- I was compelled to study these organisms because I love them.

Even in all of the leaves of plants are microscopic fungi that live inside of them.

- Whoa.

- One time we found this chicken of the woods, and it was covering the whole tree, and it goes on for 10 feet in either direction.

You're always close to a mushroom.

They're everywhere.

If you start looking today, you'll find them today.

(gentle quirky music) - Well, hello there, everybody.

Who are you?

What's your name?

Are you a friend?

Can I eat you?

Are you poisonous?

One of the best ways to learn about mushrooms and to identify them safely is to join your local mushroom club.

Across the United States, there are nearly 100 mycological clubs, some dating back over 70 years.

The Philadelphia Ecology Club launched in 2018 and has cultivated an impressive following thanks in large part to the pandemic.

This young, but vibrant club hosts everything from an event in which they make jerky out of mushrooms, their annual mushroom Jerk Off, to more traditional mushroom forays.

(upbeat quirky music continues) - All right.

I think it's a nice day now that we're in the shade.

Hi, guys, welcome.

That's a really cute basket.

I really love that basket.

We do have stickers here for sale, Philly Mycology Club things.

I didn't bring the t-shirts today.

And if anybody would like to wear a name tag, I brought some.

I won't remember your name if you don't.

I brought some books if anybody wants to see the books that we usually recommend.

This one is the most recent one, so it's got nice pictures and recent names.

This little one, though, if you just want something to carry with you, obviously there's a little bit better size, and it's still pretty recent.

I definitely would recommend getting ones that are newer because the names change a lot.

They're gonna stop changing in maybe like 10 years, but for now they're changing a lot thanks to DNA analysis.

If you've never signed that before, we would love for you to sign that.

It just says that you won't sue me because you understand your safety is your business.

The main things that we're looking for are obviously dead wood.

We would love a big dead, well decomposed log, but also since it's the summer and we're looking for those mycorrhizal mushrooms, we also just want large mature trees.

Oak trees and beech trees are well known for being the trees that create the most mycorrhizal associations.

Mainly the name of the game is walking until you see a mushroom.

(upbeat quirky music) Hello, mourning dove.

Bye.

2018, it was a really wet year, and I know a lot of people in the Northeast who got into mushrooms because it just kept raining every three days, and there were just mushrooms popping out of everywhere.

So while I was walking my dog, I found a bunch of little tiny ones popping up outta the cobblestones, and it looked magical, and I took some pictures, and I thought they were the best pictures I had ever taken 'cause they were so cute, and I never stopped.

(chuckles) Where is it?

Oh my goodness.

Oh my God, good job, Matt.

Oh my God, crushed it.

There are a lot of different species of chanterelle around here, a lot.

These are mycorrhizal mushrooms that we only find in the summer.

All of the species of chanterelle are in the genus Cantharellus.

They usually only get to about this size.

You can eat them, but it's quite a bit of work to pick enough of them.

(laughs) I have to say that before I got into mushrooms, none of my friends were into mushrooms.

And since I've gotten into mushrooms, now I would say the vast majority of the people that I spend my time with are very into mushrooms simply because I spend all of my time doing things related to that.

This is a loupe.

People call it jewelers loupe, L-O-U-P-E. You can get it on eBay for like $10, and they're really cool for looking at tiny little things.

You can also take a picture through them.

It took me three years to figure that out.

It works really well for macro photography.

- That's so cool.

(upbeat quirk music) - [Jeff] It's got a lot of structure.

- There was a very well loved mycologist who died a couple years ago.

He was the president of New York Club for a long time named Gary Lincoff.

And he was fun, and he was very well known for telling people that the best way to identify russula is to throw it at a tree, and if it explodes, it's a russula because they're very, very brittle.

They have a different cell structure than most families of mushrooms.

It's like just a more rounded and very brittle cell structure.

(upbeat quirk music continues) There's a lot to learn, and if you want to learn it all, you absolutely need the help of other people.

And so that has historically fostered a lot of community around learning about mushrooms.

Oh yeah, throw it at a tree.

