Ologies with Alie Ward - Mycology (MUSHROOMS) with Tom Volk

Episode Date: May 14, 2019

Mushrooms! Psilocybin! Humungous fungus! Black mold! Foraging! The incredibly charming and warm Dr. Tom Volk, world-renown mushroom expert, welcomes Alie into his office to dive deep into the underground world of fungal enthusiasts and touch on pathogens and medicinal therapies. Dr. Volk himself is a heart transplant patient, and shares how his life has been changed since a donor saved it. Also: Alie holds his old heart in her hands.Dr. Tom Volk's awesome fungus websiteThis week's donations were made to DonateLife.net and The Mycological Society of America Sponsor links: KiwiCo.com/ologies, BioliteEnergy.com/Ologies (code: OLOGIES), Takecareof.com (code OLOGIES30), TheGreatCoursesPlus.com/Ologies, Stitchfix.com/OlogiesMore links up at www.alieward.com/ologies/mycologyBecome a patron of Ologies for as little as a buck a month: www.Patreon.com/ologiesOlogiesMerch.com has hats, shirts, pins, totes!Follow twitter.com/ologies or instagram.com/ologiesFollow twitter.com/AlieWard or instagram.com/AlieWardSound editing by Jarrett Sleeper of MindJam Media & Steven Ray MorrisTheme song by Nick ThorburnSupport the show: http://Patreon.com/ologies

Oh hey, it's straight up your weird internet dad. Just sniffing candles in a blissfully empty aisle of a discount home goods store, Alliward. Back with another episode of oligies, one that you have requested, rather you have begged for since the inception of this podcast. I keep hearing dadward, mycology, when, and I keep saying, settle down, I have a plan. You trust me all this time that mycelia have been growing and it's finally time to enjoy my dirty bloom. Then it's going to make more sense later.

But first, okay, a little bit of business and by business, I mean thank yous to all the folks on Patreon supporting this podcast for as little as 25 cents an episode. Thank you so much for making this whole thing possible and thank you to anyone who makes sure that they are subscribed and have rated the podcast special tip of the old hat to those who leave reviews, which I read when I'm sad. And then I pick a fresh one each week to read you, such as this one by M.Postlegator who says, Alli approaches each scientific subject with the eagerness of a toddler meeting kittens. M.Postlegator, I feel seen and also attacked and I like you for it.

Okay, mycology. What is the etymology of mycology? Let's start with it. How did this word burst forth from our brains and out of our mouths? So myco comes from the Greek for fungus and little bonus points for you. The word fungus itself has its roots in the word for spongy. So this mycologist, oh my word, has been on my list for well over a year and he is a major reason why I took a Midwest road trip a few weeks ago.

I wanted to find the best mycologist out there. And I asked Eugenia Bone, author of the book Mycophilia, thank you to talk nerdy's Cara San Maria for that intro. She told me that this mycologist is, quote, a mycologist of the utmost charm. I had to meet him. So on a rainy spring morning, I headed to the University of Wisconsin La Crosse and I stayed in a charming B&B that was apparently a castle built by a lumber baron. Whatever.

I navigated to the campus, up some old elevators, down a linoleum hallway right to his office, which was this thrilling jumble of mushroom knickknacks and maps and hardbound dissertations of his former students. And he himself stood up, he has gauged ears and salt and pepper hair. He streaks with purple or pink. And he stood up to greet me. He was wearing a short sleeve shirt that was screen printed with mushrooms and ferns. Both of his arms are heavily decorated in fungus themed tattoos.

He's the best. And having run a mushroom and fungus webpage nearly 25 years when the internet was just a squirmy baby, this guy has been cool since before you were born. He's been a professor in the Department of Biology at the University of Wisconsin La Crosse since 1996 and teaches general mycology, medical mycology, not to mention, has helmed some classes in food and industrial mycology, also in Latin and Greek for scientists. He seems like the kind of guy I would have gone to concerts with in my goth days and then spent all night talking about cell division in a denny's while our friends smoked cloves

in the parking lot. This is truly the highest compliment I could give a person. Anyway, he let me pepper him with questions for an hour and we cover what the hell is a fungus, foraging under the forest canopy, fairy rings, magic mushrooms, being blindfolded in the woods, the tastiest mushrooms, plus mildew, fungal infections and how having a part of you replaced can change the way you live your life. So prepare for a budding fungus obsession with a mushroom expert of the utmost charm, mycologist Dr. Tom Volk.

I would love to know when did you start getting interested in mushrooms? When did they become captivating for you? So I took a course in mycology in 1978 at Ohio University and I found that you get free food and so that was good and that was pretty different and I'm sort of a different kind of person and so that's appealed to me that it was something unusual that not very many people studied and knew about so when it came time to go to grad school that's what I decided I would study. Did they give you free mushrooms to eat?

You can find them in the woods, they're all free. But there's always the risk of foraging, you have to get really good in order to get free food out of woods. Absolutely. Well there's a few you can learn right away that are pretty easy but then it gets trickier after that because you could get sick or even die if you eat the wrong thing. So knowledge has to be on your side. Absolutely.

That's true for everything right? So on the topic of knowledge, Dr. Volk got his bachelor's in botany from Ohio University and his PhD in botany with a minor in genetics from the University of Wisconsin, La Crosse where he teaches now and he studied among other things the life cycle of the coveted and delicious morel mushroom which are the ones that have like a spongy looking honey comb texture and sell fresh for upwards of 60 bucks a pound. If you're like where, pray tell, can I get me some of that? Hang tight.

There's going to be some foraging secrets in a bit but first let's ask a smart person. Something pretty stupid. And this is such a basic question but what is fungus? What is a fungi? Why does it have its own kingdom? It's neither animal nor plant. What's happening? Yeah, so remember in the olden days when you were in school we probably learned about

the two kingdoms, the animals and the plants and fungi were included with the plants because they didn't move and they had cell walls and all that. But it turns out that fungi are more closely related to animals than plants. So physiologically and genetically they're much more similar to animals than plants but they're really different than animals obviously. So the cell walls of chitin, they share the chitin in common with some animals like the arthropods in sex and sex have chitin exoskeletons and so that chemicals in common. Okay, quick aside.

What is chitin? You ask. It is a word that looks like chitlins but minus one L. Now fungus, hog guts, all things that seem dicey to eat but are a delicacy of sourced and prepared right. Alright so chitin, the thing that makes up the cell walls of your favorite mushrooms and is technically a long chain polymer and a derivative of glucose. But the important aspect is it gives arthropod skeletons and fungi cell walls some rigidity and a little chew if you've ever eaten bugs.

So how varied are fungi? There are an estimated 5.1 million species of fungi. Now that's about 13 times as many species as plants known to science. Okay, but more importantly, how do you pronounce fungi? Because Tom said fungi and I think I said fungi. Okay, so I asked my good friend Wikipedia and they said this is how you pronounce it in the U.S. Okay, definitively.

This way. Fungi. Got it. Okay, oh wait. There's another audio clip or you can pronounce it this way. Fungi. Okay. Oh there's a third way.

Fungi. Okay, or? Fungi. Oh my God, okay, so just say however your mouth wants to say it. Let's get back to kingdoms. But there's, they put them, the fungi in the animal sense group called the episthecanta, which is the rare flagellum which refers to the, some of the fungi, the primitive ones have a flagellum on them and of course human males have the sperm with the flagellum.

