, some also contain parasitic fungi that are infesting a host mushroom. Thus, even experienced pickers may run risks foraging wild samples. The cloning/cultivation/identification process is an important part of safety, and should be done by an experienced mycologist.

An ounce of prevention is better than kidney and liver failure... as they say.

We are lucky, as local farmers here produce fresh Flammulina filiformis (Enoki) for hot-and-sour soups etc.

Have a wonderful day, =3

I’ve been told by a hobbyist "There are many old mushroom hunters, and there are many bold mushroom hunters, but there are not many old and bold mushroom hunters”

A colorful lie. The oldest and best mushroom hunters have a hint of jaundice to their eyes.

Is this a literal example?

Im not sure if I know what you mean by example. I'm not talking about myself.

I know some old and wise mushroom hunters. Some of the best take informed risks. Talk to pros, authorities in the field, and major authors, and they all have some crazy stories.

The safest option is always to stay home and watch TV.

Deep Vein Thrombosis. Even the couch is not safe. Every day we are dying. Some faster than others.

"Most men die at 27, we just bury them at 72." (Mark Twain)

You will note that mark twain did not die in a skydiving jetboat accident at 27 years of age.

He had quite a life, and the pen name hints at where he started.

Mark Twain always did know how to punch a man in the nuts without moving a limb.

I heard this one recently: “All mushrooms are edible. Some only once.”

It may actually be true, some patch-specific varieties apparently can trigger severe allergic responses in some individuals, and not others.

It was one of those weird stories I never could find much information about. =)

I'd believe it; fungal antibiotics (e.g. neomycin, various -cillins) trigger allergic responses the same way.

Indeed, it certainly does sound plausible...

It would be terrible being 2 hours away from civilization, and in need of an Epipen.

Have a great day, =3

hypomyces are not especially dangerous and sometimes desirable, as in the case of lobster mushrooms.

life is full of risks but undetected parasitic fungi are extremely low on the list. If you know enough to pick edible mushrooms, you can learn not to eat rotten mushrooms.

The complexity is on par with not eating moldy bread or rotten eggs, not rocket surgery.

Like everything in life, there are some who choose to gamble on the unknown... and eventually become a cautionary tale.

The recommendation of using repeated sample clones as part of the identification process for agricultural purposes is recommended in Paul Stamets books. He makes several fairly good arguments why you shouldn't gamble with something capable of rapid genetic changes, bioaccumulation, and affecting your immune system in unpredictable ways.

Have a great day, and keep safe out there =)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aNSHZG9blQQ

If Paul Stamets avoids eating wild mushrooms out of fear of hypomyces, I retract my statement! I too recommend staying home and away from dangerous wild mushrooms. Better safe than sorry.

You created an informal fallacy for your own entertainment.

Anyone can "Try Anything Once", but a few forget to ask if they should...

Good luck, =)

I think you are making things up. Intelligent and experienced people typically think through the consequences of their actions. This is not the same thing as being completely risk adverse

That is ok, as some of the people I respect the most have argued for years over what seems rather mundane to observers.

Have a wonderful day, =3

And a lot grow fast enough that as long as you pick young specimens, it's rare to find bugs as they won't have had much time.

E.g. chanterelles are usually big enough to pick in 2-3 days. When I used to pick them growing up, we'd usually avoid the older ones, as they weren't worth the hassle of cleaning and cutting away bad parts.

Bugs is mostly a problem when picking bigger/slower growing ones. That's not to say it doesn't happen with others, but it's not really an issue.

The problem with sticking to cultivation is how few mushroom types are reliably cultivated at anything approaching reasonable prices.

Most of the options cultivated at scale bore me.

sounds like he got scammed.

Buggy mushrooms are still edible, but high end culinary mushrooms are typically low bug. He should have asked them them to cut it open.

Source: amateur hunter. Probably collect 2-300 lbs of Boletes/year. I eat a lot of bugs.

"Enhanced protein content"

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