- [Nia] During the pandemic, we were just binge watching videos about mushroom identification.

- Feel it.

It's gooey.

- We just really enjoy discovering new mushrooms, the way that they look.

I love that you can touch the mushrooms even if you can't eat them.

(child groans) Just being in the woods all the time in autumn is like really beautiful.

And we found like a bunch of edible mushrooms, and we ate one of 'em, so it's really exciting, yeah.

- One thing that concerns me a lot, especially living in a city, is that my son will grow up thinking that the world is this like little manmade cube, and he won't have an imagination about what the natural world is like.

And then you see something like a mushroom, which is so much weirder than anything a person would invent.

And so I think that's really important to show to a kid.

- This could be poop.

(both laugh) They're very exciting.

They grow in all sorts of shapes and colors, and they do weird stuff, and they come out of the ground or out of trees or outta sticks.

They smell different ways, and they have different textures, and they fall apart in different ways.

And they're just cute.

(Jeff laughs) They're real cute, you know?

- Looks like the leaf came through it.

- Yeah.

- Mushrooms, hemp, and hydrogen are the three things that I'm most encouraged by right now.

Specifically I've been really interested in lion's mane mushrooms.

My son, I adopted him when he was three and a half, and he's got brain damage.

And he entered middle school with a Lexile score of zero and graduated high school with a Lexile score of 720.

And I'm not gonna take total credit for the mushrooms, but I've been giving him supplements of lion's mane daily since right before middle school started.

- A huge amount of the work of field mycology has been done by amateurs simply because there hasn't been that much money.

So there just aren't that many professional mycologists versus how many amateur mycologist there are.

And because of the ephemeral nature of mushrooms, it is a matter of how much time you spend out there looking.

Okay, these guys are deadly amanitas.

It definitely could be called a destroying angel.

And it definitely has amatoxins that would kill you if you ate it.

(forager laughs) - [Forager] I think I have some paper bags too.

- [Forager] (indistinct) Fried, battered and fried.

(foragers chatter) - [Forager] (indistinct) Looks kinda like (indistinct).

- One last thing that I always want to ask of everyone is to think about using iNaturalist.

There have been a very large amount of really important discoveries by people who did not know what they were looking at.

So I just wanna let you know that you could be somebody who found a new species and not even know it if you just get into using this app.

And thousands of scientific papers have already been written only using the data that was taken by iNaturalist users who are non-professional.

So, the mushrooms really want you to do that.

Think about that.

(upbeat quirky music) - American mycology has benefited greatly from the work of Pennsylvanian Charles McIlvaine.

Referred to as Old Iron Guts, McIlvaine was known for his intrepid and perhaps reckless research methods, consuming hundreds of species of mushroom to discern the edible from the poisonous.

(upbeat quirky music continues) In 1902, McIlvaine co-authored the classic illustrated guidebook, "One Thousand American Fungi," and this rare first edition print is housed here at Swarthmore College.

Last reprinted in the 1970s, McIlvaine's work remains an invaluable guide for both professional and amateur mycologists today.

(upbeat quirky music continues) (dog barks) - Good boy.

This is where I really wanna exclude any air as best as I can 'cause we don't wanna see a bunch of air bubbles.

So we have the Taxonomy Tuesday with the the NJMA where we all meet on Tuesday nights, which is tonight, and we present to each other our best finds.

So I often will be down here on Mondays, Monday nights trying to figure out everything I found over the weekend.

So we'll see what happens here with this one.

I go through different things like rapidly, you know, what they call the multipotentialite if you've ever that word, really like I'll do something for a year or two and then I lose interest in it, but mushrooms have always really kind of endured with me.

I think part of it is that there's so much to learn.

I started out learning edible mushrooms.

Maybe I was interested in some other types of mushrooms for a little while.

Then I got into microscopy for a while.

Now it's DNA, learning how to do DNA work with mushrooms, and it's also really exciting right now because there are so many mushrooms that are unidentified.

We're learning mushrooms really quickly now.

It's super exciting right now.