Oh, I didn't know that. That's one of the things that linked them together. Okay, so P.S. yeast possess 23% homologous genes to human beings. So you're walking around, you're wearing pants, you're driving a car and you're like 23% kind of the same as a single celled fungus. So I don't know, go dance in public, tell someone you're in love with them. Nothing matters. What even are we?

What is life? That which humbles liberates. So tattoo that on a pillow, embroider it on your butt, I don't care. Can you tell me a little bit about the structure of fungi? I know a lot of people think fungi is just mushrooms, but that's just like essentially looking at their cone hats, right? Right, yeah, so you're looking at the reproductive structures most of the time. But what you don't see most of the time are the hyphae that are underground.

So these are hyphae on my arm. And so you can see, if you were here, which you are, you could see the mycelium, the hyphae growing and that's how they feed. So their reproductive areas are their most public parts. It's kind of like if you wore a full body spandex jumpsuit all the time, but it was crotchless. It's just the fungus way. And so when fungi feed, they can grow through the ground, they can grow through the wood

or whatever they're growing on through your brain by dumping their enzymes to the outside of their body and they digest outside of their body. And then they take in the small molecules and use them in metabolism. And so it's totally different. They digest their food first and ingest it, whereas we ingest our food and then digest it inside our bodies. And that's how they're breaking down substrates. And that's how they can push through the soil or push through the wood.

So the fungus way, barfing on your lunch and absorbing a sandwich through your arm. It's casual. It's effective. And now you mentioned also our brains, just casually. What are some places that a fungi live and also I want to hear about our brains and how they might live there? I teach, of course, in medical mycology as well as mycology. And so there are fungi that will infect your brain.

Which kinds? There's one called Cryptococcus that's famous for that. It's a yeast and it usually gets them an inch. It's the lining of the brain. Not so much in the brain, but there are some that'll get in there as well. Cryptocoxosis, by the by, is what this is called. It's a nasty bugger. So these Cryptococcus yeast form, their name means hidden sphere.

They're found worldwide in soil. But for those with compromised immune systems like folks with HIV, it can be fatal. Cryptococcus accounts for 20 to 25% of the HIV related mortality in Africa. So that's no joke. Now if you've ever lurked around on Goop, chances are you've seen scary articles like there. The insidious yeast infection we all have. What's the latest on Candida yeasts and whether or not they can cause the leaky gut syndrome?

Has that been debunked by medical science? There's a lot of things. If you look on the internet, every single disease that's possible is caused by Candida. This yeast. I think there's something too, some of it, but there still needs to be a lot more research done with that. There is Candida that passes through the digestive system because you have, this is a part of the normal flora of your body.

And so in the, you've got Candida in your mouth as part of the normal flora, keeping the bacteria in check. And then you swallow some of that and it goes through the digestive system and some of it remains intact. It goes through. Okay. So did a little digging on this and systemic Candidaeuses can spread to the blood where it's called Candinemia.

The CDC estimates about 25,000 folks in the US a year will have a Candida overgrowth in their blood, but that the total number of Candida overgrowth may be twice as high if other organs are the site of the primary overgrowth and it doesn't just show up in the blood. So yes, it does happen in the millions per year that we don't know, but leaky gut syndrome isn't recognized as a medical diagnosis. Doctors call it increased intestinal permeability, which is kind of like how if your family calls you scooter, but you're like, don't call me that in front of my boss. So it's pretty much the same diff, tomato, tomato.

Now speaking of food, if a Candida overgrowth diet, which suggests cutting out gluten and dairy and sugar and alcohol makes you feel better, there could be a number of reasons why. And now can you tell me a little bit about where a fungi like to live? I know we think of them in dark, damp places. Fungi are anywhere where it's, where they have enough moisture to grow and enough heat. And so they're, you know, they need, you know, room temperature they like. Well, although there are some that'll grow at low and very low and very high temperatures,

but most of them like this middle ground where they can, they can do well. But you can find fungi in just about any environment where there's enough water to support their growth. Why do you think they like darkness? Well, they don't like darkness. They, that's just where the food is. And so that it doesn't, they don't necessarily need to be dark. They grow inside of things because that's where they can, they can get in and that's

where all the food is. Their main competition is bacteria and bacteria can only grow on the surface. They can't push their way through the wood or wherever they're growing in. And so the fungi can go and escape the bacteria by growing into the wood. I always figured that they must be like photophobic or something, but really it's just their pro food. And so when they're, when they're in the log and they're growing, they just are growing their hyphae, their mycelium to eat the food, but then, you know, at some point they reach

the surface of the log again and the light is their signal to make the mushroom. And so that tells them they're outside of the log and that they, that's okay to make a mushroom. There's also more oxygen outside of there. So that's another signal for them to make the, the mushroom on the outside of the log or whatever. And can you tell me the difference obviously between the mycelium, the hyphae and the mushroom for anyone who's just like, what, there's more to fungi than a mushroom?

Yeah. So there are these hyphae that are underground or in the wood, I'll just talk about wood for now. Yeah. That are in the wood and they, they're, they're not particularly dense, they're growing through the wood. But when they send up the fritting body, there's the fritting body, the mushroom is still composed of hyphae.

And if you, you know, tear one apart and look in the microscope, there's, there's the same kind of hyphae, but they're all stuck together in such a way that they're very strong and they can put this, this thing up above this, the wood to make this mushroom so that they can release their spores and get somewhere else. I want to get out of here. And so they're, the mushroom is made up of hyphae, but they're really dense in that form rather than more spread out as they are in, down in them, in the wood. And then where are these spores getting made?

So the spores are made on the gills of the mushroom, if you have a typical mushroom kind of thing, you can see when you look at the gills that they kind of undulate up and down and, you know, and so this, they have a huge surface area and the spores are born on the external areas of the gills, things called Basidia, these club shaped things. And then the spores drop off of there and they're usually caught in the air and then spread somewhere. Oh, spores, they just, they grow up so fast. And then before you know it, they're just a huge web of underground hyphae forming a

mycelium and barfing onto their lunch before just exposing their reproductive structures to the sun. Where does the time go? So they have to make this enormous number of spores because otherwise the chances of landing on something they can actually use is pretty small if you're just randomly being spread by the wind. And so they produce huge numbers of spores to, so by chance some of them will, will survive. It's just a numbers game.

Just a gamble. Absolutely. And so you have some, you know, you think about the gill mushrooms, but you also have some that have different ways of increasing the surface area with pores underneath or even small teeth or some of them are just kind of wrinkled and some of them are smooth but they can dry out and revive. And so they increase in their surface area over time rather than by space. So side note, if you like variety, may I suggest a mushroom obsession?

There are cup fungi and puff balls and bracket fungi and toadstool shapes and lattice types glow in the dark ones and ones that look like they're bleeding, terrifying human blood and ones named after dicks on and on and on. Now with five million species, there's a whole lot of selection going on. And so they, you know, there's a lot of different kind of strategies that that fungi use. Do you have a favorite mushroom? Favorite for what? Like, I know that's such a stupid question.

What is one, when have you been out lurking around? You're looking for mushrooms and you come across one that's like, ta ta, like angels singing. So if it's food, then I'm talking about chanterelles. Okay. So chanterelles are the, you know, the, I think the most delicious. They're bright orange. You have these folds on the outside and they smell like apricots.

