[HN Gopher] Mushroom hunters can't stop finding mysterious fungi
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Mushroom hunters can't stop finding mysterious fungi
Author : Hooke
Score : 141 points
Date : 2024-06-11 13:05 UTC (2 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.nytimes.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.nytimes.com)
| Bowes-Lyon wrote:
| https://archive.ph/ZMqxg
| carabiner wrote:
| 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.
| bqmjjx0kac wrote:
| That's just the next phase of the mysterious mushroom's life
| cycle!
| idiotsecant wrote:
| 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.
| Joel_Mckay wrote:
| 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
| ceedan wrote:
| 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"
| s1artibartfast wrote:
| A colorful lie. The oldest and best mushroom hunters have
| a hint of jaundice to their eyes.
| knowaveragejoe wrote:
| Is this a literal example?
| s1artibartfast wrote:
| 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.
| johnrob wrote:
| I heard this one recently: "All mushrooms are edible.
| Some only once."
| Joel_Mckay wrote:
| 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. =)
| Ferret7446 wrote:
| I'd believe it; fungal antibiotics (e.g. neomycin,
| various -cillins) trigger allergic responses the same
| way.
| Joel_Mckay wrote:
| 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
| s1artibartfast wrote:
| 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.
| Joel_Mckay wrote:
| 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
| s1artibartfast wrote:
| 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.
| Joel_Mckay wrote:
| 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, =)
| s1artibartfast wrote:
| 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
| Joel_Mckay wrote:
| 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
| vidarh wrote:
| 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.
| s1artibartfast wrote:
| 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.
| erikerikson wrote:
| "Enhanced protein content"
| w-ll wrote:
| Alan Rockefeller has a great Instagram also did a trip with
| `Crime Pays But Botany Doesn't` recently.
| inhumantsar wrote:
| great name for a great channel.
| elsonrodriguez wrote:
| Alan is wonderful and is almost a co-host of Crime Pays at this
| point.
| wh313 wrote:
| Unlocked article:
| https://www.nytimes.com/2024/06/11/science/mushroom-hunters-...
| zeagle wrote:
| Thank you!
| xipho wrote:
| Replace "Mushroom" with insects, fish, bacteria, and viruses, and
| many other branches of the network-of-life. Inventorying our
| Earth is far from done.
| defrost wrote:
| 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
| TechDebtDevin wrote:
| Read The Seance 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.
| defrost wrote:
| 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/campaign
| s/met...
|
| [4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walther_Rathenau
| 082349872349872 wrote:
| > _capitalist resource extraction attitudes_
|
| Please, _extraction_ is such a divisive term; we prefer
| to call it _recovery_.
| bregma wrote:
| I believe the proper capitalist term is "primary
| resource".
| scottyah wrote:
| Everybody wants cake, but nobody wants to crack an eggshell
| boomboomsubban wrote:
| 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.
| autoexec wrote:
| 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.
| rgrieselhuber wrote:
| 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?"
| autoexec wrote:
| 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
| luggageproblem wrote:
| >>> 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
| 14 wrote:
| 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.
| samarthr1 wrote:
| 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~~
| xvector wrote:
| 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.
| adrianN wrote:
| That's interesting, can you elaborate? I was under the
| impression that the main benefit of wood+sheetrock was
| cost and speed of construction.
| xvector wrote:
| Updated my comment with details
| katbyte wrote:
| Tl;dr, basically it's just real cheap.
| abenga wrote:
| 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.
| f3b5 wrote:
| 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
| trimethylpurine wrote:
| > _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.
| datavirtue wrote:
| 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.
| coryrc wrote:
| 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.
| scottyah wrote:
| 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.
| cesarb wrote:
| > 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.
| xvector wrote:
| 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.
| 14 wrote:
| 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.
| autoexec wrote:
| 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.
| 14 wrote:
| 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.
| mandmandam wrote:
| > 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
| hosh wrote:
| 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.
| tbrownaw wrote:
| > _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".
| Nursie wrote:
| 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.
| tuatoru wrote:
| 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.
| exp1orer wrote:
| if anything is fungible, surely mushrooms are...
| tbrownaw wrote:
| When the thing being avoided is more important then the thing
| being preserved because "what if", this same reasoning is
| called FOMO.
| godelski wrote:
| We need to consider them and do our best.
|
| Neither should hypotheticals stop us nor should they be
| dismissed.
| Kaijo wrote:
| 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.
| peatmoss wrote:
| 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.
| ctoth wrote:
| I want to read this book please.
| rad_gruchalski wrote:
| https://fullgrown.co.uk/
| BillTthree wrote:
| I think its equally likely something would be toxic to humans
| 3lit3krew wrote:
| 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.
| giantg2 wrote:
| There are a bunch of different type of coral fungi. Not all are
| edible.
| accumulator wrote:
| Ironically all of the macro fungi displayed in this article are
| very well known and common
| Kaijo wrote:
| 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.
| dendrite9 wrote:
| 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
| jc6 wrote:
| 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.
| lagniappe wrote:
| I hope someone here knows what this is because that sounds
| really cool
| tomohelix wrote:
| 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.
| jc6 wrote:
| 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.
| overtomanu wrote:
| cordyceps ant zombie fungus which inspired "last of us" tv
| series
|
| https://www.youtube.com/shorts/w1ibC4lf4Dw
| pubutil wrote:
| 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.
| jc6 wrote:
| 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.
| barrenko wrote:
| Oh man, this would make a cool Dr. House episode resolution.
| tristramb wrote:
| 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.
| MisterTea wrote:
| 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.
| spacecadet wrote:
| Yeah this, was it "orange"?
| tristramb wrote:
| 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."
| zikduruqe wrote:
| Or "There are bold mushroom foragers, and there are old
| mushroom foragers. But there are no bold, old mushroom
| foragers."
| fanf2 wrote:
| 'All Fungi are edible. Some fungi are only edible once.' --
| Terry Pratchett
| pimlottc wrote:
| 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.
| MoOmer wrote:
| 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!
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