Mushrooms
are really fungis
Wild Williamsburg digs up the undergrowth for our spore-filled friends
By Callan Bentley
Flat Hat Variety Editor
Last Saturday I was headed up Old Rag Mountain, just outside of Sperryville, Virginia, on a hike with the College's Sierra Student Coalition. A quarter of the way up the mountain, I saw an incredible congregation of yellow organisms clustering around a tree trunk. They were mushrooms, a.k.a. toadstools, and members of the kingdom Fungi, one of the five kingdoms of living things (the others being bacteria, animals, plants, and protists).
Mushrooms are saprolites, meaning they eat dead material. They do not catch food like animals, and they do not create their own food like plants. Despite this uncommon feeding habit, mushrooms have become incredibly diverse.
There are over 100,000 species of fungus, according to College botanist Martin Mathes. Some 38,000 of these are mushrooms, members of the division Basidiomycota. About 45 million years ago, the fungi began to evolve out of an ancient stock of protists whose cell walls were made of the protein chitin. They forma separate evolutionary line from plants (which evolved from chlorophyll-containing protists). Despite this distinction, most botany courses include fungi in their syllabus, and many publications refer to them as aberrant plants.
Mushrooms are found the world over, but are most common in hot and humid areas of the planet. No matter where they are located, mushrooms have two distinct parts: a vegetative structure called a mycelium (composed of many fibers of cells) and a fruiting body that bears the mushroom's spores (this is the aboveground portion that we would call a toadstool).
Each mushroom produces a distinct smell. This ability has been modified in some interesting ways. The stinkhorn mushroom has adapted to smell like rotting meat, which land on the mushroom, pick up spores, and unwittingly distribute them in their travels.
Certain pigs are well renowned for their ability to sniff out truffles, an underground mushroom regarded as a delicacy in many places. When they can't find truffles, people will eat other mushrooms. A large American subculture has developed around hunting the woods for edible mushrooms. (Another American subculture has developed around another group of mushrooms, the hallucinogenic psilocybin "shrooms," but that's another story.)
The common mushroom that Marriott serves you in the dining hall is Agaricus bisporus, but adventurous connoisseurs strive to discover others. This is a somewhat hazardous activity, as many mushrooms contain powerful toxins.
The World Treasury of Mushrooms In Color by Bernard Dupre offers some tips for the prospective collector: "Species with an unpleasant, rancid, or nauseating smell are definitely bad, as well as those with an acrid, acid, or peppery flavor,… a dull or mottled coloring; blue, brown, or yellow gills; also a change in color once the mushroom is cut… One should certainly reject any species the flesh of which is soft and watery or, at the other extreme, heavy, leathery, and fibrous… [as well as] any fungus which secretes a milky, acrid fluid, changes the color of litmus paper, tarnishes a silver spoon or imparts a black color to onions with which it is being cooked."
With so many potential dangers, it is surprising that mushroom collecting is as popular as it is. After reading a list like that, I'm almost afraid to look at a fungus.
Last year, a woman in Indiana found a mushroom in her back yard that had a diameter of 27 inches. She called a mycologist (someone who studies fungi) at Purdue University, who gratefully accepted the 40-pound behemoth on behalf of their biology department. The scientist planned to dry out the fungi and add it to the university's collection, but it was so big that it wouldn't fit into their drying machine. Instead, he elected to sauté it in better and eat it with some of his colleagues. Ultimately, this plan too was scrapped when it was found out that the fungus had begun to rot.
While that was a big fungus, it pales in comparison to one that scientists discovered in 1992 in Washington State. An Armillaria ostoyae, the fungus ran under 1,500 acres near Mt. Adams. It held the record as the world's largest organism until the discovery of stand of aspen trees, all connected underground, a few months later.
While the group of mushrooms
I saw on Saturday were nowhere near that large, it was still impressive. The
ground beneath them was dusted a light yellow (Yellow? Doesn't that mean
poison?) with spores, and I imagine that by next week, the colony will have
doubled in size. Though the recently departed summer is the peak season for
fungus in Williamsburg, many species may still be observed on an hour's stroll
through the College Woods.