So they're pretty smelling. They're pretty dense and they're usually not contaminated with bugs and stuff. That's just extra protein in there. And when you go to like a farmer's market and you see the mushroom stand, are you like nice, but I can get it myself? Or are you excited to see what their variety is? I'm excited to see that people are promoting mushrooms. So I'm happy that the growers are finding a way to exploit the life cycle of mushrooms

in order to, that people can try different things. Does it help the mushrooms to get picked because then their spores go more places? There's a lot of controversy about that. That's a whole, a whole different thing, but maybe they're, you know, if you're taking them somewhere else, the chance of the spores landing for their way might be good. It might be good for their genetics, but you know, that's, that's a half hour conversation. Yeah. You don't want to have.

And you just shut up. No, you shut up and test you. Okay. I look this up. Boy, howdy. This is a topic of some fierce debate, but most hardcore mushroomers observe some basic fungal decency and when they encounter pairs of mushrooms, they leave one and they leave behind the smallest 50% of the mushrooms they find.

They try to identify mushrooms without picking them first. And as you'll see, if you Google mushroom hunt, each mycologist collects in an adorable little picnic basket, not just because it's cute as hell and it looks like an outtake from a period piece set in the English countryside, but because the baskets allow for the spores to catch on the wind and go out and make more fungus babies. So step one, start basket shopping. Step two, send out a press release, letting everyone know how goddamn adorable you have just become.

Okay. And then what's next? What would you, how would you advise people if they are interested in maybe starting to forage or starting to catalog mushrooms or also want to make sure they don't eat the wrong ones? Yeah. The best way to learn is to have friends who will help you or if you don't have any friends, you can make friends at any of, I think there's 120 mushroom clubs in North

America. Oh. And so you can join one of those and they go out on forays, which are little mushroom hunts. Okay. So PS, a foray is different than a forage. A foray is when you're looking at all the ding, ding mushrooms, but a forage is when you're out specifically looking for edible yum-yums.

So ta-da, we just learned that together. And you can learn a lot from people in the woods, you know, they say, oh, look, this is where you look for this one and there's a more there and you look, there's an elm tree right there. So that's where you need to look and, and, you know, they can, you know, and everything is better in 3D. And so if you're doing this with people and, you know, go to these big mushroom foray, they, they go out and find mushrooms and then they lay them out on a table and you can look

at them side by side and find which ones, you know, the poisonous and their edible, you know, the things that look alike, you can distinguish between them much more easily if you have them sitting there in 3D and you can touch them and feel them and smell them and everything else. So, you know, there are really, they're wonderful mushroom clubs that are, you know, fantastic. Have you met some of your favorite friends, mushroom hunters? Absolutely. You have?

Yeah. What's a vibe like on a mushroom hunt? There's a lot of different kind of vibes on a mushroom hunt depending on whether, how competitive people are. So sometimes they're on a, morell hunts are really different because that's really competitive. But other times, you know, people are, you know, all I found this, come and look at it or, I'm on a morell hunt, they found this and don't tell anybody. Oh.

Because will they come back and look for more later? They might. Yeah. And then what's up with, with pigs and dogs finding truffles? So, so you can, you can train a dog to find anything, so, but the pigs are trained to it because it smells like a pig pheromone. Oh, pheromone. And so they immediately try and find that.

Do they eat them when they find it? They can, yeah. Yeah. Have you ever been truffle hunting? Yes. But not with dogger pigs. I would like to do that. How do you do it without a dog or a pig?

You look for where the squirrels have been digging and the squirrels are, you know, the squirrels are digging them up. They eat them and then they poop the spores out somewhere. So that's their method of dispersal. Oh. It seems like in, in the knowledge of mushrooms, you also have to have a good knowledge of soil systems and animals and trees and substrates. Is that true?

Yes. And so if you know, you know, in order to really understand fungi, you know, it's on the whole environment around them. And so as a mycologist, you know, I have to know about plants and in order to learn about plants, you have to, you know, they have animals and then all the other stuff in the, in the soil. So, you know, I've, I've been studying fungi since my class in 1978 and only in the last couple of years do I think I have an understanding of what goes on under the soil, but I don't

know a will enough to tell anybody. Yeah. So that's what I'm working on is being able to, to explain or have a diagram or have something, a diorama that explains what I think is going on under the soil. It's really complicated. Do you ever dream about fungi? Oh, always. You do?

What kind of, what kind of mushroom dreams do you have? Usually finding some big load. They say when you go to mushroom hell, they show you, they replay your life and they show you all the mushrooms you missed, but just if you had gone 10 feet further on this trail, you would have seen this. Or if you had turned left here instead of right, you would have seen this. Do you have a favorite mushroom in pop culture? Do you ever see someone you're like, that is not what that species look like?

Well, the most common one, of course, is the, the red mushroom with the white tops on it. So that's ammonite and muscaria. And that shows up in all of the artsy fartsy kind of depictions of mushrooms with the elves dancing around, which is kind of funny because it's a hallucinogenic mushroom. Oh, is it? They have the elves in dancing around and these mushrooms are red with white trim and so is Santa and there's reindeer flying and there's elves dancing around and things like that.

So when the reindeer do, actually do eat these mushrooms to hallucinate. Do they really? What happens when a reindeer is shrooming? I don't know how you tell for sure, but, but they, but they do, they guard their, their little cache of mushrooms under the, under the snow. Oh my God. Oh boy. Okay.

So without falling down a real Alice in Wonderland mushroom crevasse, I'm going to briefly relay that this is just a widely circulated nodoi. I had no idea. So the Sami indigenous people of northern, northern Scandinavian regions are like, yeah dudes, guy from the North Pole, he's being pulled by a sleigh of reindeer. We do that. It comes to your house in winter, tripping balls on red and white mushrooms, red and white.

And then gives you the gift of advice from another dimension. Duh. And the reindeer also tore up on shrooms are like, check me out, man, I'm flying. I'm a reindeer. I'm flying in the air. Oh no. Shit man. Look, even the BBC is reported on this.

In autumn, reindeer seek out the mushrooms, even under an early fall of snow. No one knows whether the reindeer are affected. But in the past, Sami shamans took fly agaric in their visionary rituals. They even drank urine from reindeer believed to be under the influence. Red nose, red toadstool mushroom, and I'm starting to like this story more than the age old one about indentured elves and leaving a frosty cola out for your winter sugar daddy. How long have humans been aware of the hallucinogenic properties of mushrooms? Probably for millennia.

They've been used in shamanistic rituals in Siberia for many years and different mushrooms in Central South America for millennia probably. And where are we at in terms of psilocybin trials and therapies for humans? Yeah. So there's actually quite a bit of research being done now on psilocybin, psilocybe mushrooms that very prestigious places such as Johns Hopkins and such. So they're looking at especially treatment for kind of end-of-life psychological kinds of treatments using to treat PTSD symptoms of PTSD and obsessive compulsive disorder

OCD and cluster headaches. So there's really a lot of research that's being done in terms of that hallucinogenic that the psilocybe or psilocybe, however you want to say it is a much more mild hallucinogen than the M&N muscaria that the reindeer eat. And so usually you have to have someone to lead you through this kind of psychological journey as the, you know, and physiologically this thing is making neurons fire in your brain and so that's making connections and reconnections that were lost or you never had.

