Mushroom season is coming, and this book has me HYPE!

In The Company of Mushrooms: A Biologist’s Tale – Elio Schaechter (1997)

            It is currently winter here in Houston, Texas, which means that soon the weather will warm up a bit, the rains will come, and the ground and trees will be full of mushrooms once again.  As an amateur mycologist, I am really looking forward to this next mushroom season.  While I wait for it, I find that reading cool books about mushrooms helps me to pass the time and prepare for my next hunts.

            The author of this book, Mr. Elio Schaechter, is a trained scientist, specifically in biology.  He combines his scientific knowledge with his love for the exploration and fun found in mushroom hunting.  The book is divided up into several parts, each of which focuses on one specific aspect of this fascinating hobby.  The first chapters discuss exactly what is a fungus, what is a mushroom, and how they fit into the tree of life.  Fungi are ancient, very ancient.  The organisms we class as fungi are so old that they belong to a separate kingdom of life, and have been evolving since before the advent of flowering plants and trees.  A mushroom is the fruiting body of many types of fungi whose purpose is solely to procreate.  Others do not make mushrooms, instead utilizing spherical shapes, jelly shapes, or other such creations to spread their spores.

            Another chapter in this great book details the use of mushrooms throughout history, and yet another explains the rise of mushroom hunting clubs and organizations.  These are some of the best parts of the book, as they detail the fun and camaraderie found by people whose shared interests in mushrooms bring them together to learn and eat and have fun.  As the world of mycology is largely one composed of self-starters and amateur hunters working alone, these mushroom/mycology clubs are a great resource for information exchange and education.  I myself have joined the Gulf States Mycological Society, and hope to head to a foray at one of the massive state parks here in Texas, as soon as the weather allows.

            One of the topics that Mr. Schaechter returns to is that of the traditional mushroom hunters in Europe and Asia, and why this has not taken hold in places like the UK, or the USA, where mushrooms are seen as dangerous and eating wild foraged mushrooms especially so.  This bias is a shame, as mushrooms are a very good food source when sourced intelligently.  The area I live in, near Houston, TX, is estimated to have 5,000-6,000 species of fungi, of which just over 1,000 are identified.  The climate is moist and there are lots of places for the mushrooms to grow.  Being in the middle of the continent, mushrooms from the East coast grow here as well as mushrooms from the West coast.  This hobby, which takes you into nature, allows for education and fun, and if lucky, results in delicious mushrooms for your table, is one that can be enjoyed by a great many people.  I hope to do my part by sharing my mushroom adventures and spreading the fungal love.

(This book can be purchased here:  IN THE COMPANY OF MUSHROOMS )

We may in fact owe all of our planet's life to the magnificent Fungi

Fungal Biology in the Origin and Emergence of Life –David Moore (2013)

      One of my life’s passions is that I love mushrooms.  Actually, I love fungi of all types.  I seek them out after spring rains.  I keep my eye on the ground as I walk around the campus where I work.  I also keep careful notes in my head about what mushrooms are delicious and safe to eat.  I photograph almost every mushroom, slime mold, or lichen I find.  The variability is amazing, and many of them are outright beautiful to look at, but I think part of the thrill is that mushrooms are unpredictable.  They do not grow in orderly ways like plants do.  Finding a patch of delicious chanterelle mushrooms is great, but it is no guarantee that they will be there again next week, or month, or even at the same time next year.  Mushrooms are ephemeral in their way.  It is amazing to think that these overlooked organisms may very well have been the very first self-contained life to evolve in our world.  This story is the subject of Fungal Biology, by David Moore.

      Moore is a biologist, having recently retired from working on genetics and mycology.  If any human has the ability to understand the many threads that point to fungi as the initial role-player in the web of life it is Mr. Moore.  His explanations are sensible, even to someone with a limited background in mathematical or genetic knowledge.  The first part of this book details the properties of modern-day fungi, and how their cellular features differentiate fungal life from vegetable life or animal life.  This background is very important to understanding the rest of this book.  I learned quite a great deal just from the first chapter alone.