Oh look, they're in there.

See these mushrooms that are in here?

They're way up in there.

They're probably about 10 feet off the ground.

Sometimes we think a mushroom is really rare because nobody ever sees it, but once you start looking for it and you know where to look for it, you start seeing it on a regular basis, and you realize it's not necessarily rare, but it's just under-recorded.

I had read in Charles McIlvaine's book "One Thousand American Fungi" that he had recorded this in the Philadelphia area in the late 1800s, and nobody had seen this mushroom since then.

And then last year, I was on Facebook on the Philadelphia Mycology Club's page, and somebody in Chester County posted a photograph of this mushroom in Chester County.

And so I started looking inside of these hardwood trees late fall this time of the year, and I started seeing them everywhere.

They call 'em the bone stem mushrooms 'cause they're really hard like a bone.

Oh look, it's a stinkhorn.

A stinkhorn is a mushroom that emits a disgusting rotting meat smell that attracts insects to it, and the insects crawl all over it and get the spores stuck to it, and they transport the spores to another area, but they grow out of these eggs.

So these eggs form in mulch and on rotting wood in different places, and they actually grow outta here.

So you can actually collect these eggs and take them home and you can either grow 'em at your house.

If you put 'em in a paper towel, this'll actually grow, or people will eat these.

I tried 'em once.

I wasn't a big fan though.

Oh, look at this.

(chuckles) Oh, this log has tons of stuff on it.

These are a turkey tail.

These are more of the same turkey tail, but the colors look a little different on them.

Then next to it, look at all this stuff.

This is a phlebia.

This is one of our crust fungi.

Crust fungi are the mushrooms that are growing as a flat crust-like organism against the bark.

We use two different names for mushrooms, common names and the Latin binomials.

So the common names usually have something to do with the mushroom.

Like we call these turkey tails because they look kinda like a turkey tail, and they're easy to use, and they generally get the point across.

But if you're being a little more rigorous, a little more scientific, there's the Latin binomials.

So it has a genus and a species.

This is Trametes versicolor.

The Trametes is referring to the genus, and the species name is versicolor, and that's a decayer.

It's a saprobic mushroom.

So it's consuming the nutrients in this dead wood and decomposing it and moving the carbon that's in this wood back into the carbon cycle.

One of the first times I ever remember seeing mushrooms in the wild, there were russulas everywhere, and they come in all these different colors.

And I remember being with my dad, and we were astounded that there were red ones and there were green ones and there were purple ones growing everywhere in the forest we were in.

So there's definitely a beauty aspect to it.

(bright quirky music) - Once regarded dismissively as a lower plant, fungi have lagged behind other organisms within the realm of formal science despite their ecological importance.

It was only in 1969 that fungi rightfully got their own kingdom separate from plants.

Today, you'd still be hard pressed to find a mycology course in most colleges and universities, but a new generation of professional mycologists are hoping to change that.

(bright quirky music continues) (class chatters) - Okay, can they hear me on Zoom okay?

Fungus, okay.

(chuckles) (upbeat quirky music) Mycology as a discipline, which is the study of fungi in case not everyone knows that... Mycology has long been just understudied, and I think that's because of the relationship to fungi and being sort of agricultural pests or pathogens.

- [Narrator] It's more important than ever for the agriculturalists to fight off the damage caused by weeds, fungus, and insects.

- It's assuming, first and foremost, that the fungus is something that causes harm.

A lot of the research in mycology that's been around for a while is more about how do we control or eliminate this group of organisms.

So, people for a long time have really been sleeping on the fact that mycology and fungi are full of all these different roles from all these different ecological functions and in many ways are completely life-giving and essential to our ecosystem.

It's starting to course correct, but we're still really behind.

There's a lot of things we need to do to catch up to understanding them as a complete like full complex group of organisms.

I got interested in mycology because in part I had a deeply feral childhood.

I was a swamp kid, a bug kid, a snake kid.

So it might still be like decayed there.

Does anyone have a guess as to why I might be wanting to stop and talk about rhododendron?

