From the Vault: Mushroom Foraging, Part 2

of Mushroom Foraging. We we started going into the woods and we got lost, and uh so we had to we had to say, you know what, this is actually two episodes. Here we are again with part two. All right, let's jump right in. So we already talked about how mushroom hunting appears to be this really popular activity in Russia, and this goes way back and so popular that there are these common media stories about people getting lost in the wilderness because they went into a trance while mushroom

hunting and then they couldn't find their way home. But apparently things are very similar in Poland. It's also a very common activity to go mushroom hunting in Poland. And Uh. The Polish romantic poet Adam mits Kevitch, who lived from eighteen fifty five, wrote famously about mushroom foraging in his epic poem pan Tadash. And so I was looking at this in a few different translations. I think the clearest one, unfortunately doesn't go for the whole poetry and meter of it.

It's a prose translation by George Rapaul Noyus. But I think this will give the best sense of the passage, maybe losing a bit of the music. Are you ready, Robert Okay? So there are these characters who are The basic drama of Pantadash is about this conflict between these clans over some kind of real estate dispute. I've never read the whole thing, but I like the parts I

have read. And and so it's got all these, uh, these fancy ladies and lads going out to hunt for mushrooms in the forest, and they've announced that, you know, whichever lad finds the fanciest mushroom will get to sit next to the prettiest girl in the castle. And it's that kind of thing. Uh. And so it goes into the section on mushrooms, quote of mushrooms, there were plenty. The lads gathered the fair cheeked fox mushrooms, so famous

in the Lithuanian songs as the emblem of maidenhood. For the worms do not eat them, and marvelous to say no insect alights on them. The young ladies hunted for the slender pine lover, which the song calls the kernel of the mushrooms. And that's colonel like the military rank, not like popcorn. I don't know why it wouldn't be the general of mushrooms. But moving on, all were eager

for the orange agaric. This, though of more modest stature and less famous in song, is still the most delicious, whether fresh or salted, whether in autumn or in winter. But the snochal gathered the toadstool flybain. The remainder of the mushroom family, are despised because they are injurious or of poor flavor, But they are not useless. They give food to beasts and shelter to insects, and are an ornament to the groves. On the green cloth of the meadows,

they rise up like lines of table dishes. Here are the leaf mushrooms with their rounded borders, silver, yellow, and red like little glasses filled with various sorts of wine, the coslac like the bulging bottom of an upturned cup, the funnels like slender champagne glasses, the round white, broad flat white ease like china coffee cups filled with milk, and the round puff ball filled with a blackish dust

like a pepper shaker. The names of the others are known only in the language of hay errors or wolves by men. They have not been christened, but they are innumerable. No one deigns to touch the wolf for hair varieties, but whenever a person bends down to them, he straightaway perceives his mistake, grows angry, and breaks the mushroom or kicks it with his foot, in thus defiling the grass. He acts with great indiscretion. I like at the end there he gets a little bit offended on behalf of

the grass. I guess I'm not sure I fully understand the meaning of that last statement, but I wanted to look at a couple of things about this passage. Um. So one is that first, while while Russian and Polish cultures are considered to have a great affinity for mushrooms, making them generally Mico philick in some terminology that will address a little bit later in the episode. Uh, this doesn't,

of course, manifest as a love for all mushrooms unqualified. Instead, it seems to me that the mushroom loving culture actually has a highly discriminated eating I from mushrooms, noticing much more the important and perhaps life saving differences between varieties. So like a mushroom culture doesn't just love mushrooms. It's more like they really love the good ones and really

hate the bad ones. But of course plenty of mushroom hunting and accidental mushroom poisoning happens even in the modern era. In Poland, I was looking at a scientific report compiling cases of mushroom poisoning in Poland from the year's nineteen sixty two to nineteen sixty seven by an author named Eliza Lewandowska, and this was called Mushroom Poisoning in Poland in the years nineteen sixty two to sixty seven. Species

of poisonous fungi. Now there's no surprise at all here that the species representing the most danger was our old friend Amanita feloides or the deathcap mushroom. We we've talked about this already, right, yes, now, this one was responsible for at least four hundred and sixty one cases of poisoning and a hundred and twenty six deaths by this survey. A commonly cited figure that I've seen elsewhere is that death caps today represent more than of fatal mushroom poisonings worldwide.