Really? So is that how it might have a lasting impact after the actual experience? And it seems to be there's some evidence that one large dose of psilocybin can have an effect for many years after that. Wow. Okay. So quick aside, this is a whole other puffball of wax, but quickly, there have been trials on psilocybin's effect on anxiety, on depression, on OCD, anorexia, and end-of-life existential

depression and anxiety. So what happens very, very simply is that psilocybin converts to psilocin, which has a chemical structure similar to the neurotransmitter serotonin. So it binds to those receptor sites in your noggin. But why do so many mushrooms, over 200 species, make psilocybin? So recently, some evolutionary fungal geneticists at Ohio State University, what's up Jason Slott, came up with a theory that when sprouting from dung, there are a lot of insects that want to munch a mushroom.

So the shrooms evolved to have mind-altering effects, which might reduce the appetites of the bugs that want to eat them. So also, if you listened to last week's Bufology episode, which completely coincidentally included some info on smoking toad poison, the basic premise is for an organism to evolve a defense that essentially communicates, can you not? Thanks. Is it our body maybe detecting something like a poison and reacting to it, or is it happening? I love it.

It's really a poison. It's an analog to chemicals that we already make, and so it's doing the same thing as those chemicals, but in a slightly different way and in larger amounts. And then I know that it's legal in some places, not legal in others. The United States is not legal anywhere, but it's on the ballot, and I think Denver would be the first to have it on the ballot, and I heard something about California, and I heard something about somewhere in Iowa as proposed, so you know. That's surprising.

I would think Washington would be that third state, like California. It's probably coming, yeah. Okay, so side note, in the two weeks since recording this episode, Denver did indeed decriminalize it. Laws are a little sticky. So Vietnam, Samoa, the Netherlands, Jamaica, Brazil, and British Virgin Islands are like, go for it. It's legal here.

Austria is like, you can grow it, but I guess not for drugs. I don't know. Everyone just chill out, have some schnitzel, yodel it up. It's cool. Also, in some states, because the spores don't have any psychoactive ingredients, you can own them, but just not to grow them for drug purposes. Just like barfing your way through a substrate of manure, it's all a little dim and murky. It certainly is, like cannabis, it's the same idea.

It doesn't belong in schedule one. There are medicinal uses for it that should be explored. If you have someone who comes to you asking you about that, is it something that you try not to give them advice on or give them advice on? I give people advice. I think it's not legal, but I'm not opposed to it. I always hear people being afraid of having some sort of bad trip. Is that just if they've taken too much?

You can have a bad day if you're not taking anything. So pissed. But that's one of the reasons why there's usually someone to lead you through this process is the ideal way to do it. That's in Central America. There were shaman-type people who would lead you through these rituals to speak to your dead relatives or help you to accept something that happened to you. Given its technical U.S. illegality in everywhere, but I guess Denver, Tom and I didn't talk

too much on the record on this. I myself have never tripped on shrooms, partly because I had a boyfriend who had a super bad trip in college, which he referred to for years as the incident, like capital T, capital I. But I'm super curious about its future potential in mental health fields. So there'll be more on this topic in a later episode. There are some top-notch docs in LA doing trials on MDMA and psilocybin. I just have to figure out if that would be psychopharmacology, myco-psychopharmacology,

anyway, to be continued. But outside of a lab, Tom says common shroom species are pretty chill to cultivate. It's actually one of the easiest ones to grow. My old professor used to grow it in grad school, and he stopped growing after a while. He'd just use it for an example, and he had really good spores on it, but it kept getting stolen, so he stopped growing it. He's like, well, if you need it, I guess you need it. And now what is the difference between molds and slime molds?

I understand that they're very different. And mildew, what's the difference between mold and mildew, actually? Oh, man, that was so many questions. Yeah, so mold and mildew are basically the same thing. They usually use mildew or something that looks wetter, but they're all just fungi. And usually, they're fungi that are reproducing asexually, so with mitosis, if your listeners know that. And so they are reproducing without having sex, and so they can produce enormous numbers

of spores. It's really cheap, and so they can grow on just about anything and produce tons of spores, almost literally. And so these molds are pretty common. You're breathing in and out right now, whoever is listening is breathing in and out. And so most of the time, they come back out, sometimes they stick in your body, and if something's wrong with your immune system, you can have problems with fungal infections in your body.

Slime molds are a totally different thing. They're not related at all. They're related to the amoeba. And so they climb around, and they have these, essentially a giant amoeba, can be a meter more across and climb around and engulf their food and eat it in a different way. But they're still a fungi? No, no. They're not at all.

We threw them out. You did. You're right. Oh, was there a ceremony? There was not a ceremony, but there should have been. At what point did you realize, like, you're not even a malt? Yeah, and we always knew that they were really different. But when people started talking about the five kingdoms, and the slime molds were clearly

not fungi, and just by, as an aside, in my organismal biology class, we talk about 25 kingdoms now. 25 kingdoms? Yeah. Really? At least. How is there a process for getting those validated? Well, that's what molecular biology has done.

DNA sequencing has allowed us to be confident about replacements of fungi and other organisms into different groups. Okay, so quick check. And right now, it looks like there are two super kingdoms, seven kingdoms, 11 sub kingdoms, eight infra kingdoms, and six superfila. So please don't quote me on that in case it's changed. And please don't ask me to make up a more detailed mnemonic for that King Philip came over for group sex, because that just sounds messy.

It sounds confusing. Also, what is the fungus evolutionary backstory? Yeah, so the fungi and animals shared a common ancestor a very long time ago, probably in the ocean, and the fungi went one way and the animals went the other way. And so the fungi probably diversified before the animals did. And can Haifi, can a big web of Mycelium connect, can it talk to each other? What is happening communication wise? Yeah, so there have been reports now, and we always suspected that the fungi underground

are in communication with one another, and not quite in the same way that we do it, but they have chemicals that transfer back and forth between them. And so many of these fungi are forming an association with the roots of trees and other plants in the soil. And so the trees are giving their sugars to the fungus while the fungus is picking up more water and minerals for the tree to use. And so there's evidence now that these mycorrhizae, as they're called, are shared between different plants, usually the same species, but not necessarily.

And there are signals going back and forth between them, these chemical signals and food being traced. Especially with a large forest where you have this mother tree that's very big and maybe shading all of her offspring, she's actually feeding some of them through her mycorrhizae. And so when the mother tree eventually dies, the offspring are there to take her place. Imagine a baby growing out of your corpse foot and then just try to be casual about that. You can't.

Fungus will out freak you every time. And then how do they figure out which is the same organism? So that's a different story. So I mean, with animals, it's very clear what an organism is because it's something that gets up and goes somewhere else. With fungi, what is an organism most of it is underground, we can't see it. And so it turns out that some of these underground fungi are very large. Mind afraid of the humongous fungus.

No. The humongous fungus, goodness. This was maybe, it's been 20 years now since 19, I don't remember exactly when, but a 37-acre honey mushroom was found underground in the upper peninsula of Michigan. Oh my God. And then everybody else started looking for big ones and there's a 1500-acre one in Washington and a 2500-acre one in Oregon. Oh my God.

