Mycology (MUSHROOMS) with Tom Volk

Oh hey, it's straight up your weird Internet dad just sniff and candles in a blissfully empty aisle of a discount home goods store. Alley Woard back with another episode of Ologies, one that you have requested, rather you have begged for. Since the inception of this podcast, I keep hearing Dad ward my cology when and I keep saying, settle down. I have a plan, please trust me all this time that my celia have been growing and it's finally time to enjoy my dirty bloom. That it's gonna

So I took a course in my college in nineteen seventy eight at High University, and I found it you can 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 you eat?

You find them in the woods. They're all free, is it?

But there's always the risk of foraging. You have to get really good in order to get free food out of Italy.

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, Doctor 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 Lacrosse, where he teaches now. And he studied, among other things, the life cycle of the coveted and delicious moral mushroom, which are the ones that have like a spongy looking honeycomb texture and sell fresh for upwards of sixty bucks a pound. If you're like where, pray tell, can I get me some of that hank tied? There's

Yeah? So, and remember in the olden days when you were in scholar we probably learned about the two kingdoms, the animals and the plants, and fungia 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 they and genetically they're much more similar to animals than plants.

Okay, quick aside, what is kitan? 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, all right, So kitan, the thing that makes up the cell walls of your favorite mushrooms and is technically a long chain and a derivative of glucose. But the important aspect is it gives arthropods, skeletons and fungi cell walls some rigidity and a little chew if you've ever eaten books. So

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 Epistola conta, 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. Yeah, with the flagellum. So I think that that's the one of the things that link them together.

Okay, So ps yeast possessed twenty three percent homologous genes to human beings. So you're walking around, you're wearing pants, you're driving a car, and you're like twenty three percent 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, embroidered on your butt, I don't care.

Right, Yeah, So you're looking at the reproductive structures most of the time, that private pots. But what you don't see most of the time are the highee that are underground. So these are highee on my arm, and so you can see if you were on if you were here, which you are, you could see the mycelium the high fee 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, yeah, 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.

Also 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.

Yeah. 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 themon inchies the lining of the brain, not so much in the brain, but there are some of that'll get in there as well.

Cryptocoxosis, by the bye 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. Cryptocoxosis accounts for twenty to twenty five percent of the HIV related mortality in Africa. So that's

Or is that there's a lot of things. If you look on the internet, every single disease that's possible is caused by Canada. Yeah, this yeast so, but I mean I think there's something too some of it, but there still needs to be a lot more research done with that.

Okay, so did a little digging on this, and systemic candidiasis can spread to the blood, where it's called candinmia, and the CDC estimates about twenty five thousand folks in the US a year will have a Canada overgrowth in their blood, but that the total number of Canada 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

Places, puire, anywhere where it's where they have enough moisture to grow and enough heat and so there you know they need, you know, room temperature they like, although there are some that'll growed 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 fungin 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. Say that's just where the food is. Oh and so that they don't necessarily need to be dark. They grow inside of things because that's where 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 in the log and they're growing, they just are growing their their hyphie, their myceelium 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 it's okay to make a mushroom. There's also more oxygen outside of there, so that's another signal for them to make the mushroom on the outside of the log or whatever.

And can you tell me the difference obviously between the mycelium, the hyphie and the mushroom for anyone who's just like what, there's more to fungi than the mushroom.

Yeah, so there are these high fee that are underground or in the wood. I'll just talk about wood for now, 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 freeing body, there's the fretting body. The

I want to get out of here.

And so they're the mushroom is made up of high fee, but they're really dense in that form rather than more spread out as they are down in the 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 they have a huge surface area, and the spores are born on the external areas of the gills, on things called b the citia, these club shape things, and then the spores drop off of their and they're usually kind in the air and spread somewhere.

Spores they just they grow up so fast and then before you know it, they're just a huge web of underground hyphie 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 random leaves of being spread by the wind right. And so they produce huge numbers of spores to by chance some of them will will survive.

This is just a numbers game. It's just a gamble.

And so you have some you know, you think about the guild mushrooms, but you also have some that have different ways of increase in the surface area with pores underneath, or even small teeth, or some of them are just kind of ring gold, and some of them are smooth, but they can dry out and revive, and so they increase in their surface every 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 funge I use.

Do you have a favorite mushroom?