So so they're the real bad boy in terms of accidental accidental mushroom poisoning. Um. But I was also reading about how the specific way that Amanda filoids kills is deceptive, lee devious. So when somebody eats this mushroom, it's not necessarily what you would picture where you eat it and then you're immediately doubled over in pain and you know, and hallucinating and sweating with a fever and screaming. Instead, when somebody eats the Amanda floids, it doesn't necessarily cause

any immediate pain or discomfort. In fact, people often don't have any symptoms at all for many hours I've read, sometimes maybe six hours later, sometimes even not until like a full day later. And then the cramps and the nausea and the vomiting and the diarrhea. Set in, and I've read that this can make it easy to mistake the poisoning for something else. You might think you've got a stomach bug or whatever because of the length of time between eating the mushroom and the onset of symptoms.

And uh. And at this point, after the symptoms set in, they can sometimes even retreat, they can grow milder if the patient is properly cared for, properly hydrated, and all that. The entire time the amanita toxins are in the background, just massacring cells in the liver and harming the kidneys,

eventually leading to organ failure and eventually to death. And I don't know that there's there's something kind of especially terrifying about that that there's this You can have this false sense that things are getting better and that, oh, I'm actually feeling a little bit better than I was earlier, or maybe I'm not even feeling bad at all, while

the mushroom is actively killing your vital organs. I think it also underlines just the sort of precision that had to take place in figuring out the properties of theirs mushrooms and and other organisms in one's environment, you know, because this is clearly something where you you would have to do a little detective work to figure out it. Yeah, exactly what had caused this awful illness in the individual. Exactly.

But in in second place for poisonings was a species that is also interesting and and requires a similar kind of precision, but with a different difficulty. I don't think we've talked about this one yet. The second place in the Polish survey for for most poisoning and death was

gyrometra esculenta, or the false moral. Mushroom. Uh, that's moral like m O R E L moral mushrooms dot morals you know, doing good h Yeah, And so in this survey, the false moral was responsible for a hundred and sixty four cases of poisoning and ten deaths in this time, in the sixties. Now, the false moral is a very strange and interesting case study in fungal toxicity because, first of all, it looks crazy. It looks like a brain

on a stick, or not even a normal brain. It looks like if you tried to make a raisin out of a brain. Yeah, it kind of looks like what you have, mushroom but ground chuck, you know. Yeah, it's got the little grinder extrusion patterns. Yeah, it does. It looks kind of like it's come out of a machine in a way. I agree, had an extruded kind of appearance to it. But a lot of delicious mushrooms look very strange and very unlike other foods we eat. So

you know, that's fine. Um. But but gyrometra is an interesting case because the toxicity seems to vary a lot. Just one example I was reading in a stat pearls entry by Horowitz, Kong and Horowitz and the author's report quote, most poisonings occur in Eastern Europe, particularly in the conifer forests of Germany, Poland, and Finland. In North America, most exposures occur in Michigan, although I less toxic variety grows west of the Rockies and has been clustered in Idaho

and Western Canada. Exposures occur mostly in the spring, unlike other serious mushroom poisonings such as Amanita filoids, which occur more commonly in the fall. So there's this geographical distribution I've read about how there are different rates of poisoning from the false morale depending on where the mushroom was grown. You know, in in different countries and at different altitudes

and things like that. It seems to vary a lot depending on you know, what local strain you're getting, and possibly due to interactions with you know, with the body of the person who eats it. Another thing I've read is that poisoning is here are much more common when

