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Amateur Mushroom Hunters Help Scientists Scientists who study
mushrooms get a boost from a network of sophisticated aficionados who
tromp through the forests observing oddball species and sharing
valuable information about their finds.
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Enthusiastic Amateurs Advance Science As They Hunt For Exotic
Mushrooms

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Enthusiastic Amateurs Advance Science As They Hunt For Exotic
Mushrooms 7:03

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Science

Enthusiastic Amateurs Advance Science As They Hunt For Exotic
Mushrooms

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June 20, 20219:00 AM ET

Richard Harris

[mushroom-1]
Enlarge this image

Photographer Taylor Lockwood found the rare mushroom Hypocreopsis
rhododendri growing in the United States, a discovery that delighted
scientists and mushroom devotees. Taylor F. Lockwoood hide caption

toggle caption
Taylor F. Lockwoood

Photographer Taylor Lockwood found the rare mushroom Hypocreopsis
rhododendri growing in the United States, a discovery that delighted
scientists and mushroom devotees.

Taylor F. Lockwoood

Let's face it. If you are a mushroom scientist, you are hopelessly
outnumbered.

By one estimate, there are between 2.2 million and 3.8 million
species of fungi -- and more than 90% of them aren't cataloged.

But mycologists (as fungus professionals are known) do get a big
boost from a surprisingly sophisticated world of amateurs -- both
those who tromp through the forests observing oddball species, as
well as those who have helped build a community that links the
amateurs with the pros.

Sometimes the amateurs come up with stunning discoveries.

Consider the story of Taylor Lockwood, a 74-year-old mushroom
enthusiast and professional photographer. This spring, we met in the
hills of West Virginia, where he has been prowling the countryside in
a van he has converted into a camper, a photo studio and a workshop.

"I'm in my Edison mode," he says, gesturing toward circuit boards and
hardware that he has cobbled together.

A love affair with mushrooms

More about that in a minute, but first the backstory. Growing up,
Lockwood spent the 1970s playing electric violin and other
instruments in bands out West.

He also worked as a carpentry contractor. And in 1984, while living
on the Mendocino coast of California, he fell in love. With
mushrooms.

"Outside my cabin were these beautiful mushrooms," he says. "And it
was as if these mushrooms looked at me and said, 'Taylor, go out and
tell the world how beautiful we are.' And I said, 'OK, I'll do it.' "

Lockwood bought camera gear and became passionate about photographing
mushrooms. One of his images is even on a U.S. postage stamp. He says
sometimes he would dig a hole next to a mushroom for his camera so he
could get just the right angle.

"I wanted to see them just as a frog would," he says.

His passion for mushroom photography has taken him around the world.
And what he has found and photographed doesn't simply have artistic
interest.

He, like many amateur mushroom hunters, works symbiotically with the
mycologists in universities and government labs.

[mushroom-2]
Enlarge this image

Taylor Lockwood has invented his own elaborate gear for photographing
mushrooms in the wild. Taylor F. Lockwood hide caption

toggle caption
Taylor F. Lockwood

Taylor Lockwood has invented his own elaborate gear for photographing
mushrooms in the wild.

Taylor F. Lockwood

"I might have hundreds or thousands of photos of things that are
unnamed or unknown, or might be known on some other continent," he
says.

He made one of those memorable discoveries here in the Monongahela
National Forest. A few years back, he came across something he had
never seen before: a mushroom that looked like tiny fingers wearing
off-white gloves.

"Like most mushrooms, I saw it as natural beauty," he says, "and
that's why I took a picture of it."

A website for sharing mushroom photos became a scientific treasure

He posted that photo on a website called mushroomoberver.org, where
professional and amateur mushroom experts meet to crowdsource
information. The site is the brainchild of Nathan Wilson, another
amateur who started the project in 2006.

"I'd always wanted to have something computer-based for sharing my
observations of mushrooms that I'd made over my lifetime," he says.
So he applied his software skills to the task.

"I told my friends about it, and they told their friends about it,
and it has been successful beyond my wildest dreams," Wilson says. He
says it now houses millions of images from all over the world. And
these days he's not alone - inaturalist.org also catalogs millions of
fungi images, along with records of many other branches of the tree
of life.

These are not just pretty pictures. They're a valuable scientific
resource.

"There are many more amateurs than there are professionals," Wilson
says, "and the professionals often end up relying on amateurs -- or
quote amateurs."

"It's not uncommon to find people who are not professionals, who are
still world class in terms of their ability to identify groups and
even publish species," he says.

Expert amateurs like Taylor Lockwood provide not just images but
data.

An eye for natural beauty leads to an astonishing discovery

His photo caught the attention of Amy Rossman, who for many years
headed research at the federal government's voluminous fungus
collection in Beltsville, Md. She recognized the distinct form of
this mushroom but found only three records of it growing in the
United States - two from Tennessee in 1888 and a third sample, from
Maine, cataloged in 1915.

A sample of this rare mushroom made its way to a graduate student in
Scotland who ran a DNA test on it and verified its identity,
Hypocreopsis rhododendri, known in the United Kingdom, where it is
rare, by the common name "hazel gloves."

Rossman says it's not only rare, but it also appears to have a
bizarre lifestyle. It doesn't grow directly on wood. It is a parasite
that lives only on another species of fungus that forms a crust on
rotting wood.

"But the crust fungus itself is not very big, so you would wonder,
how could you get a parasite that's so much bigger than the thing it
parasitizes?" Rossman says.

One hypothesis is that it essentially uses the crust fungus as a
straw and sucks up nutrients through it. It's hard to study because
most of the time, fungi like live hidden as tiny threads called
mycorrhizae that run through their hosts.

Mushrooms "are not like plants," she says. "They don't come up at the
same time every year, and so sometimes it can be decades between when
a fungus fruits" -- that is, when it produces a mushroom cap. Rossman
says that's why it's so valuable to have people like Taylor Lockwood
poking through the forest with a trained eye.

He gives me a flavor of what that's like by taking me back to the
spot where he found the specimen a few years back.

"Who knows where it could be at this point!" he says, surveying an
abundance of downed and rotting branches in a boggy hollow festooned
with ferns. But then his eye catches something of interest.

He reaches down to get a close look at a downed branch that has
turned a color you don't usually see in wood.

"This blue-green is Chlorociboria," he says. "It's not fruiting now,
but it shows the blue-green color of the fungi in here. And when it
has little fruit bodies coming out, they are beautiful blue-green
little ears."

Lockwood has been drawn back to this spot for his latest effort -- and
this gets back to the story of his portable workshop and his "Edison
mode."

A few years ago, he decided still photos weren't enough. He decided
to make time-lapse videos of mushrooms.

"When I do time-lapse, you'll find that there's lots and lots of life
going around the mushroom -- insect life and worms, and all kind of
things like that," he says.

His art involves not only photographing a mushroom over time, but
also putting his camera in motion to create otherworldly videos. One
of his videos looks like it could be an outtake from the science
fiction classic Avatar. At a campsite, he sets up a curved track made
out of PVC plumbing pipe and puts a motorized, wooden camera platform
on top.

"It's all handmade stuff," he says. He plugs the motor into some
circuitry he's built so the platform moves at something slower than a
snail's pace, while the camera is set to take a photo every six
seconds.

This is a test run to try out new gear he has built. It may be weeks
or even months before he finds the perfect mushroom to film, but at
74 years old, he's a patient man and happy to be out in the woods,
making discoveries and making beautiful images.

"I love the science, but I'm an artist at heart," he says. "I love
doing this and I love doing finding beautiful mushrooms."

And sometimes beauty and science intersect.

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