And so they're quite large organisms. I can't even, how much weight do you think that is? There's, that's been published, I don't remember the exact numbers, but it's thousands of tons. Oh my Lord. Are these big humongous fungus, are those the same species or are these totally different species of fungi? All of the three that I just talked about are all the same genus, they're different species

of the same fungus. But when all that happened, there was an argument about what is an organism and people started talking about aspen grows. So aspen grows, the trees are just clones of one another, you start with one tree and it suckers from the roots and you get another tree coming up from the roots next to it. And so you can get these 10,000 stems that are above ground, but they all share the same exact root system. I had no idea.

And so there's something called the pando grove that's supposed to be the world's largest organism. Oh my God. I had no idea about aspen trees. That's wild. I had no clue. You can see, you can pick out which, which are this, the same clones, they change color in the fall at the same time, they all leaf out at the same time because they're all the

same individual. Oh, that's bananas. And what do you think that? Bananas are clonal too. Oh yeah, that's right. The cavendish, right? Bananas are going to change in the next 10 years because they're always, they're all susceptible to this fungus that's been introduced.

So we'll see what happens. And they're all clones. So they're all susceptible to the same fungus. And how do you feel when you hear about a fungus, say, threatening a population like the white, you know, a white nose fungus or these banana fungi? Are you like, go fungus, go? Or are you like, why are you doing that fungus? There's so many other things to eat.

Yeah. And it's hard to root for the fungus when you're talking about food to feed a lot of people, but you know, it's interesting, you know, and you mentioned the bat white nose syndrome. So that's certainly something to worry about. That fungus grows optimally at four degrees centigrade, which is, you know, not around 40 Fahrenheit. And so, you know, that's the reason it's growing in the hibernating, on the hibernating bats

and making them wake up early and then there's no food and then they die. And so are we seeing different kind of fungus blights as climate changes or as population gets more dense, or is that just part of the cycle? You're going to have a blight when you have a blight. Yeah. There's predictions that climate change will cause more infections because things will be able to sort of, things are now limited by a low temperature that they can't survive at.

And if that low temperature is different, they may be able to survive the winter at these other temperatures. Tom says that most of the fungal blights are invasive species. So they were in control in their home country because exposed organisms likely had evolved some defense or resistance, but they kind of pop up when you're unprepared. They're like in-laws coming over, or Ashton Kusher popping out from behind a ficus on punked. So that's why you hit the broccoli police at the border, you know, so we don't bring

in these pathogens. The broccoli police? Yeah. I've never heard them call that. Is it hard to kill a fungus and why? It is hard to kill fungi because they're so big and they're so diverse in what they do. In terms of a fungal infection of humans, it's hard to kill the fungi because we're so close related.

And so there's very few targets to kill the fungus without killing us. Oh my God. And so, and then killing things that are on crops or just it's a matter of size, you know, massive amounts of spores and their spores are resistant and, you know, they thought they were going to get killing off the black samarist of wheat and they found out that the spores were actually migrating on the winds to Mexico for the winter and then coming back. Oh my God, that's quite a journey.

Yeah. How do they even do that? It's just, it's just the way the wind goes. Tom noted that grad students in his lab can work on whatever they like, so long as it's fungal and it's something he's interested in. And he's had students work on medical mycology, on finding new species, ecology. I had one student did a hardcore nuclear physics on fungi, so, you know, I've learned a lot from my students.

So I don't really have a specialty, you know, worked on wood decay fungi for a long time. I know a lot of different things about a lot of stuff, I guess. I know my, I just caught a VHS tape that says counseling patients with vaginal yeast infection. You're like, oh, that's another one among, among all the these things up there. That's what you picked out in there? Yeah, I just happened to see it and I was like, oh, well, you know, I don't, I'm sure there's at least half of our listeners have been familiar with that. Well, they say that three out of every four women will get a yeast infection sometime

during her life. Oh, sure. That's a very high number. And I'm no doctor, but I estimate that one out of every four persons with a vagina has lied about never having a yeast infection. But okay. There's a lot of research and money, you know, doctor bills and everything else based on all that.

And, you know, it's, it's hard. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it is crazy to think that they're so close to us that it's hard to kill them. I never even thought about that. Systemic antifungals can do quite a number on your liver and, yeah. And so then it's because they're, you know, they're targeting the, this substance called ergosterol in the membranes, which replaces cholesterol.

And so ergosterone cholesterol very close. You have to target the ergosterol in the fungi without affecting the cholesterol in the humans. There are a lot of folk remedies that probably work, but I think it's pretty variable. I guess is it, um, the, these chitinous membranes, though, they're, they're pretty tough. They're the same thing with arthropods use, right? For as an excellent and so on. Yeah. Yeah.

So is that, um, is that their main source of protection then? So that is the physical protection, yes. But most fungi also produce chemicals to deter their, their competitors. And so some of these are useful to us like penicillin. So that's trying to kill off the bacteria in the surrounding environment. And so as someone who has all of this backdoor knowledge about fungi, has it made you live your life any differently? So yes.

And the reason is that 13 years ago I had a heart transplant. I know. And so, and actually my heart is in that recycled thing right there. Is it really? If you wanted to look at it, you could. Of course I do. Can I look at it now or should I look at it later? Oh my gosh.

It's in here. I knew your heart was in here. Oh my goodness. So it's in, my friends made a heart cozy for it. Oh my gosh. I'm going to pick it up. Yeah, please. Um, I mean, I've read about it and I've seen pictures.

Oh, how beautiful. So that's all made with wool that's dyed with mushrooms and then felted. So right now I was holding something about the size of a Kleenex cozy, it's this woolly box that's kind of like a golden yellow with these felted mushrooms and mycelia crafted almost woven into the surface. And inside of it is a clear Tupperware and inside the Tupperware is a Ziploc bag. Inside the Ziploc bag is another Ziploc bag and inside of that is Tom Volk's heart. Kind of blanched looking, drained of blood and dissected into thick slices.

It's bathed in about a cup of liquid preservative. The woolen box keeps it all contained. So my dear friends in Seattle made that for me. May 22nd, 2006. That's the date of my transplant. Yeah. So it's going to be 13 years pretty soon here. Oh my gosh.

Now that's in a Tupperware. It's been dissected. So you can take it out and hold it if you want. Oh my gosh. Oh, it's your heart. Wow. Yeah, I'm holding my heart in your hands. Oh my goodness.

Sometimes I wear it on my sleeve. Oh my gosh. This must be so surreal for you. Yeah. I'm kind of used to it now after all these years, but yeah. Wow. What was it like the first time you saw this on the outside of your body? Yeah.

So I was in the doctor's office and I asked to see it. And so they brought it to me and I cried of course because it's just really weird. Yes. Did you have to petition to keep it? I asked him for it after about three months and they said they were still studying it and then about a year later I asked for it and they said I could have it. Wow. I knew I had this, you know, I'm a biology professor so I would find use for it.

Tom of course has to be really careful because his immune system is compromised. And he went through so much before the transplant. He had Hodgkin's disease, cancer of the lymph nodes, and the radiation from that therapy damaged his heart. And then he got flesh eating bacteria in his foot and his pacemaker was shocking him every 90 seconds at some point. He says he was the most interesting case at the Mayo Clinic's ICU, which is not a good thing. But after the transplant, except for the gash in his chest, he says he felt immediately better.

Oh my gosh. And now how are obviously you're doing well post-transplant? Yeah. Because of the transplant I'm on anti-rejection drugs so it suppresses my immune system so I have to be more careful about what kind of fungi I encounter. And so we have to be really careful and I teach medical mycology because we're working on actual pathogens and so I have to be careful about that and I have to be careful about everything.