these mushrooms are eaten raw. Now, there's one thing that poison control authorities often emphasize, which is that you should not use intuitive smell and taste senses to figure out what is poisonous in the mushroom world, because even though our senses of smell and taste are certainly evolved to help us figure out what's good to eat, they are

not an infallible guide. And a great example of this is once again the deathcap mushroom, one of the most dangerous mushrooms to humans and the most deadly one in Poland. During that survey we were just talking about the deathcap mushroom does not taste like poison. It reportedly does not taste bitter, does not taste sour, does not you know, set your mouth on fire with needles going into your tongue. In fact, it is widely said to be absolutely delicious.

There are people who have had these hepatotoxic mushrooms absolutely destroy their liver. But they report that, you know, before the pain and the nausea set in, six hours later, twenty four hours later, when whenever it is while they're eating these mushrooms, they are some of the best tasting mushrooms that they've ever had. They're said to smell sweet like honey and taste absolutely delightful, sauteed and butter. Don't do this, don't It's not worth it. It will kill you.

Do not take the death cap challenge something like that on YouTube. No, not at all. But but this does bring me back to an interesting observation from Miskovich, which is that some of the species of mushroom that are detestable to humankind, and I'm sure the death cap is one of these in in his survey, they're known in the cultures of what he calls the wolves or the hairs,

you know, the language of wolves or rabbits. Now, you might think that this is just another folk tale about the animals of the forest, but I think that this could actually be based on real observation, because despite being one of the most deadly fungui to humans. It is not necessarily deadly to everything in the forest all of the time. It came across one statement about this when I was reading an article about the spread of the death cap mushroom throughout North America, and this was by

Craig Child's in The Atlantic. It's a very interesting article. It's worth reading. A Child's talks about how death mushrooms naturally live in a symbiotic relationship with host trees. And we've talked about how several mushroom species are like this. They attached themselves to the roots of trees, and they sort of trade resources between them, uh and so that they're able to get some nutrition from from tree roots.

And this is the reason that you will often find them sort of in a ring of deadly fruiting bodies around the roots of a central tree trunk. But their spores don't naturally tend to spread very far, at least under normal circumstances, and it has taken human intervention to

really set them spreading far and wide. Specifically, what's named by Craig Child's in this article is that deathcap mushrooms have been spreaded spreading rapidly throughout northwest North America, riding along on the roots of imported European trees, like imported sweet chestnut trees and beech trees. So you get this fancy tree from Europe, it's got deathcap mushrooms in a relationship with it. You bring the tree over here planted,

and it brings the poisonous mushrooms with it. But anyway, the reason I brought this article up was that there's this quick side note where Child's mentions that that squirrels and rabbits have sometimes been observed to eat deathcap mushrooms without being harmed at all, which sounds again like like mits Kevich, like that, you know, the hairs don't really mind the mushrooms that the humans find absolutely detestable. And so I think that's interesting. It's another indication of what

you should not do. You should not watch what animals eat in the forest to determine what would be okay for you to eat, because they may be able to digest and metabolize stuff just fine that would absolutely kill you with just a few mouthfuls. And also in this just another reason to respect the mighty squirrel. Yes, yeah, I saw squirrels were thrown in there too, So I'm sure our fans are gonna gonna go hog wild about that. Sure,

meme away, yeah me until you drop. But one last thing I wanted to add about this was I saw some mushroom enthusiasts online just in common sections and stuff, saying that they kind of wish they had whatever resistance these rabbits have to to the death cap toxicity is because they would love to taste them. For one, since you know, by all accounts, when people eat them, even

though it kills them, they are very tasty. Interesting. Um, you know, in our previous episode we mentioned were mentioned a few different mushroom foraging cultures, and I believe Scottish culture came up. As luck would have it, was watching uh, the the TV adaptation of Outlander last night. Watching that, yeah, and in the second episode what happens they're forging for mushrooms, talking about them, the medicinal use of mushrooms and which ones are good to eat and which ones are poisonous.

