Albuquerque, NM

This mushroom is probably NOT EDIBLE. Photo by MAry MacIntyre

My research shows that the saprophytic fungi (those that promote decay) seem to be running after human beings as quickly as they can, repairing the damage we cause to ecosystems.

Mushroom Magic

by Paul Stamets
t is my contention that mushrooms and fungi are far more crucial to the planet’s ecological health than previously thought. We know that many mushrooms have powerful healing capabilities for humans, but what I’ve learned is that these organisms also appear to serve as primary healing agents for land and ecosystems. My study of fungi and mushrooms has demonstrated powerful new ways of rehabilitating degraded and polluted landscapes and enhancing soil fertility.

In some ways, we know less about the fungal domain today than our distant ancestors did. Ten thousand years ago we were all forest people, and there are many indications that our practical knowledge of mushrooms was far greater then. For example, the famous prehistoric iceman whose frozen remains were discovered high in the Alps on the border of Italy and Austria in 1991 had three wood conk mushrooms tethered to his right side. He probably used them for multiple purposes.

The mushrooms he prized sufficiently to carry with him on a long solo journey included a fragment of a birch polypore, which has very strong antibiotic properties. It’s likely that he was using it to treat an infection or stomach disorder. He also carried some Fomes fomentarius, which can be hollowed out and used to carry fire because it burns only very slowly. This function would have been a matter of life and death in that era, allowing people and nomadic groups to travel without losing their ability to make fire. We’ve recently discovered that Fomes fomentarius seems to be effective against E. coli 0157, a potentially deadly bacterium often found in spoiled food. Although we’ve rediscovered this fact only in the past several years, it seems probable that the iceman’s culture knew about Fomes fomentarius‘s antibacterial properties 5,300 years ago. . . .

To understand the wondrous properties of many mushroom species, it’s helpful to know some of the basics of how they grow. When we see a mushroom, we are seeing just the tip of the iceberg, so to speak. That mushroom is merely the fruiting body of a much more extensive organism, the mycelium, growing in the ground. Overlapping mosaics of mycelial mats actually permeate all the landmasses on the planet in the first 2 to 4 inches of soil. Such a mycelium may reside in the ground for years and may, after many years, produce mushrooms.

The mushroom’s emergence above ground is a major event in the life cycle of the mycelium, which otherwise grows invisibly in the soil. Like a fruit, the mushroom’s function is reproductive: after mushrooms are formed, specialized cells on the gills or the pores produce spores that are jettisoned into space. When these spores are triggered into germination, they form a new mycelial mat.

Mycelia are remarkable phenomena. We have fossil records of mushrooms going back over 90 million years, to the earliest onset of the dinosaurs and vastly predating humans. Clearly they are highly successful life-forms. Mycelia are everywhere, and they grow very quickly: they can travel from one edge of a room to the other in two to four weeks. A single cubic inch of soil can contain more than a mile of overlapping and interpenetrating cell networks, just one cell wide but extremely pervasive. In fact, mycelial mats constitute the largest organisms on the planet. The biggest one found to date extends over 2,200 acres. It’s 165 football fields long, 3 feet deep and 2,400 years old.

Along with bacteria, fungi are the primary recyclers and digesters of life. We now know that the complexity of the fungal kingdom gives soils the ability to respond to catastrophes, whether from a tornado, a hurricane or somebody chipping wood or building a house. My research shows that the saprophytic fungi (those that promote decay) in particular seem to be running after human beings as quickly as they can, repairing the damage we cause to ecosystems — which appears to be one of their ecological functions. Until very recently, this capacity of mycelia for ecological repair had not been sufficiently understood or appreciated.

Scientists are increasingly realizing that species they considered to be parasitic fungi are not blights on the forest, as was once thought. Such fungi actually build soil so the landscape can become a pedestal for greater ecological diversity. Many mushrooms play an absolutely critical role in maintaining forest biodiversity. For example, mycorrhizal species such as chanterelles, matsutake and porcini, which are symbiotic, grow in association with the root zones of higher plants. With very few exceptions, virtually all deciduous trees and shrubs have mycorrhizal mushroom hosts that sheathe their roots, increase their capacity to absorb water, extend their root zones, and protect them from disease vectors.