Favorite for what? Well?

I go, 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 it's like dada like angels singing.

If it's so, if it's food, then I'm talking about Chantererell's. Okay, So Chanterrell's are the you know, the 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 sixtra protein.

But and when you go to like a farmer's market, you see the mushroom stand. Are you like nice but I can get them 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 the 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 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 just shut up, You shut up and test you? Okay, I look this up? Boy howdie who? This is a topic of some fierce debate, but most hardcore mushroomers obsorb some basic funkal decency, and when they encounter pairs of mushrooms, they leave one, and they leave behind the smallest fifty

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 and any of I think there's one hundred and twenty mushroom clubs in North America, 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 toda, 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 somewhere el there and you look, there's an elm tree right there, So that's where you need to look. And you know they can, you know, and everything is better than three D. And so if you're doing this with people and you know, go to these mushroom for it. The people go out and find mushrooms and then they'd lay them out on a table and you can look at them side by

Have you met some of your favorite friends mushroom hunt?

Absolutely?

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 the morale hunts are really different because that's really competitive. But other times, you know, people are you know, I found this, come and look at it, or I found this and don't tell anybody.

Because will they come back and look for more later?

They might?

Yeah? And then what's up with with pigs and dogs finding treuffles?

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, and so they immediately try and find that.

Do they eat them when they find it?

They can?

You Yeah, have you ever been trouble hunting?

Yes, but not with dog or 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 put 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 funding and 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 got animals and then all the other stuff in in the soil. So I've been studying fungi since my class in nineteen seventy eight, and only in the last couple of years do I think I have an understanding of what goes

Do you ever dream about fungi?

Always?

You do?

What kind of mushroom dreams do you have?

Usually finding some big load. They say when you go to mushroom hell. They show you every play your life, and they show you all the mushrooms you missed. But just if you've gone ten feet further on this trail, you would have seen this, or if you had turned left here instead of right.

Something is, do you have a favorite mushroom? In pop culture? Do you ever see someone you're like that is not what that species so click?

Well, the most common one, of course, is the red mushroom with the white tops on it, so that's aminie 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. You get the elves in the dancing around and these mushrooms are red with white trim and so asanta, and there's reindeer flying and there's elves dancing around things like that.

Do they really what happens when a reindeer is shrewman?

I don't know how you tell for sure, but they but they do. They guard their their little cache of mushrooms under the under the snow.

Oh my god. Oh okay, So without falling down a real alice in Wonderland, mushroom cravass, I'm gonna briefly relay that this is just a widely circulated no doy. 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 reindeer we do that 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.

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 saw me Shamans took flyergaric in their visionary rituals. They even drank urine from reindeer leave to be under the influence.

Red nose, red toad stool 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. You know, how long have humans been aware of the hollucinogenic properties of mushrooms?

Probably for millennia, you know, Yeah, they've been used in shamanistic rituals in Siberia for many years, and different mushrooms in Central South America for millennium 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 doing being done now on psilocybin psilocyby mushrooms at very prestigious places such as John Sapkins and such. So they're looking at especially treatment for kind of end of life psychological kinds of treatments using to to treat PTSD, symptoms of PTSD and sess of compulsive disorder o c D, and

Really, so, is that how it might have a lasting impact after the actual experience.

It seems to be there are 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 pop fall of wax. But quickly, there have been trials on psilocybin's effect on anxiety, on depression, on OCD arexia, and end of life existential depression and anxiety. So what happens, very very simply is that psilocybin converts to silicin, which has a chemical structure similar to the neurotransmitter serotonin. So it binds to those receptor sites in your knockin. But why do so many mushrooms, over two hundred species make psilocybin.

That's really a poison. It's an analog to you chemicals that we already make. Oh okay, So it's it's doing the same thing as those chemicals, but in a slightly different way and larger amounts.

And then I know that it's It's legal in some places, not legal in others.

In the United States, is not legal anywhere, Yeah, but it's on the ballot in I think Denver will be the first to have it on the ballot. And I heard something about California, and I heard something about somewhere in Iowa's proposed.

So you know, that's surprising. I would think Washington would be that third state like California. 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, yodle

Now there's it certainly is you know, like cannabis. It's the same idea. There's you know it was you know it's not it doesn't belong in Schedule one. You know, it's there's there are medicinal uses for it that are that should be explored.