I found it rather interesting. Also castle they used in that show, same castle they used in Highlander and in Monty Python and the Holy Grail, So it's got that going for it. So even in your ultimate kilt lift or narrative. You cannot escape a good mushroom hunt, right, I mean that's I mean you've got time travel in there, so it's a it's it's a big part of the plot apparently, at least as I can gather thus far. Well, whether you're time traveling or not, whether you forge for

mushrooms or not, stay away from the death caps. Just just don't even try it now. Of course, this is this goes way back, this this basic um reality that we're discussing here, and we've we've covered humanities hunter gatherer past on the show before. I mean the basic is you know, we're we're omnivores, and mushrooms have always been

on the table. Uh. Though, of course our ancestors had to devise the expertise to avoid harmful species, as well as figuring out which ones are beneficial, which ones can be food, etcetera. Right. One of the resources we were looking at for this section was Eric BoA's Wild Edible Fun Guy. A Global Overview of their use and importance to people. Yeah, it looks like this was a report compiled for the Food MAgric Culture Organization of the u N in two thousand four. Yeah, and uh and Boa

points out and mentioned a few different facts. He points out here, first of all, wild edible fungi are collected for food in more than eighty countries, and we're dealing

with more than one thousand, one hundred species. And interestingly enough, some cultures may be viewed is microphobic being you know, meaning there's a fear of mushrooms or a reluctance to engage in mushroom consumption and foraging, while other cultures are are microphilic meaning you know, the loving mushrooms, you know, being open to those experiences in those quests, with English culture standing interestingly enough as an example of of microphobic

UH culture, while Chinese culture, he mentions, is a strongly micophilic culture. He points out that a lot of Chinese writings on mushrooms have yet to be translated, but there's a lot of material there. Now. I found this very interesting because I've've certainly seen some documentaries um that really focus in on on British and Scottish traditions regarding mushroom hunting. Yeah, and of course that highlights that these designations. I've seen

these designations used by other people as well. Burtleson talks about this, where you know, cultures that are predominantly microphobic or microphilic, they're all gonna be relative, right Like, within each of these broad cultures there will be subcultures and individuals that sort of run against the grain. Um. But on the note of of of Chinese culture being microphilic, of course that comes through in in certain types of

ancient medical practices, but also in cuisine. And I just think about one of my earliest memories of Chinese food. I've loved Chinese food as long as I can remember, but one of my earliest memories is of the unidentifiable fungus within the Chinese soup I was eating, and how much I loved it, and how how it was like there was nothing else like this in my diet. I guess it was probably a type of black fungus in a hot and sour soup, and I is just like,

what is this? I have no idea. It's like something from another planet, and it's delicious. But as to microphobia, Burdleston mentions evidence of strains of microphobic thinking in many of the historic common names for mushrooms and some European cultures, for example, though today we think of French cuisine as being very very pro mushroom. Historically, there was some French aversion to mushrooms, like calling mushrooms things like eggs of the devil or the devil's paint brush, or toads bread.

Of course, there's the English expression toad stool. In Danish and Norwegian you have variations on PoTA hot toad's hat, and in Germanic and Celtic cultures. Burtleson writes that you sometimes see an association between mushrooms and witchcraft, and this association may have played a role in keeping the British aisles relatively microphobic for for many centuries. You know, I can't help be reminded. I'm sure I've brought this up

up on the show before. Um, but there's that that wonderful um a little bit in uh burd of Echos the Name of the Rose, where there's the story of of one monk. You know, it's like a multi multi cultural, multi linguistic community of monks there, and one is talking about having this pig that will accompany them into the woods to search for truffles, and the the other monk that's hearing this story is I believe German, and he thinks that he's not saying truffle but to full, which

is a German for devil. So he thinks this is a horrific story of this weird pig that will accompany uh you into the woods so that you can seek out the devil. I remember that moment, and that's oh man, that's so emblematic of everything I love about Name of the Rose. Now, in terms of the ancient uh uh foraging for mushrooms and the use of mushrooms by by human beings, you know, there's there's apparently evidence in what is now Chile of mushroom consumption by humans thirteen thousand

years ago. Um Obsouly the iceman who we've mentioned on the show before, who lived between thirty four UM hundred and thirty bc uh somewhere in that area, was found with two varieties of fungia on his person, one of which we've discussed on our other show or previous other show.