The absence of mycelia in soils indicates an imperiled habitat; conversely, mushrooms in your garden are a sign of a healthy ecosystem. The mycelium produces enzymes and acids and compounds with antibiotic properties that break down large organic complexes of molecules into simpler forms that plants can absorb. Mycelia are the great soil builders of our planet: they create habitats in which vegetables and other plants can grow. This characteristic of fungi is also what makes them so useful in ecological restoration, where the need often is to break down wastes and toxins.

I find fascinating structural similarities among mushroom mycelia, the brain’s neural networks and the Internet. Mushroom mycelia seem to form a sort of planetwide biological Internet that transmits information. If a twig falls in the forest, to the mycelia it’s like a pebble being thrown into a pond. When trees or plant materials fall and die, mycelial networks sense it almost instantaneously. This process has been proven in the laboratory; for instance, if a dead beetle is put into a petri dish, mycelial mats growing on the opposite edge of the dish will move quickly toward that nutritional source, through means we don’t understand. The mats are geographically separated from the food source by what for them is a great distance — hundreds of thousands of microns — yet are able to sense it, target it and stream mycelium to it rapidly. In Japan, scientists recently showed that a slime mould can repeatedly navigate a maze in the most efficient manner to capture nutrient sources with the least amount of cellular production, suggesting a form of cellular intelligence.

About 465 million years ago, humans shared a common ancestry with fungi. We share about 30 percent of our genes with fungi, giving us more in common genetically with them than with any other kingdom. So perhaps it’s not such a leap to speculate that mycelial networks might display a form of natural intelligence. It’s certainly compelling that human neural structures, mushroom mycelia and the model of the Internet all share a very similar decentralized, networked architecture. There is no point-specific central location on the Internet or in a mycelial mass where you can fatally harm the entire organism.

Whatever one may think about the prospect of fungal intelligence, the practical uses of mushrooms are indisputable. Dusty, my partner, and I have been working in three main areas: preserving potentially useful mushroom species and fungal biodiversity in general, which above all entails protecting habitats, especially forests; doing research on the medicinal uses of mushrooms; and devising new technologies that use some of the remarkable properties of the fungal realm to clean up pollution, enrich agricultural soils and create environmentally benign pesticides. . . .

In the area of medicine, mounting research is confirming the enormous potential for new curative compounds waiting to be found in the fungal realm, including entirely new classes of medicines. In light of the fact that penicillin comes from a mould, it’s surprising that the pharmaceutical industry has not paid more attention to this field. What I want to focus on here, however, is the capacity of fungi to heal polluted sites and ecosystems, and how they can be used for insect control. Fungi can be great allies for rehabilitating environments and recreating sustainable biotic communities.

We’ve begun several such projects. One involves helping habitat recovery where people are cutting trees. We’re demonstrating a technique of putting spore mass into chain-saw oil, so that when trees are cut, the oil — which mushroom mycelia love — will inoculate the stumps and accelerate the processes of decomposition and restoration. When the stumps are inoculated, the mycelium propagates rapidly. Its water-transporting properties increase resident moisture and attract all sorts of other microorganisms so that when the stumps and the trees are cut, they become an oasis of life instead of just drying out.

Another of our remediation projects using fungal technologies took place after a diesel-fuel spill near Bellingham, Washington. We entered a state-sponsored pilot project with other bioremediation companies that were using standard bacterial and enzymatic processes to try to decontaminate the soil, which was saturated with oil and mounded up in piles about 3 feet high, 40 feet long and 6 to 8 feet wide. Each company was given a soil module to work on. We inoculated ours with the mycelium of oyster mushrooms, and like the other companies, we then covered it with a tarpaulin and came back about six weeks later.

As the tarpaulins were lifted from the other companies’ modules, the odor of oil was overwhelming. Their piles remained starkly devoid of any life. When the tarpaulin came off ours, the mound was literally blanketed with oyster mushrooms, some as big as 12 inches in diameter. Hundreds of pounds of oyster mushrooms ultimately arose from this diesel pile. Subsequent laboratory tests found virtually no toxic oil residue in either the soil or the mushrooms, the result of enzymes and acids that the fungi release that break down such molecular complexes. This finding is especially significant because hydrocarbons are the basis for many other toxic industrial products, including most pesticides and herbicides.

But the really exciting part of the story is what happened next. After the mushrooms matured, flies came in and laid eggs in them. Maggots appeared, birds flew in and other small mammals began to eat the mushrooms and the maggots. The birds and animals carried in seeds, and plants started growing. The mushrooms initiated a process that led to rapid habitat recovery. The polluted pile of dirt was transformed into an ecosphere of life. That’s what these mushrooms are: keystone species that precipitate a catalytic, downstream reaction that invites other life-forms. This is what nature can do, but she needs a little help from us.