      In following chapters, David Moore explores the scientific consensus regarding the state of the Earth in the early days.  As he describes it, a habitat must have been created before the processes began which lead to multi-cellular life.  This habitat was a very different place than the green and blue orb we all live on currently.  Not only were there no plants or animals on Earth about 3.7 billion years ago, there were no cells of any type, or even oxygen in the air!  Only with the arrival of single-celled, photosynthetic proto-algae did our world’s atmosphere begin to be oxygenated.  In fact, most of this early oxygen “fixed” itself to the massive quantities of Iron atoms dissolved in the primordial oceans, raining down a silt of iron oxide molecules that created the world-wide layers of iron ore we have been mining for the past 1000+ years.  It was not until the flourishing of single celled plants in the oceans that the atmospheric oxygen actually rose to the super high levels that allowed the massive proliferation of land-plants, and the animals that lived on those plants.  This took well over 2.5 billion years to occur, a magnificently ridiculous expanse of time.  (For comparison, Dinosaurs lived around 100 million years ago, and the genus Homo has been running around the Earth for maybe 600,000 years.  Our whole current civilization is barely older than 10,000 years, a trifle in comparison)

      Before plants and animals came to dominate the Earth it was fungi that ruled.  They ruled for over 2 billion years!  They did not spring wholesale out of the ground though.  David Moore describes through several chapters what he sees as the mechanism by which life arose.  Many scientists have claimed that the first cellular life that we would recognize as such arose in inhospitable places, such as underwater thermal vents, deep caves, or volcanic fissures.  We find very hardy microorganisms in these habitats now, and call them Archaea, but these creatures are actually quite late-comers compared to other fungi, bacteria, and algae.  Moore posits that much of the chemicals for life existed in the vast aerosols that covered much of our atmosphere.  Aerosols are just particles so small that they stay aloft as they are buffeted by the molecules of the atmospheric gases. Each of these tiny aerosol droplets was a laboratory, mixing up pre-living enzymes, amino acids, lipid molecules, etc.  It only takes one of these billions to manage putting together a self-replicating molecule.  These aerosols and organic molecules would have ended up dispersing this material all over the Earth, resulting in a landscape we would never recognize, of rocks and gravels covered in a thin bio-film.  It is the materials in this worldwide bio-film that served as the food source for our OG organism, allowing it to grow, replicate, compete, and evolve.  I can only summarize what is covered in much more proper detail in this book.

      By the time plants arose, so many fungi existed that today 90% of all plant life has some sort of relationship with it.  Many plants are in symbiosis with fungi.  The fungus provides rare minerals to the plant through the connection of roots and mycelium fibers (hyphae), and the plant provides the fungi with simple sugars that it needs to grow.  Some fungi are predators of plants, and work more like parasites.  Still other examples see plants that parasite the fungus, where the plants receive the benefit but provide none for the fungus involved.  As far as animals are concerned, almost no herbivore animals exist that do not have a colony or colonies of primitive fungi/bacteria living in their digestive tract.  The very first herbivores ate tons of fungi unknowingly, and in many cases this became a deep symbiosis.  Without the fungus in a cow’s gut, the cow would not be able to extract nutrition from the cellulose that makes up most of what it eats.  All plant and animal life owe their existence to fungi.

      To this day the kingdom of fungi is overlooked.  Humans place undue value on animals, for we are animals.  We value plants, because so many of them are needed for our survival.  I think we should start to praise and love fungi as well.  We are here because they were here.  They broke the inhospitable Earth for us plants and animals.  Without them nothing in our vast web of life would exist, and our world would be just one giant layer of biofilms, exuding tar and other waste products.  I cannot begin to describe the amount of information provided here by David Moore, but I am very glad I ran across this cool and seminal work.  I hope it brings mycology to the forefront and helps shape the conversation for decades to come.  Now to go outside and look for some more mushrooms!