Invention was likely a dried fungi used to help start fires, but the other was a birch fungus that was likely consumed for medicinal reasons, and so that the consumption of mushrooms for culinary and or medicinal purposes dates back in a number of ancient cultures. They're they're more examples of this than we could easily cover on the show here. Uh. And with the agricultural revolution came the eventuality of mushroom cultivation as well. Though, as we previously touched on, there

are so many varieties that are resistant to cultivation. Yeah. I think specifically a lot of the ones that you think of that are most commonly used in food that are the hardest to cultivate, or are the ones that are, for my corpsal reasons, unable to be cultivated because they exist in these symbiotic relationships with other plants, trees, and forest atmospheres. And so the truffle is a common example, but of course Sean trells are like this as well.

I believe also porcini mushrooms, uh, that it's just really hard to recreate the conditions in which they arise. Yeah.

So even as as humanity inevitably be you know, began to shift uh this revolution in neolithic times, uh, shifting away from the hunter gather existence to one dependent on intensive agriculture, there's kind of this you know, this tendency to sort of think of that as Okay, well, you know, you're just changing the way you live entirely, you're just stopping where you are and now you're gonna grow plants, and maybe mushroom foraging is one of those things that

remains outside of that tradition for these very reasons we've been discussing. Um. However, this was quite interesting. I was looking around for resources on this and I ran across a paper published in the Royal Society b by Curtis w. Uh Marine titled the Transition to Foraging for Dense and Predictable Resources and It's Impact on the Evolution of modern humans. And in this uh the the author um is discussing, you know, this basic shift, but he points out, they

point out that there's another shift to consider. Quote the foraging shift to dense and predictable resources is another key milestone that had consequential impacts on the later part of human evolution. Now, the basic idea here is that there wasn't just this sudden shift from hunting and gathering to cultivation. And there are many hypothesized explanations for this, but Marine argues that hunting and gathering would have seen an increased

focus on dense and predictable resources. As such, this also means that a given area becomes increasingly worth defending and staking a claim to. Oh this is interesting. So this could be the transition point between um between people who just roam about following resources and consuming them wherever they can be found. That and then on the other hand,

having far land in between. You could have places where there are naturally high density resources that can be exploited over and over that you might not be quite farming yet, but might be worth defending as a stable territory. Yeah. Yeah, And I have to admit I hadn't really thought about this before. I without giving it a lot of thought.

I always just kind of, you know, had this this inaccurate picture in my mind that was again like, okay, we're not hundred gathers anymore, let's start growing this corn. Why don't we? You know, like I don't. I didn't really think about some of the potential, you know, for for areas in between. This would be very interesting to explore.

Paired with something that came up in our Invention episodes on Bread and Toast, where we talked about the studies indicating that bread and may actually have been invented before grain was was an agricultural product like people may have been making and I think the archaeological evidence is that people were making bread from wild grains and wild grasses

before they had farms and wheat. Yeah. Absolutely, It makes me wonder if they were getting these grains from some kind of like a location where there were a lot of them growing together and could be exploited over and over again. Yeah, exactly, Now marine rights to some all

this up quote. I hypothesize that the origin population for modern humans made this shift to dense and predictable resources, and thus was subject to high levels of territoriality and intergroup conflict, which provided the selection regime for high levels of cooperation with unrelated individuals within one's group. The downstream effect was that all modern humans inherited these hyper pro