90% or more of all terrestrial plants have a fungus that they rely on in what we call a mycorrhizal network.

So the word mycorrhizal, myco meaning mycology, rrhizal referring to root.

So the fungus grows through the soil and attaches to the root, and there's different ways in which the fungus attaches.

There's different types of mycorrhizal fungi, but they're all providing essentially the same benefits.

And it was through this exact partnership that plants were able to leave the marine habitats in which they evolved and actually transition to land.

It's not an overstatement to say that the forest, the lands that we know now and that our own biologies evolved from just like simply wouldn't exist.

But what's amazing is that we're still not like researching them as much as I think we need to.

Actually, I learned this fact just a few days ago, but there's only 200 professional mycologists practicing, like carrying out active research in the US.

So it's an order of magnitude less than botanists and zoologists.

At least I don't actually don't know the exact numbers for those groups either, but it's definitely in the thousands.

So we're still just beginning to illuminate like how these fungi work and how deeply embedded in our ecosystems they really are.

Rarely can a fungus just be understood as living in a vacuum, right?

It is often basically understood as a partner to other organisms.

It really brings to focus actually how rare it is for an organism to be as independent as we often think of them as.

Whenever you find a mushroom, before you just go in and grab it, first of all, actually all mushrooms are safe to touch.

So this is not a safety warning.

Anytime you see a mushroom, you can pick it up, you can smell it, you can put it right up to your face.

You can actually even bite it so long as you spit it out.

You do have to spit it out.

They're that safe.

And so another thing you wanna do is when you go to pick them, you kinda wanna be careful to make sure you grab like all of the parts of the fungus.

So I'm gonna pass this around.

Again, it's all safe to touch.

Feel free to use your hand lens to look at the gills.

So one question I got on the walkup was like, what makes a mushroom a mushroom as opposed to a fungus?

Basically a mushroom is something that has a cap and a stem and then usually gills.

All mushrooms are fungi, but not all fungi are mushrooms.

This would be an example of what is not technically a mushroom but is a fungus.

It doesn't have the typical stem and cap shape, instead has what...

This we kind of call like a shelf-like growth pattern, kind of grows out from the wood.

And as you noticed or you can see, it's growing on wood.

So unlike the other one, which was growing in like the soil and in the leaf litter, this is growing directly from wood.

We think that there's about three million species of fungi that exist in the world.

And of that, maybe 3% have been described.

And some estimates are even higher than that.

Some are estimating closer to eight million species of fungi, meaning that we have a lot of work to do to figure out what they all are and what they're doing in our environment.

- Just tastes like a mushroom.

I don't know.

- Aren't you supposed to be spitting it out now?

- Don't worry, I wouldn't if I knew...

It's not gonna be a highly...

I would not on this walk let you put a highly known toxic one in your mouth, yeah.

- [Forager] I figured, which is why I did it.

- Yeah, so actually a very small minority of mushrooms are dangerous in a life-threatening way.

There's only a handful of species that will actually kill you.

- Patti, is one of the most poisonous mushrooms the Amanita phalloides?

- [Patti] Yes, it is.

- So isn't that interesting that it's called phalloides, and it's the most dangerous?

- [Patti] I actually hadn't really thought about that.

- What does that mean?

- What does it mean?

- Phallus.

- Like phallus, yeah, yeah.

- Cool.

- Cool.

(laughs) - There's actually a whole genus called phallus, and it's also a common name of that group is the the stinkhorn.

One thing that I've noticed is in the last couple of years there's been a very big boom of excitement and burgeoning excitement around mycology, and it's really exciting for me as a mycologist to finally have an audience.

That's been really exciting for me to share knowledge about something that I care a lot about.

(calm music) Thank you all for joining me.

Actually that felt like that really flew by.

Typically people, once they get their first taste, tend to get pretty into it.

So hopefully that is your journey as well.

But it's okay if it's not.

If you can leave with just one little thing whether it's you're gonna get obsessed with mushrooms or not, just consider the fungus I guess is one thing I hope that people will do.