(This book can be purchased here: FUNGAL BIOLOGY IN THE ORIGIN AND EMERGENCE OF LIFE  )

Trees, seemingly simple, are as complex as any life-form

The Hidden Life of Trees: What They Feel, How They Communicate: Discoveries From a Secret World – Peter Wohlleben (2015)

            I have always been a huge fan of trees.  In my early childhood, which was spent in the sub-tropical island of Puerto Rico, many of the trees provided fruits and veg of some kind.  I loved this.  No matter the season, there was something good to eat from the trees outside in the yard, whether it was tamarind, guavas, scotch bonnet peppers, breadfruit, coconuts, etc.  When I was around 8 years old my family relocated to the city of Houston, Texas.  I was distraught at first that there did not appear to be any fruiting trees around, but then I discovered the pecan and the Loquat trees that grew everywhere.  Once again, the trees were providing me with food.

            In the years since I have learned more and more about trees, their life cycle, and the many varieties, but there did not seem to be much scholarship that treated the trees as organisms deserving of careful study. Trees were seen as static, dull, and lacking in any of the qualities humans appreciate in other lifeforms.  Thank goodness for people like Peter Wohlleben, a former forester in Germany who left his work to become a scientists specializing in the life-cycles of trees.  His personal experience with the way that humans attempt to control trees, to shape them for our own aesthetic pleasure, and prep them for future harvesting was in stark contrast with what he came to learn about individual trees, species of tree, and whole communities of various tree types. 

            One of the most controversial ideas espoused initially by Mr. Wohlleben, and since corroborated by many different researchers, was the topic of communication between trees.  Most humans assume that plants cannot possibly communicate.  We assume that communication is reserved for organisms with a brain, or with social structures.  This is a deeply held bias, based on erroneous ideas spread for centuries through religion, concerning the supremacy of certain creatures as opposed to other creatures, and the dominance and value found therein.  The truth is that all life communicates, whether it is a large 400-year old Oak, or a small protozoa that lives only for ½ a day. A brain or a nervous system is not required for communication.

            Trees communicate in many ways.  Some trees of the same species will make underground connections through their root systems.  The tips of these roots contain very special cells, cells which seek out nutrients, water, air, and other plants.  The roots of these species will connect and share resources.  When one tree needs more water, the other trees will provide it.  If a large old tree, one that had supported various smaller offshoots for decades or centuries, dies from an accident, the other trees will continue to “feed” the leftover stump and root systems, sometimes keeping them alive for several hundred years.  This requires communication.

            Another way trees communicate is with chemical signals.  Certain trees, the acacia for example, are a favorite of grazing animals in Africa.  A giraffe will start munching on an acacia tree and the tree can sense this somehow, which causes it to begin releasing a specific chemical cocktail into the air.  This chemical floats in the breeze and “informs” the other acacias to begin producing bitter chemicals in their leaves.  The initial tree warns the others of danger so they do not get eaten!  The signal fades after about 100 feet.  The giraffes are smart, and after gnawing on one acacia, will walk at least 100 feet away from it to begin grazing anew.  They seem to know the trees have communicated!  Other trees will feel a bug digging into their bark, and release a noxious chemical through their whole trunk which will kill or repel these bugs.  Trees have immune systems!!!!

            I wish I could talk about all the cool things I learned from this book.  One of the saddest things I learned is the state that city trees and park trees suffer in.  They are not able to create connections underground with similar trees.  They are essentially orphans, and live their lives in high risk.  Orphan trees do not have the support from surrounding trees to protect them during storms.  They do not have the other trees helping them during times of drought.  They do not ever “talk” to any other trees.  These trees are hermits, living in isolation.  They grow stunted, or mangled, or warped compared to their forest brothers.  They die young, and suffer greatly from pests and fungi and other natural enemies whose detrimental effects are buffered by a forest of trees.

            Any and all divisions that we humans see in the living world are created and enforced by our own ideas, whether misbegotten or accurate.  Life existed for billions of years before the rise of modern Homo Sapiens Sapiens, and will continue long after we are gone or replaced as a dominant species on this planet.  The genetic difference between all humans is minuscule compared to the genetic differences between different trees of the same species!  They are constantly evolving, adjusting, migrating, and procreating. They have been doing this for so long, without our help, and to treat them as purely a source for materials or as a natural resource undercuts the dignity that every living thing should be treated with.  Hopefully this great book will open eyes and minds, and allow for a true co-existence between humans and our tree friends.

(This book is available for purchase here:  THE HIDDEN LIFE OF TREES  )