Oyster mushrooms are one of the prime candidates for breaking down petroleum-based and hydrocarbon-based contaminants and pesticides. They are by far the easiest of any mushrooms to grow, and they’ll grow on almost anything: old chairs, soggy money or coffee grounds. (They’re also delicious and contain lovastatin, a cholesterol-lowering agent.)

For several years I’ve been working with Battelle Laboratories to test some of my strains for bioremediation. We’ve discovered that at least one strain was able to break down highly toxic materials, including VX, the notorious nerve-gas agent. VX contains a recalcitrant molecule that’s very difficult to degrade and is the core constituent of other chemical warfare agents, which poses a huge problem because the U.S. government has them in storage in great quantities. The only other method of disposal currently used is incineration, which of course disperses it into the air and could be quite dangerous. A laboratory experiment we conducted for the Department of Defense, reported in the British military-affairs magazine Jane’s Defense Weekly, showed that by using mushrooms we were able to break down the VX in an unprecedented manner, and its transformation into a harmless substance occurred very quickly. Since this mushroom is native to old-growth forests, I see a strong argument for saving our primeval forests as a matter of national defense.

Benign insect control is another area of key interest. The mushroom Termitomyces is well known to native peoples in Africa as a delicious edible fungus cultivated by termites. They live in its mycelium, where they produce a beautiful honeycomb-like structure from which mushrooms later pop out. The termites are absolutely dependent on these fungi and have developed a close collaboration with them: an interspecies symbiosis. Insects and mushrooms share a close and ancient relationship, which we can adapt for human ends. . . .

It turns out that prior to sporulation some fungi develop attractant properties specific to an insect species they have evolved to parasitize. The fungi entice the insects to ingest and carry them away, thus spreading the infection. The insects are beguiled into coming closer, whereupon they gorge themselves with mycelium and take some back into the nest, breaking it up to feed their queen and brood. Thus the workers effectively spread mycelium throughout the nest, which it then colonizes. When sporulation does occur, the entire insect colony is wiped out.

If these techniques pan out, we might be able to replace many pesticides with totally benign mycoinsecticides. But let me be clear about my own philosophy as a biologist and ecologist. The point is not to wage a war of annihilation against whole insect species. I seek to restore balance and equilibrium; it’s absolutely crucial to protect the insect genome, which is essential to the web of life. The point of such a mycotechnology is that it be highly targeted and localized. Insects, fungi and microbes have coevolved successfully over great periods of time without wiping each other out, and all have much to teach us. The more we study these relationships, the more likely we are to find other highly practical applications.

We’re trying to apply our approaches to a variety of other uses. For example, logging roads cause siltation in salmon beds, posing a major threat to salmon. We’re working on a strategy of putting wood chips infused with mycopesticidal species of fungi onto logging roads. As the fungi grow, they provide mycofiltration, catching the silt before it gets to streams and helping accelerate regeneration of the landscape. And eventually the logging roads would become perimeter barriers preventing insect plagues, such as beetle blights, from sweeping across the forest.

By partnering with fungi and harnessing their extraordinary powers, we are entering a new frontier of knowledge. I believe that the future of our planet and our health will increasingly depend on our working synergistically with other organisms. Fungi can provide us with a powerful array of tools for living in harmony within our ecosystems.

Excerpted from Nature’s Operating Instructions: The True Biotechnologies (The Bioneers Series), edited by Kenny Ausubel, published by Sierra Club Books and distributed by the University of California Press. © 2004 Collective Heritage Institute.

Founded in 1990, Bioneers advances positive change by bringing together leading scientific and social innovators and promoting their visionary ideas and practical solutions through an annual conference, educational media and website. Visit www.bioneers.org.

I LOVE THE WORK of Paul Stamets. I also love New Chaper, a vitamin/food based supplement company that has taught me about the many benefits of MUSHROOMS. Most of all I love the way mushrooms b y New Chaper make me feel. On a cellular level it’s comforting to know that the mushrooms could teach the body to re-genrate healthy cells. The above article was published in the SUn Monthly “magazine”. www.sunmonthly.com

There’s so much in this issue, I will do several articles from it. You can instant and more in depth information by clicking the links above.

Blogsville: www.earthlygardens.com
www.about-sacramentoca.com