If you have someone who comes to asking you about that, is that something that you try not to give them advice on or give them advice on.

I give people advice. I mean, I mean, I think it's you know, it's not legal, but I'm not opposed to it.

Yeah, 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, and you know, if you're if you're not taking any things. So, but that's that's one of the reasons why there's usually someone to lead you through this process. Is the ideal way to do it, and that's in the In the in Central America, there were shaman type people who would lead you through these rituals to speak to your dead relatives or you know, or help you to accept something that happened to you.

So given its technical us illegality and 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.

It's one of actually one of the easiest ones to grow. My old professor used to grow it in grad school. Yeah, and you know, he stopped growing after a while. He just used it for an example and had really good spores on it, but it kept getting stolen, so he stopped.

Growing in Oh no, 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, mold, and mildew basically the same thing. They usually use mildew or something that looks wetter, but it's they're all the just fungi. And usually they're fungi that are reproducing asexually, so with mitosis that if your listeners know that, and so they are reproducing without having sex, and so they you know, 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

But they're still a fun guy.

No no, they're not at all threw we threw them out?

You did? Was there a ceremony?

Like, there was not a ceremony about that. You should have been And.

At what point did you realize like you're not even a mold?

Yeah? I mean we always knew that they were really different.

Uh.

But you know in the when when people started talking about the five kingdoms and you know, and and slim w olds are clearly not fungi, and just by as an aside, and my organismal biology class, we talked about twenty five kingdoms.

Now twenty five kingdoms really and at least how is there a process for getting those validated?

Well that's what Maleca biology has done. DNA sequencing has allowed us to be confident about replacements of a fungiant and other organisms into different groups.

Okay, so quick check. And right now it looks like there are two super kingdoms, seven kingdoms, eleven sub kingdoms, eight infra kingdoms, and six super phyla. 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 the 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 iiphi can a big web of my sam 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 these trees are getting the trees are giving their sugars to the fungus, while the fungus is picking

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. See I might have

Oh my god.

And so they're you know, they're quite large organisms.

I can't even how much weight do you think that is?

There's that 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 augus that you know. When all that happened, there was an argument about is what is an organism? And they 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.

I had no idea.

And so there's something called the panda 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.

And you can see you can pick out which which of this we have the same clones. They change color and the fall at the same time. They all leap 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 ten 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 no, like, why are.

You doing that? Fungus? There's so many other things to eat.

Yeah, it's I mean, 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 forty fahrenheit, and so that's the reason it's grown in They 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 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 right 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 loss coming over or Ashton Kusher popping out from behind a ficus unpunked.

So that's why hit the broccoli police at the border, so we don't bring in these pathogens.

The broccoli police, I never heard of them call that. And 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 with humans, It's hard to kill the fungi because we're so closely related, and so there's very few targets to kill the fungus without killing us.

Oh my god.

And so then killing things that are on crops or just it's a matter of size, massive amounts of spores, and they're sports are resistant. And you know, they thought they were get killing off the black sam rest of wheat, and they found out that the sports were actually migrating on the winds to Mexico for the winter and then coming back.

God, that's quite a journey. How do they even do that?

It's just the wind, 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 have one student at Hardcoard nuclear physics on fungi, so you know they I've learned a lot from my students, So I don't really have a specialty. I worked on k fungi for a long time. I know a lot of different things about a lot of stuff, I guess I know.

My eye just caught a VHS tape that says counseling patients with vaginal east infection. You're like, huh, that's another one among all these. Yeah, I just have it, and I was like, oh, well, you know, 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, so oh sure, that's a very high number.

And I'm no doctor, but I estimate that one out of every four persons with ivagina 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 that'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. Yes, I never even thought about that. Systemic anti fungals could do quite a number on your liver and right, yeah, And.

So it's because they're you know, they're targeting the substance called ergosterol and the memories which replaces cholesterol, and so a goostri and cholesterol very close. You have to target the ergosterol and 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 these kiteness membranes though they're pretty tough, they're the same thing with Arthur POD's use right for as an ex scot and so well, yeah, so is that is that their main source of protection then?

So that is a physical protection, yes, But most fungi also produced chemicals to deter 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 is 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 thirteen years ago I had a heart transplant.