You don't have to study them.

You don't have to even like eating them, but you could just speak lovingly about them, think about them, and know that they care for us, and we can hopefully care for them in return.

But thank you all so much.

(foragers applaud) (calm music continues) - [Beth] Brought you a little something.

- Oh my god.

- I'm Beth.

- Yes, wow, I see.

But like, oh, nice to meet you.

Thank you, this is so cute.

- [Beth] Yeah, I just thought I'd say hi.

- Yeah, nice to meet you in person.

- It's so fun to go to a mycology event that I'm not organizing in this town.

It's really exciting.

- Oh yeah, just to hang out.

Yeah, cool.

- Yeah, I have a button maker.

It's just a, you know.

- I love it.

- Yeah.

- Yeah, thank you.

(calm music continues) Amateur mycologists are really like the backbone, I think, of mycology and are invaluable.

- This is a new design that we just had made recently by a wonderful girl in our club named Kianna Hicks who's a young lady that made that just for us.

We originally had this one made by Alexis in our club, and she taught me to screen print when I wanted to print shirts, but I didn't want to add to the trash created in the world.

So these are all Goodwill shirts that have been repurposed.

This is, I mentioned, our maitake Jerk Off that we have in the fall.

This is the official t-shirt of the maitake Jerk Off.

(laughs) So we sell these at the forays just for fun.

When I first got extremely obsessed with mushrooms, I spent a long time asking myself, why mushrooms, what's happening, why is this more interesting to me than everything else has ever been?

I think there are a lot of small answers that add up to it just being the right thing for some people.

(calm music continues) (camera shutters) - Thanks to phone-based apps like iNaturalist, mushroom identification is safer and more accessible than ever.

But even this modern technology relies on a community of amateurs and professionals working together, and like their muse, the world of mycophiles is full of cooperation, reciprocity, and a hopeful outlook for a future on this planet.

- Any country music fans out there?

(crowd cheers) (relaxed bluegrass music) I love it.

Well, thank you so much for having me.

I'm really excited to be your host for today.

Now, we've got good news.

We had so many walkups, we needed to make a couple more mushrooms 'cause we're gonna consume over 100 pounds of mushrooms here today.

(crowd cheers) - Just a little bit of a gimmick to like kind of stand out a little bit, maybe psych up my opponent a little bit.

Nothing more intimidating than seeing a big guy wrapped in...

Literally, these are real chains by the way.

This is 60 pounds altogether.

So nothing more intimidating I guess than like seeing your competition like so pumped up they're wearing chains.

- How many pounds are you trying to put down today?

- More than two.

- More than two is the goal, and I gotta feeling she's gonna do it.

(crowd cheers) - You guys are gonna get to a point where you're gonna have a mushroom backup if you're not drinking the water.

So we don't wanna be given the Heimlich if we don't have to.

(crowd applauds) - [Host] That's right, Frank.

Professional record is 11 pounds.

Who thinks we're gonna have a new record today?

- [Crowd] Three, two, one.

- [Attendee] Here we go.

- [Host] Eight minutes on the clock.

And we gotta thank our incredible sponsor, Frank, Buona Foods, fourth generation grower/shipper of fresh mushrooms and proud sponsor of the one and only breaded mushroom eating contest.

So, these mushrooms are breaded.

And right out the gate, look at Molly Skyler, Mom Versus Food.

She's almost done with one entire pound of breaded mushrooms.

That is incredible.

How are our amateurs doing right now?

(crowd cheers) (relaxed bluegrass music continues) - Tyler, just get one pound.

- Tyler, get one pound!

- [All] 10, nine, eight, seven, six, five, four, three, two, one.

- [Frank] That's it, hands down, hands down.

(crowd cheers) (relaxed bluegrass music continues) Mushroom Champion is Molly Skyler, Mom Versus Food.

Woo!

(crowd cheers) - [Host] Now if I'm not mistaken, that is a new record here at the Mushroom Festival, 12 pounds.

(crowd cheers) (relaxed bluegrass music continues)