Yeah. Who touched this before me and where they clean. Right. I imagine, oh and I see that you have hand sanitizer, which is very smart. So to my left was this hefty pump top bottle of Purell. I put his heart back in its cozy. Tom hasn't found out who his donor was but he wrote a letter to the family thanking them for the gift, telling them all the places he's lectured, the 1500 students that have learned

from him since the transplant, the dozens of master's theses and PhD students he's been able to supervise all because he got that new heart. But I put his original one back in its cozy little cozy where it remained on my lap for the rest of our chat. It's so nice to meet you. I've heard so much about you and when you are looking at medical mycology, what are some of the things that you're looking at the most, the therapeutics or the antifungals? So we look at everything.

So we're looking mostly at the fungi that infect people. So it's not medicinal mycology, which we're getting drugs from fungi, but we're looking medical mycology, which is fungi that infect people mostly. And so we look at everything from you've started on the outside of the body, there's things that are really superficial, then you go into the dermatophytes that are in the cutaneous layer and then there's some that are below that have to be inoculated by a trauma and then some that are inhaled in the lungs and go further than that. This was going to be an aside describing some of the Narnar fungal infections you can get

from like inner ear sludge to jock probes to subtonal goblins to the fungal lung ball that is valley fever. My friend Tegan had part of her lung removed because of it, but things started getting a little too real when the words ice cream scoop appeared in a paragraph about excising infected flesh. I was like, okay, I'm good. We're good here. I did get a rash on my face when I was living in a house with black mold, but do you have

people who ask about black mold in the walls or under the carpet, is that a problem? So there are a lot of studies trying to figure out this, the fungus you're talking about is the black mold stachy botteries. And so the stachy botteries is found kind of rarely, usually it's a black mold, it's cladosporium or something else. But there are people trying to prove that stachy botteries causes these things and there's been a distinct lack of proof of it so far. There are known mycotoxins on the spores that could be inhaled and if you inhale them in

large amounts, hypothetically there could be something that happens. So it was an interesting time so I had to spend a couple of months in Rochester, Minnesota where the Mayo Clinic is and get used to that. Psychologically when you look back on it now, how has it changed the way that you maybe look at life or look at the things that you want to do? So psychologically I had trouble adjusting because I know somebody had died and I had their heart inside of me so that's survivor guilt. But also there was changes also in the way I thought about things, I don't let the little

stuff bother me anymore and it turns out everything's little stuff. And so you just go with what you got and you just do what you have to do. He did a TED talk called A Change of Heart about his experience and he shared a thought that brought me to tears. When my mother grew up during the depression and whenever we got some new dishes or new clothes or new furniture or something, she would say save it for good and put it off in a closet somewhere or put a pulse to put plastic over the couch or things like that. We were saving it for some good.

It turns out that every day is good. Every day is good. Good China now. I sit on the good furniture where the clothes I want to. Every day is good and there's no reason to save it for a good day. Use it now while you can. So everything, I have a very different attitude. I just turned 60 and so when some people had this crisis I said I made it, I made it.

Because there was a time I didn't think I was going to make it to 50 so the birthdays are a bonus instead of something to dread I guess. We have a heart birthday every year so the people in my department don't have a little party for me so that's kind of cool. Is there a heart-shaped cake on May 22nd? Usually. Do you get mushroom-shaped cakes the other times of the year? Sometimes.

I got mushroom-shaped cakes. Does it change the way that you maybe interact with your students or how you maybe guide students into working on things they want to work on? Yeah, I think I'm better with students now than I was before. I'm friendlier, I'm not as uptight as I was. And so things are, I've talked to anybody about anything. I have to say I was running 15 minutes late and you were like, okay, no problem. Yeah, whatever, that's a little thing.

Every day is good in some way. So instead of saving all your stupid questions, ask them now. Patrons get to submit questions beforehand so we're about to ask them after a quick few words from some sponsors of the show. But before the sponsors, because of the sponsors, each episode we get to make a donation to a cause of theologist choosing and Tom is a big supporter of DonateLife.net. DonateLife America is a non-profit organization dedicated to increasing awareness for the need for organs and tissue donation.

They want to help develop a culture where donation is embraced as a fundamental human responsibility. There's 114,000 people in the US waiting for a donation of some kind. So to find out more about making your wishes known, you can visit DonateLife.net. And an additional donation was also made to the Mycological Society of America, msafungi.org. And thank you to the following sponsors who I like so much for making those donations possible. Okay, back to your questions.

Can I ask you some questions from listeners? Sure. Is that okay? Yeah. They know that I'm meeting you specifically, of course, because I've been telling them before ever. Zoe Bagger wants to know, I've not asked this question here before and this subject has wreaked some havoc on our home recently.

I would be very grateful if this was asked to the mycologist. Why do psilocybin mushrooms react to black light? Do psilocybin mushrooms react to black light? There are actually a lot of fun to have that react to black light. So you see my little poster, there's a black light poster, which is a homage to that. But there are people who bring black lights to mushroom forays and you find all the mushrooms laid out and you turn the lights out and you find out which ones glow, which colors. So that's a consequence of having different kinds of pigments that happen to glow under

UV light. Oh. And so they're just different. It's just, so far as we know, it's just happenstance that happens. There may not be any value to it, to the fungus, to do that, but it just happens. There are some fungi that glow in the dark without an UV light. Which ones? So there's one called the jack-o'-lantern mushroom that's actually bright orange and

glows in the dark. Okay. Quick aside, I look these up and they're bananas. They're this beautiful, soft golden rot color. They look a little bit like chanterelles, however, they're poisonous. Please don't eat them. But at night they glow this acid alien green. So orange and glowing at night, hence jack-o'-lantern.

Spooky. Cute. I approve of this branding. Also, I'm going to take a moment to read off some other glorious names of mushrooms because, frankly, you deserve to hear them. Okay. Ready for this? There's the pear-shaped wolf fart puffball.

There's witch butter, butt rot fungi, the bearded hedgehog mushroom, octopus stinkhorn, bearded tooth mushroom, the devil's cigar, the bleeding tooth fungus. Hair-sedge smut, destroying angel, powdery piggyback, barometer earth star, the gassy webcap, dewdrop dapperling, the humpback, the pretender, the drumstick truffle club, bug, Sputnik, cinnamon jelly baby, pink disco, lemon disco, midnight disco, hairy nuts disco, weeping tooth crust, King Alfred's cakes, hotlips, pancake crust, dead mall's fingers, scurvy twiglet, plums, and custard. Literally, any one of those mushrooms could be playing Coachella next year.

Do my colleges have just a hell of a time naming these mushrooms? I think they're good at naming mushrooms. There's challenges to doing that. We use all Latin as the best way to do it because there are no standard common names for mushrooms like there are for birds. There's only 7,000, 9,000 birds in the whole world and there's probably, in this room right here that we're sitting in, this little room probably has 500 species of fungi in it.

I think there's probably 10, there's probably more like 1.5 million species of fungi. 1.5 million species, oh my God. So the things that glow or that are in DV are, I think it's just coincidence. And brown rice wants to know. I like brown rice. Perhaps they're a family of very healthy eaters. How much decomposition are they responsible for and what would happen if they suddenly disappeared?