social provoclivities that are unique to our species. Now, to bring this back to mushroom foraging, it is interesting to process one's thoughts about the predictable times and places one will find, say Chantrelle's or into the woods, and the competitive feelings that they may force we may be forced

to confront during this. In fact, I understand that more serious mushroom foragers are, you know, their loath to reveal the secrets, uh, their secret places, their quote unquote honey spots, the places where they can dependently find the best patches

of mushroom. Do you remember the story in Michael Pollen's book where he's going hunting for psilocybin mushrooms with Paul Statements, and he's going to great pains to try to tell you what he's doing without revealing the site of Paul statements mushroom psh Oh yeah, yeah, because Paul really doesn't want people to know where he gets him that's his

honey spot. Now, I think though that, yeah, you can certainly see that with plants, especially, how this could be this intermediary zone between hunting and gathering and cultivation where you realize, oh, well, the the wheat that we can make into bread, it grows really well here. Uh, this is a place that we need to keep secret or even protect from other other individuals. This is our spot, this is our sacred spot that we return to. It's

a very interesting possibility. I wonder what what would be the evidence that you could find to back that up. I don't know, I have to keep thinking about that. All right, we're gonna take a quick break, but we'll

be right back. Thank and we're back. Now. Another interesting topic to to consider in all of this is that that there is essentially a foraging gene uh So the key gene of note in most studies, especially with fruit flies and fruit flies, it's p r KG one uh and uh this is um this is something that we see presented in a wide variety of animals, from fruit flies to even humans. But p r KG one is president fruit flies and has previously been shown to influence

foraging behaviors. Researchers and studies that I think date back to at least night have looked at this, and multiple researchers found that one variant of the gene and fruit flies induces what is called sitter behavior and in the other's rover behavior. Now, the difference here is that when a sitter enters an area can taining fruit, the they scalut the perimeter of the area and then they move inward. They sort of you know, they scouted out, they make

a perimeter, and then they move in. Rovers instead move right in and go for the first fruit they encounter. Interesting, Now, the human form of The gene is apparently a nucleotide polymorphism genotype called r S one, and in two thousand and nineteen, researchers from Canada, the US, and the UK this would be struck at all um. They experimented with it in a paper published in the Proceedings of the

National Academy of Science. The title is self regulation and the foraging gene p r KG one in humans UH. Here's how the study went down. So, the authors analyzed the genotypes of rs and four thirty seven undergraduate students who performed two virtual foraging tasks. So this was a touch screen situation in which subjects search for and collected as many red bear areas as possible within five minutes. And then so they compared the subjects with C A

or CC genotypes of rs UH. Individuals with the A A genotype were more likely to hug the boundary of the search environment, pick smaller berries, and stop to pick berries and patches with fewer visible berries a k A sitter behavior. The findings suggests that the A A genotype is associated with a search strategy that restricts exploration and exploits the local environment extensively. In other words, distinct patterns of goal pursuit for foraging are associated with particular genotypes

of pr k G one. That's very interesting. Now, as we've talked about on the show before, you always have to remember when you're drawing correlations between particular gene variants and a behavior, it's it's almost never going to be like an on off switch that like, if you have a certain gene variant, you show X behavior and if you don't have it, you don't. But instead you you'd be charting sort of like you know, percentages of influence.

Can can you see correlations between gene variants and a and a tendency or a certain proclivity to a certain type of behavior and uh and so yeah, this would say that somehow foraging behaviors or downstream from things that this gene does to the brain that make you more likely to kind of like go out on a long search of versus try to exploit all of the resources

you can in your nearest immediate environment. Yeah. Yeah, absolutely, Now, and of course we also have to keep in mind that the scope in the size of the study here, but um, and also I should point that the authors mentioned that the human foraging behavior is ultimately far more complex than the the foraging behavior fruit flies, and instead they're just being two distinct foraging strategies. It seems like