I know so.

And actually my heart is in that recycled thing right there?

Is it? Really?

I know if you wanted to look at it, you could, of course I do.

Can I look at it now or shall 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 it made a heart cozy for it.

Oh my gosh, I'm going to pick it up.

Yeah please.

I mean I've read about it, and I've some pictures.

Oh so that's all made with wool that's dyed with mushrooms. Oh my gosh, then felted.

So right now, I was holding something about the size of a Kleenex cozy. It's this wooly box. It's kind of like a golden yellow with these felted mushrooms and my celia 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 to thick slices. It's bathed in about a cup of liquid preservative.

So my dear friends and Seattle made that for me.

May twenty second, two thousand and six.

It's a data my transplant. Yea, so it's gonna be thirteen 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.

Oh my gosh. Oh it's your heart.

Wow. Yeah, you're 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, what was it like the first time you saw this on the outside of your body?

Yeah? So I it 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 that's it's just really weird.

Yes, did you have to petition to keep it?

I asked them for it at that, you know, after about three months, and they said they were still study it. And then about a year later asked for it and they said I could have it. I knew I had this 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 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 ninety seconds. At some point, he says he was the most interesting case at the

Yeah, so because of the of the transplant I have, I'm on antirejection drug, so it suppresses my immune system. So I have to be more careful about what kind of fungi encounter. And so we have to be barely careful. And I teach medical mycology because we're working on pathogens, and so yeah, I had to be careful about that, and I have to be careful about everything. So, yeah, who touched this before me? And were 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 purel. 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 fifteen hundred 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

So we look at everything, so we're looking mostly at the fungi that infect people. So it's not medicinal mycology, which we'll be getting, you know, drugs from fungi. But we're looking at medical mycology, which is fungi that infect people mostly got it, and so we look at everything from you start in the outside of the body. There's

This was going to be in a side describing some of the Narnart fungal infections you can get from like inner ear sludge to jock probs to some tonail goblins to the fungal lung ball that is valley fever. My front tigan had part of her lung removed because of it. Huh. But things started getting a little too when the words ice cream scoop appeared in a paragraph about excizing infected flesh.

So there are a lot of studies trying to figure out this. The fun that you're talking about is a black mold stacky batries, and so the stacky batrice is found kind of rarely. Usually it's a black mold, it's clatysporium or something else. But there are people trying to prove that that stacky batries causes these things, and there's been the distinct lack of proof of it so far.

Psychologically when you when you look back on it now, how maybe how has it changed the way that you maybe look at life or or look at the things that you want to do.

Yeah, so you know, psychologically I had trouble at justin because I know somebody had died and I had their heart inside of me, so that you know, that's some survivor guilty. But also there was changes also in the way I thought about things. I don't let the little stuff bother me anymore. Yeah, and that turns out everything's little stuff. And so you just go with what you what you got, and you, you know, just do what you have to do.

And 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 are saving it for some good. It turns out that every day is good. Every day is good. I use the good china now, I sit on the good furniture, wear the clothes I want to. Every day is good, and there's no reason to save it for

So you know everything that I have a very different attitude I have. You know, I just turned sixty, and so when you know some people have this crisis, I said, I made it. I made it, you know, because there was a time I didn't think I was make it to fifty. So, you know, the birthdays are a bonus and said of something, you know, the dread.

I guess, Yeah, we have.

I have a heart birthday every year or so that the people in my department all have a party for me. So that's kind of cool.

Oh, is there a heart shape cake on me than usually? Do you get mushroom shaped cakes the other times of.

The year sometimes? Yeah, I've had mushroom shaped cakes. Yes.

And uh, does it change the way that you maybe interact with your students or 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 I'm friendly er, I'm not as uptight as I was. Yeah, and so things are. I'd talk to anybody about anything.

I have to say. I was running fifteen minutes late and you're like, okay.

No problem whatever. That's a little bit.

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 the ologists choosing. And Tom is a big supporter of

Sure?

Is that okay? They know that I'm meeting you specifically, of course, because I've been telling them forever. 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 the mycologist. Why do psilocybin mushrooms react to black light? Do psilocybin mushrooms react to black light?