No. That's a good question. I talked about that in my class and I tell them if there were no fungi we would be knee-deep in everything or probably over our heads in wood and in feces. Oh God, no. So the fungi and the bacteria are at the degraders in the environment and they break everything down so that other organisms can use that material again. Yeah.

So a ton of people asked about psilocybin, which again, I'm not a doctor and I can offer no advice on if anyone should seek it out. I'm just relaying questions here. So Stephen Hoffman, Michael Novak, Lacey Gilbert, Zoe Jane, Diana Zhu, we're all like what is up with them? And Jerry Davis specifically asked, which native ones are the most magic and easiest to find? Asking for a friend.

Winky face. Asking for a friend. It depends on what part of the country you're in. So in the South there's different ones than there are in the Northwest. Northeast and Midwest are not very resplendent in magical mushrooms in the wild. They actually turn out to be really easy to grow, as I said, but they're in the wild, they're special places where they're showing up, so I don't know where he's from. He's got to join a mushroom club.

He has to join a mushroom club. So some of the mushroom clubs are kind of frown upon the psychedelic things, but I think people are coming around as we're showing that there is actual medicinal value to them. Sometimes they call them nutraceuticals, because there are many fungi that are eaten for their healthy properties, so especially in East Asia. So they've been using nutraceuticals, they've been using mushrooms as medicine for thousands of years probably. Unlike Western medicine where we want to take a pill and everything's suddenly better,

they eat these mushrooms over a long period of time and that leads to a healthy condition. And is this like cordyceps reishi? Cordyceps reishi, yeah, all those kind of things, shiitake. Okay, so quick aside, cordyceps may be familiar from the Mermicology episode about ants, because it infects insects, brains, and turns them into zombies. Ever played the video game The Last of Us? Yeah, that's real life for some insects, real life. Now shiitake mushrooms are being studied for the possibility of tumor growth inhibition

as well. Now, side note to the side note, if you eat raw shiitake, you might get something called shiitake dermatitis, which looks like raised whiplash marks or claw scratches on your skin. I urge you to Google image search it, because I am positive in times of your village doctor healers were like, yes, I know science, and you've been attacked by a poltergeist. Put a leech on it. Your bill comes out to one goat, buh-bye now. Also, this next question was asked additionally by Emily Hoban and Heather Densmore.

Jared Fransen wants to know, where can I find me somewhere else? The usual answer is out in the woods under some trees. There you go. If you have a good friend, they might take you to your spot, they might blindfold you as they take you there. Does that happen? Yeah, yeah. Oh, my God.

This is so petty, and I love it. Another way to do it is to steal the GPS coordinates after someone posts their pictures online. Nice. And then you know exactly where to find them. I know where it is. Yeah. Is it true that they sprout out more after forest fires? There are certain species somewhere else that come up after forest fires in the West,

yes. Uh-huh. So you would look for, you know, the fires there, and you know, in other places you look at dead-for-dead-own trees, and in the South you might look under tulip poplars or ash. Okay. So in different parts of the country there's different species that have different ecological habitats. So you got to get in also with a tree person.

Yes. Get to know your trees. You have to know your trees, absolutely. Know those trees. Deon Dabolo wants to know, what are your thoughts on Star Trek Discovery's Mycelial Network? Have you any? I haven't seen it, so I don't really know. Okay.

I don't know the answer, but you know, that's based on the, you know, these trees talking to one another and their, you know, avatar. Uh-huh. You know, that's not a bad way to think about these underground things is looking at that movie. Josh Fry wants to know, what's the best resource for someone who wants to start mushrooming at home, growing and harvesting, not tripping, although I'm sure that maybe some could apply. So if someone wanted to start growing their own mushrooms, any advice?

There's plenty of places online that will, you know, kind of guide you to that. There's Facebook pages and chat rooms and all sorts of things to help you to grow. Um, you can buy some books that'll, that'll help you too. So very often these mushroom clubs have cultivation classes and so you can join one of those and very often someone, you know, make your own bags and grow your own oyster mushrooms is a pretty common thing to do it up for it. Dylan Ring wants to know, do mushrooms have seasons the same way that plants do? Yes.

And so they, you know, they're not as obvious because they're, they're just showing their fruiting bodies during certain seasons. So you look for morels in the spring, uh, you look for an art man, my area, you look for shantarels in the summer and look for bull eats in the summer and then you start to get a frost and you get a honey mushrooms and chicken of the woods and hand of the woods and things like that. So yes, they're, they're seasonal fruiters, but they're growing all the time and then they have, and in our area, they go dormant in the winter.

Oh, they do. Yeah. And so they're, they're, you know, they're living inside the log and some sort of suspended animation that is unclear as, as of yet. Are they typically under the frost line when they're, uh, in underground? Um, sometimes, but not always, you know, the, these mycorrhizal ones are usually within the top meter of soil. Okay.

So if my hand wants to know if my dog eats a mushroom, how do I know if it's poisonous or not? What would some symptoms be? Yeah. So they're, you have to know what the mushroom is. And so the same thing if a child is eating mushrooms, I'm on the, uh, call list for Wisconsin Poison Center in Minnesota as well. So, you know, we often get calls from dogs that have eaten something or kids that are

grazing in the yard and you know, the mommy finds something in their hand and is worried about it. Probably it's not anything, but they're, you know, dogs do die from it and, you know, and, and there have been any kid ones that I've know of, uh, but the dogs are out eating the, you know, the stuff and sometimes it's just rotten things. Like I had a dog case where dog ate a rotten mushroom, it would happen to be a, the M.I. to muscaria, the hallucinogenic one, but it was certainly way past what it would have been.

And it probably died from the bacteria that it was eating all this junk. There's actually a really interesting Facebook group where you can post your pictures of that and they'll, um, they'll help you identify a poisoning. That's great. I mean, before that, it's not like you could just send out an APB to the world. Yeah. I mean, the poison center is available for human cases and they usually don't deal with dogs.

Claire Kimbley and Jacqueline Snoke had the same question as Christie, whose syntax was perfection. Christie asked, do you have any mushy book wrecks? Mushy book wrecks. Well, this is the time of the internet. Very catchy. There are some really good, um, mushroom keys and books. There's a, there's been a whole, um, ton of books coming out in the last 10 years that

are really good. So it really depends on what part of the country you're in, which kind of books you do want to get. There's plenty of web pages as well that are just identification pages. They have to start with yours. Yes. Duh. Of course.

His site is linked in the show notes, by the by. Also a group of folks wanted to know this next question, including Michelle Grondin, the Lorax, a.k.a. Forest, Kitty Helverson, Thomas Beckett. Laura Kinney wants to know, I read that there was a mushroom that could break down plastic. Is this true and can we use it to help clean up the sad plastic nightmare that the earth is becoming? The sad plastic nightmare, like that. Um, yes, uh, but it needs a lot of development.

So there are actually in 2006, we published a paper about breaking down phenolic resin plastics. So, um, bowling balls and break linings and things like that. And, um, we showed that they could break down, but they break down into something toxic. And so recently someone else, there've been several of these paper scents that have, uh, looking on different kinds of plastics and different kind of fungi. So I haven't critically evaluated what's going on with those, whether I, um, how far along they are in developing this for actual use.

But they're working on it. Yeah. Yeah. Absolutely. So there's plenty of things to, to work on. Um, Megan Janelle Lushin says, my boyfriend has texture issues and refuses to eat mushrooms. No. He's a vegetarian though.