they are three. So you have siderin rover, but then you have a mixed uh disposition as well, the combines elements of both. But on top of that, they point out that this would go beyond mere foraging and humans, that that it that it would instead impact human behavior regulation across multiple domains. And I think we can imagine how, yeah, that would involve various things that are like foraging, but

also potentially impact just sort of risk assessment, etcetera. Oh yeah, I mean, I think it's easy to see how complex modern behaviors are in a way kind of probably uh minor reconfigurations of traditional instinctual behaviors like foraging, like hunting and that kind of thing. Uh, So you can see how whatever we're most instinctually inclined to do in terms of foraging could manifest in the way you accomplish work around the house, in the way that you know, go

shopping or whatever. I mean again, you you have to be careful about drawing too direct and inference about anything like that, but the fact that there's some kind of influences. Seems pretty clear. All right, we're going to take a quick break, but we'll be right back. Thank and we're back now. Another aspect of early human foraging tactics, and indeed the way these these early humans use spatial abilities to gather resources, is that there was seemingly a division

of labor between males and females. This is the sexual division of labor, sometimes abbreviated as sdl UM. And this is a subject that has received a lot of study over the years, especially of studies that look at extant hunter gatherer populations in the world. And there are varying

hypotheses for the evolutionary origins of this divide. Now, for our purposes here, I was looking at a study by Louis Pacheco, Cobas, Marcos Rosetti, Cecilia Quanti Emquoees, and Robin Hudson titled sex differences in mushroom gathering Men expend more energy to obtain equivalent benefits and this was published in Evolution and Human Behavior back in so the authors here pointed out that the evidence was accumulating quote that women

excel on tasks appropriate it to gathering immobile plant resources while men excel on task appropriate to hunting mobile, unpredictable prey. And this would be due So the thinking goes to this ancient labor divide in human societies. But it also means that intrinsic foraging abilities and tactics would differ from

males to females. So the researchers here decided to put this to the test with a mushroom foraging experiment, which is the other key reason to discuss it here, because people are are This is an experiment that includes not touch screen um practices, not some sort of touch screen experiment,

but an actual foraging for mushrooms, let's forage. So in their study they use GPS and heart rate monitors that had been affixed to the researchers themselves, and then these researchers would follow twenty one pairs of men and women from an indigenous Mexican community in uh Tlex Cola while

foraging for mushrooms in the wild. So the researchers are the ones where in the gear they're following the actual foragers, but in doing so, they're going to be able to chart where the foragers went and how much energy seems to be expended in the silent hunt, so they ultimately measured the costs, the benefits, and the general search efficiency

of everyone's movements, and then they analyzed them. The resulting foraging patterns showed that while males and females collected similar quantities of mushrooms, males achieved this at a significantly higher cost. So the males they traveled farther. The males climbed to greater altitudes. They had higher mean heart rates and energy expenditures while partaking in the foraging, and in addition, they also collected fewer mushroom species and visited fewer collection sites.

And this is interesting. They seemed to focus on large patches of mushrooms, even if these were harder to come by, so they were like bypassing or not even looking for those smaller patches they wanted wanted to get the big game mushroom patches. The females, meanwhile, it seemed to know where to go and they foraged of from many small patches as opposed to seeking out those greater patches of

fun guy. This was also compared by the way to previous research on the way males and females navigate, which indicated that males tend to create mental maps and then superimpose their position, while women tend to remember landmarks and

memorize the routes quote. These findings are consistent with arguments in the literature that differences in spatial ability between the sexes are domain dependent, with women performing better and more readily adopting search strategies appropriate to a gathering lifestyle than men.

So basically, the idea is that if you were primarily charged with hunting prey two point five million years ago, it made sense to travel far, to take widening paths in pursuit of that big payoff prey, and then take the shortest, most direct path back home so as to make for up for all that time you spent wandering

and pursuing the prey. Meanwhile, if you were tasked with gathering fungi or plants, it would serve to remember where the most productive plant food sources were found, you know, those honey spots, and then retrace your steps exactly so as to take advantage of them in the future. And like, no,

making a bee line back for camp. That's very interesting. Uh. Now, one thing that we always got to say whenever you talk about studies that explore sex differences, is that people a lot of people like to take these and really run with them and say like, oh, this means that men are like this and women are like that. I think we always try to caution people not to not to over interpret findings of sex differences in in particular studies.