There are actually a lot of funs that react to black light. And so you see my little poster if there's a black light poster, which is a you know, homage to that. But there are people who bring black lights to mushroom forests and you find all the mushrooms laid out, and you turn the lights out and you find out which ones glow which color. So that's a a consequence of having different kinds of pigments that happen to glow under Evie light, and so they're just different.

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 Chantrell's. However, they're poisonous. Please don't eat them. But at night they glow this acid alien green 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.

They're you know, there there's challenges to doing that, and we use you know, we use all Latin is the best way to do it, because there are no standard common names for mushrooms, like theart for birds and there, you know, there's only seven nine thousand birds in the whole world. And there's probably you know, in this room

One five million species, Oh my god.

And so the things that glow are you know that that are on DV or just I think it's just coincidence, huh.

And brown rice wants to know, like brown rice, perhaps they're they're fam of very healthy eaters. How much decomposition are they responsible for? And what would happen if they suddenly disappear?

No, that's a good question. So 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 and feces. Oh god, no. So you know, the fungi and the bacteria are the degraders in the environment, and they break everything down so that other organisms can use that material.

Again, just knee deep in feces. 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 Novac, Lacy Gilbert, Zoe, Jane Diana Jou were 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 her for him, It depends on what part of the country you're in, So you know, in the South there's different ones than there are in the Northwest. Northeast. Mids are not very resplendent in magical mushrooms in the wild. They're actually turned out to be really easy to grow, as I said, but they're in the wild, they're you know, special places where they're showing up. So I don't know where he's from.

So 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 is that, you know, we're showing that there is actual medicinal value to them. Sometimes they call them nutraceuticals because there are many many fungi that are eaten for their healthy properties, so especially in East Asia, so they've been using nutriceuticals. They've been using mushrooms as medicine for thousands of years probably, you know.

And is this like cordyceps, rechi.

Cordobs, rishi, all those kind of things, okay, shittaki.

Okay, so quick aside. Cord Aceps may be familiar from the Mirmorcology 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, Shataki mushrooms are being studied for the possibility of tumor growth inhibition as well. Now, side note to side note, if you eat raw shataki, you might get something called shataki dermatitis, which looks like raised whiplash

The usual answer is out in the woods under some trees. There you go, you know, and if you haven't, if you have a good friend, they might take it to your spot. They might blindfold you as they take you there.

Does that happen?

Yeah?

Yeah, 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.

And then you know exactly where.

They know where it is.

Is it true that they sprout up more after forest fires?

There are certain specieswhere else that come up after forest fires in the west, yes, so maybe so you would look for you know, the fires there and you know in other places you look at dead for dead elm trees and in the south you might look under toolip poplars or ash okay. So in different parts of the country there's different species that are that have different ecological habitats.

So you got to get in also with a tree person, your trees. You have to know your trees, of those trees. Dionne Dabolou wants to know what are your thoughts on Star Trek discoveries my Celial Network, have you any.

I haven't seen it, so I don't really know. I don't know the answered, but you know that's based on the you know, these trees talking to one another and they're you know avatar. You know, that's not a bad way to think about these underground things. Is looking at at that.

Movie Josh for I wants to know what's the best resource for someone who wants to start mushrooming at home growing and harvesting, not dripping, 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 chatrooms and all sorts of things to to help you to grow. 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 for.

It Dylan Ring wants to know do mushrooms have seasons the same way that plants to.

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 merles in the spring, you look for in my aria, you look for chantrelle's in the summer, and look for bull eats in the summer, and then you start to get a frost and you get it honey mushrooms and chicken of the woods and hand of

Are they typically under the frost line when they're in underground.

Sometimes but not always. You know, these microezle ones are usually within the top meters.

Okay, April Mihan wants to know if my dog eats the mushroom, how do I know if it's poisonous or not. What would some symptoms be?

Yeah, so there you have to know what the mushroom is. And so the same thing if the child is eating mushroom. So I'm on the call list for Wisconsin Poison Center 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

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 Kimbly and Jacqueline Snooke had the same question as Christy, whose syntax was perfection. Christy asked, do you have any mushy book wrecks?

Mushy book wrecks? Wow, this is the time of the internet.

Very Caul.

There are some really good mushroom keys on books. There's a There's been a whole ton of books coming out in the last ten 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? And there's plenty of web pages as well that are just identification pages.

They have to start with yours, yes, duh.

Of course.