So I'd really like to get him eating them since they're a great substitution for meat. Which mushrooms have the least mushroomy texture? So you should try some mushrooms called the chicken of the woods and the hen of the woods, which are, have the texture of chicken. Oh, okay. And so if you were to put those in a stir-fry or in a stew, you would probably not know the difference between that and the, and the meat. Um, so those are both very good.

Chicken of the woods, Lady Porus is not available commercially and it's quite figured out how to grow it. Successfully. But the hen of the woods, Grifula, Mytaki, all that's standing for the same thing are available commercially and they're pretty good. Nice. So yes, hen of the woods and chicken of the woods, totally different mushrooms. And I feel for them because they probably get each other's mail all the time.

And other ones are literally like, what? Our mushrooms are a pretty good substitute for, for meat in general. They are. They have, they're pretty high in protein. Uh, they have a very good component of amino acids, better than beans. Oh. They have a lot of B vitamins in them and considering where they grow, they have lots of minerals of course.

So. Right. Do you think that they hurt when we pick them? Yeah. I guess we're really just kind of picking their genies. I mean, we're really just getting their fruiting bodies, right? Genies. Yeah.

So it's kind of like, okay, okay, Will Pliwa asks, should we be looking for new antibiotics in fungi? Absolutely. Okay. Yeah. Uh, one of my, a few of my students have worked on looking for new antifungal and antibiotic drugs on fungi. There was actually a whole group here that was looking for, for those kind of things

in fungi and other things. So, um, yes, we need more antibiotics because of the, you know, over prescription of antibiotics and various other problems that are causing drug resistant bacteria and such. So yes, we need more of that. So get in it. If you just want to go study it, sign up, get on it. Yep. Even though, you know, the drug companies are constantly looking for, for new things,

but you know, getting, making your drug is really expensive. Yeah. Oh, God. Billions, billions of dollars. Billions? Cranolation asks, I love mushrooms and I love fairy circles. What can I do to invite mushrooms to live in my yard? Oh, that's nice.

Um, you can, you know, if there's some particular mushroom you want, you can collect it and then, you know, spread the spores in your yard. And so, you know, there are some fairy ring mushrooms you probably don't want in your yard. There's, you know, fairy ring comes from a, a spore landing somewhere and it grows out in a circle because you have a pretty homogenous environment in your, in your lawn. And so then it just fruits on the edges of that. And then you, the, you know, the middle English people thought that were fairies dancing in and out of it and things like that.

But the most common one that's in the lawns is actually the most common cause of poisoning in North America. And it causes projectile vomiting, projectile diarrhea at the same time, which is not as pleasant as it sounds. So there, you know, this, this chlorophyllum olbiditis it's called is, is a, is toxic. Okay. So that's one of the more common ones that's growing in fairy rings. So maybe not that one.

Maybe not that one, but there are others. There's one called the fairy ring mushroom orasmias, which is edible as common as well. Okay. So obviously one would be the better choice. So green light on the scotch bonnet mushroom, not to be confused with the tongue searing scotch bonnet pepper. Let's all agree also to avoid the other one, which is called a false parasol or simply the vomitor.

Okay. One more question. Bob Ogden wants to know, I'm allergic to mushrooms. I don't know anyone else who is. How common is this? There's a lot of people who are allergic to mushrooms. So some people develop an allergy because they ate too much. Oh.

And so I know, I know at least 10 people who are allergic to morels who ate them for many years and then one year overindulged and now they can't eat them at all. And so, and there are people allergic to, you know, there's people who are allergic to strawberries or coconut or whatever. So it's not surprising. Some people are allergic to some mushrooms. There are some mushrooms that people are allergic to touch. I know several people that that happens with one particular one called the chicken fat

mushroom. Okay. So from what I understand, the chicken fat mushroom is a little slippery, kind of greasy and can have what's been described as an organic flavor, not for everyone, particularly the allergic. But that's, you know, it's an allergy and like everything else. And last two questions I always ask, what is one thing that is very annoying about mushrooms or your job in general?

Annoying. I love my job. Anything that sucks. Some of them are difficult to work with. They don't cooperate and do what we want. But other than that, they're mushrooms have been pretty good to me. Anything as a mycology professor that's annoying? No, not really.

I mean, I mean, you know how I'm a little stuff doesn't bother me. It's not easy to annoy me. There are a lot of different kinds of things. I, you know, I teach general mycology every fall and we, you know, you know, it's fun. We go and collect stuff and I recommend it as a, as a good hobby for anyone to go out and collect mushrooms and make new friends. Yeah. And you're out in nature.

Yeah, I can beat that. You're wearing probably rubber boots. Yeah, something like that. Something like that. And then the last question, of course, I always ask is, what is your favorite thing about mushrooms or your job? I like the people, you know, I like the mushrooms, but the people are really interesting.

There's some really interesting people in mycology. They tend to be smart. They're interested in science. We go to these amateur mushroomers. There's, you know, they're from all walks of life and, you know, they're interested in fungi for all kinds of reasons. So, you know, I think that's one of the most interesting things about it. Well, I hope there'll be a bloom of a new budding mycologist budding.

I get it. How many times are you introduced as a fun guy? Almost never. No one's like, you need to meet Tom Volk. He's a fun guy. Yeah. That's a very common. Okay.

I'm sorry, but it's fine. I pretend to laugh every time. I'm glad I'm good with that. But you are a fun guy, so that only compounds the problem, I think. I suppose. Yeah. Thank you so much for letting me talk mushrooms with you and letting me hold your heart in my lap as I did it.

Yeah, for the last half hour. I know. Thank you so much. I can't wait for this to come out. You're the best. So ask smart people, stupid questions, join a mycological society, make some lifelong fungus friends. You can find Dr.

Tom Volk with an easy Google and his Wisconsin.edu mushroom site will pop up and if Oregon donation is now something you're interested in, that site was donatelife.net. So links to those and to the sponsors are in the show notes. They're also up at alleyward.com slash oligies slash mycology. We are oligies on Twitter and Instagram. So you do follow there. I'm at alleyward with one L on both.

Come say hello. Thanks again to the patrons at patreon.com slash oligies where you can submit questions and support the show for as little as a dollar a month. And you can find other oligites by wearing merch from oligiesmerch.com. You can tag photos on Instagram with hashtag oligiesmerch so I can repost you on Mondays. Thank you, Bonnie Dutch and Shannon Feltes for managing that site. Thank you, Aaron Talbert and Hannah Lipo for being the moderators on the

wonderful oligies podcast Facebook group. Thank you, Jared Sleeper of Mind Jam Media for assistant editing and helping with some research. I stole his Coachella joke and he said it was okay. And to the magical mushroom that is Steven Ray Morris for editing all these clips and drops together, stitching them together each week. Nick Thorburn wrote and performed the theme music. Now, if you listen to the end of each episode, you know, I tell you a secret.

And this week's secret, I have one of those shower doors that you need to squeegee so that it doesn't get spots on it. And I was late to the airport and I took a shorter shower than the amount of time it took me to squeegee the shower door. Well, I spent more time cleaning the shower than myself. But the squeegee works. What can I say? Okay, bye.

That was just a detour, a shortcut, a shortcut to what? Mushrooms. Mushrooms.