It's very easy, I think, just because people want to have strong intuitions about gender and sex and like what men are like and what women are like and stuff that they want to say like, oh, this explains why my husband does this or why my girlfriend says that kind of thing. You can you can easily go way overboard with with looking for explanations in that way. Yeah.

I mean it also it comes down to what is the Barnum effect that we've discussed before, where we say, oh, well, that's me, this this study is correct because that's me. I totally am like that when I go to the to the grocery store and my my partner is like this, etcetera. But but yeah, like you're saying, like, we're talking about general perceived trends in the sexual division of labor and

as reflected here in particular studies. Uh so, yeah, I don't don't have it printed on a T shirt or anything, but but it is interesting research and and certainly it was neat to find a study that was that was actually involving mushroom foraging, like the scientific study of mushroom foraging behavior totally, and it highlights how there can be different types of foraging strategies that are effective in different ways.

I was looking at some other studies that were about different types of foraging strategies and birds, you know, and how this is kind of interesting, like some birds tend to forage by moving in little random types of motions around a central locust, uh in a way that's very comparable actually to the movement of tiny particles on the atomic scale that's known as Brownie in motion and physics. Whereas other birds tended to forage by sort of taking

large leaps at a time. And that these, uh, these different strategies could be differentially effective depending on what types of things you're looking for while foraging, what the surrounding landscape is, and things like that. Yeah, it's such a foraging itself is just such a fascinating thing to think about because it's easy to just sort of dismiss it as this kind of primal thing that we sometimes engage in when we decided to go into the woods and

look for mushrooms, etcetera. But it is again something basic like neural activity that we're continually engaging in and and something that also comes down to this kind of like like this the basic mathematics of it, like how do you go about looking for resources in a given area? And then how are you how do you deal with

spatial awareness in that given area? Like there it seems like a rich domain for you know, AI research in the like totally because strangely enough, I feel like search activities are one of the ways in which human behavior can be most closely compared to what computer programs do. Does that make sense? Yeah, that there are some pretty direct analogies actually having to do with energy is expended

and efficiency in different ways of searching through randomly organized material. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. I mean in the same way that you can imagine someone in desiring an AI program that will find you a good deal on something. There are also plenty of humans out there like that's their thing, like let me, let me help you find a good deal on that. Because I love looking for him, So, yeah, I mean

a lot of it does come back to foraging. I mean I would be interested in studies looking at foraging behaviors in humans and animals compared to what search engines do to get you your results. That would be interesting. So who knows, perhaps will have some additional foraging episodes in the future, as as you and I go out into the wilds seeking out fruitful papers on these topics. Bring it on home, all right, We're gonna have to

call it there. Uh. Likewise, we weren't able to touch on everything regarding mushroom foraging and foraging related topics here, but we certainly would love to hear from everyone out there. Um, you know, are you involved in in mushroom foraging? Are you an active forager? Or let us know your experiences.

We'd love to hear your insight on all of this. Likewise, if you were, if your culture of origin, or you're you know, if you're immersed in a particular cultural uh take on mushroom foraging, be it you know, the activities or or beliefs and strategies tied up with the foraging uh activity, let us know. We'd love to be enlightened on those topics, huge things. As always to our excellent

audio producer Seth Nicholas Johnson. If you would like to get in touch with us with feedback on this episode or any other, suggest a topic for the future, or just to say hello, you can email us at contact at Stuff to Blow Your Mind. Stuff to Blow Your Mind is production of I Heart Radio. For more podcasts for my heart Radio, visit the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listening to your favorite shows.