Of course his site is linked in the show notes by the Bye. Also, a group of folks wanted to know this next question, including Michelle Grondine, the Lorax aka Forest, Kitty Halverson, Thomas Beckett, Laura Kenny wants to know I read that there was a mushroom that could break down plastic. Is this true? And can use it to help clean up the sad plastic nightmare that the Earth is.

Becinding the sad plastic nightmare. Yes, but it needs a lot of development. So there are actually in two thousand and six, we published a paper about breaking down finolch resin plastics, so of bowling balls and break linings and things like that, and we showed that they could break down, but they break down into something toxic. And so recently someone else. There have been several of these papers since that have working on different kinds of plastics and different

This for actual use, but they're working on it.

Yeah, absolutely, so there's plenty of things to work on.

Megan Janelle Lussion says, my boyfriend has texture issues and refuses to eat mushrooms. 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 have the texture of chicken. Oh okay, so if you were put those in a stir fry or in a stew, you would probably not know the difference between that and the meat. So those are both very good. Chicken of the Woods Lady Porous is not available commercially, no one's

Nice. So, yes, Hand of the Woods and Chicken the Woods totally different mushrooms, and I feel for them because they probably get each other's mail all the time. None of the ones are literally like what. Our mushrooms are pretty good substitute for meat in general.

They are. They have they're pretty high in protein, 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 do you think that they hurt when we pick them? I guess we're really just kind of picking their gennies. I mean we're really just getting their fruiting bodies right kind of like Okay, okay, Will Pleia asks, should we be looking for new antibiotics in fungi?

Absolutely? Okay, yeah, and so one of a few of my students have worked on looking for new anti fungal and antibiotic drugs on fungi. There was actually a whole group here that was looking for those kind of things in fungi and other things. So, yes, we need more antibiotics because of the you know, for a 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 anyone wants to go study it, sign up, get on it.

YEA. Even though you know, the drug companies are constantly looking for new things. But you know, getting making any drug is really expensive. Yeah, got as billions of dollars.

Crenilation 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. You can. You know, if there's some particular mushroom you want, you can collect it and then then you know, spread the spores in your yard. And so, you know, there's some fairy ring mushrooms you probably don't want any yard. There's you know, fairy ring comes from a spore landing somewhere and it grows out in a circle because you have a pretty homogeneous environment in your in your lawn, and so then it just fruits on

So maybe not that one.

Maybe not that one, but there are others. There's one called the fairy ring mushroom rasmus, which is edible, the most common as well.

Okay, so obviously one would be the better choice. Yes, 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 vomitter. 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 it.

There's a lot of people are allergic to mushrooms. So some people develop an allergy because they ate too much.

Oh so I know at least ten.

People who are allergic to morales who ate them for many years and then one year overindulged and now they can't eat them at all. And so, and they are people allergic to You know that people are doing anything be allergius strawberries or coconut or whatever, so it's not surprising some people 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 organy flavor. Not for everyone, particularly the allergic.

But that's you know, it's analogy 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, the mushroom's been pretty good to me.

Anything as a micology professor that's annoying.

No, not really, I mean, I mean, you know how I'm The little stuff doesn't bother me, so it's not easy to annoy me. There are a lot of different kinds of things, you know. I teach general micology every fall and we you know, you know, it's fun. We go and collect stuff. And I recommend it as as a good hobby for anyone to go out and collect mushrooms and make new friends.

Yeah, and you're out in nature.

Yeah, who compete 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 my coology. 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 my collogists.

Letting I get it.

How many times are you introduced as a fun guy?

Almost never.

No one's like, you need to meet Tom Bog He's a fun guy.

Yeah, yeah, that's a very common Okay, I'm sorry, Well it's fine. I pretend to laugh every time.

But you are a fun guy, so that only compounds the problem. I think.

I suppose.

Yeah, thank you so much for letting us and letting me hold your heart in my lap as I did.

It 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 doctor Tom Folk with an Easygoogle and his Wisconsin dot du mushroom site will pop up. And if organ donation is now something you're interested in, that site was donatelife dot net, so links to those and the sponsors are in the show notes. They're also

What can I say?

Okay?

For Bride pack Aderman's College Hobbiology Cryptozoology lithology, new technology, meteorology, perahology, ethnology, seriology, selenology.

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