Wanted... Fungi Specialists

I've been following this story for over a year.

In August of 2008, Nicholas Evans, author of The Horse Whisperer, and three friends, including his wife, consumed Cortinarius speciosissimus, a deadly mushroom, sometimes known as a Deadly Webcap. They had mistaken them for chanterelles in the Scottish countryside.

For the past year the four of them have been on dialysis in renal units in the United Kingdom and are currently on kidney transplant lists. Their conditions require 15 hours of dialysis a week. Of course, many people are poisoned by mushrooms each year. Often, the culprit are lookalike mushrooms, or the incorrect assumption that what one sees in a field guide is going to be what was picked, or just the lack of importance being placed on the toxicity of a select bunch of mushrooms.

What this article in last week's Scotland On Sunday website focuses on is the lack of proper experts to identify mushrooms in Scotland.

What I think this event points out is that there are still lots of people who take unnecessary chances, combined with lots of wives' tales and misinformation about mushrooms. Look no further than the comments section of the Scotland on Sunday article where "Commentator #4" calls people idiots and then proceeds to quote one of the biggest mistruths about poisonous mushrooms, only to be (rightfully) chided and corrected by "Commentator #7."

Know your mushrooms.

How to Avoid Being Attacked By A Mushroom

Eat your 3 meals a day! That would be breakfast, lunch, and dinner. Or breakfast, dinner, and supper if you grew up with me in Maine.

It seems New York City's Albert Einstein College of Medicine at Yeshiva University is reporting that by listening to what your Mom said, you can avoid mushroom attacks... okay, actually not really mushrooms, but the smaller, less-understood, somewhat-less-exciting-for-a-blog-post, fungi.

By keeping our normal 98.6º internal temperature, we can fight off any fungal nasties that are looking to take up residence in our bodies. That high of a temperature keeps the majority of fungi attackers at bay. By keeping our food intake up, we are replenishing ourselves with the proper energy to prevent these invasions. The study also suggests that this could be a factor in why mammals rose to dominance after the dinosaur extinction. (Which of course is just a prelude to the day when fungi rise to dominance and throttle us out in the woods - that picture to the left is quite accurate.)

Editors note - That last sentence is not actually part of any study conducted by the good folks at the Albert Einstein College, just a prediction made by most scholars bloggers in the know.

Somewhat Weekly Fungal Wrap (8/30/08)

Here's another installment of stories from the world of fungi.

In our regular Monster Mushroom series we have a giant puffball from Woonsocket, RI. If it's described as looking "like elephant brains," and weigh in around 4 pounds, you can be assured it'll make its way into the papers.

A study, reported here, in Science Daily, from John Hopkins, Weight Management Center suggests that "increasing intake of low-energy density foods, specifically mushrooms, in place of high-energy-density foods, like lean ground beef, is a strategy for preventing or treating obesity." Mushrooms are approximately 90% water so this would seem to be obvious. Many types of contact lenses also have a high percentage water base, but I wouldn't suggest eating those.

Dave Anderson has a nice article over at unionleader.com highlighting the bumper crop of mushrooms this summer. With all the rain, New Hampshire, and all of New England has supplied an abundance of mushrooms for mycologists - amateur and expert - to enjoy. New Hampshire is where Stacey and I first got hooked on mushrooms.



And finally... we know that some mushrooms may be dangerous to your health. We also know that there are a lot of things that can annoy you on a flight. But what happens when you combine the two? This!

I couldn't find any good photos of mushrooms jumping out of overhead luggage bins and attacking people so I had to use the old standby - A Matango poster.

So make sure to Be Careful Out There! Mushrooms continue to take over the world... one passenger at a time.

Be Careful Out There... (on the internet)

I was originally attracted to this article because of its headline - "Puff ball mushroom found near Littlefork."

I was thinking, "So?" I mean it's a little like, "Stop sign found at end of street!" But I figured it must be an INSANELY HUGE puffball... the size of a Volkswagen, eating small children, that kind of thing. I was severely disappointed to see it was a basketball-sized puffball but nothing worthy of its own headline.

Reading the article I was surprised to see:

"All puffball mushrooms are edible, although not all are considered choice."

Huh? Well perhaps you could twist that to be true. Many puffballs are edible... for a short while. But they often turn from white to yellowish, to greenish, to brownish in a short time and you don't want to experiment with these changes in color. In addition, Scleroderma citrinium (Common Earthball, pictured at right) and Scleroderma areolatum are poisonous. Now Puffballs are not some scientifically determined type of mushroom. You could easily make an argument that Puffballs and Earthballs are different (dealing with texture and how spores in each are distributed), but if you own any mushroom field guide you know they are always listed together... often on the same page. No field guide I own makes a hard distinction.

The article wraps up by saying:

"Puffballs that resemble hard boiled eggs are decaying, and not edible. Discolored puffballs should also be avoided."

Perhaps that sentence should have been appended to the previous one I listed. The lesson? Once again, be careful out there... and everywhere.

You can find some good info and additional pictures of various Puffballs (and Earthballs!) here at mushroomexpert.com.

Be Careful Out There... (follow up)

Well we actually have follow up information on the bear attack I wrote about in the previous entry. Cinthia Ritchie of the Seward Phoenix Log did a follow up story on the couple who were attacked by a grizzly bear while morel hunting. You can view the interview/article here.

Both people are doing well and are planning their next morel excursion. Unfortunately the burning question of whether they were able to bring back morels from the attack was not answered! I would think that would be foremost on people's (okay, maybe just me) minds. Anyway, the writer of the story leaves her phone # at the end of the article. Perhaps I'll do a little investigative research of my own.

Be Careful Out There...

In what will sure be an ongoing theme on this blog, here is a story from the Fort Mill Times of a couple who were attacked by a grizzly bear while morel hunting in a burned section of forest in Alaska. Recently burned woodlands are prime areas for morel foraging.

Besides puncture wounds to the rib cage it is unclear from the article whether they also came home with any mushrooms. Hopefully they did.

Be Careful Out There...

So you're spending a nice afternoon in the woods foraging for mushrooms, when...

You get threatened by a turkey hunter with an axe! (I couldn't find any free pictures of pilgrims wielding axes, so you'll have to settle for a musket.)

You can read the account here.

And if I can offer some advice... The best thing to do would be to run. Arming yourself with a handful of chanterelles probably wouldn't have the outcome you were hoping for. Plus you'd be out a handful of chanterelles. I suppose you could hurl a stinkhorn or two at the guy with the axe.