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| Hand-drawn mushrooms for my recent feature for Topanga New Times. I love observing and drawing our local Santa Monica Mountains—so many weird and wonderful colors and shapes! I drew from my collection of mushroom sketches for this piece and filled in with a few new drawings. |
The first rains of the season arrived this weekend in the Santa Monica Mountains, initiating
the start of mushroom season. It seems like a good time to share my recent article on mushrooms
from the Topanga New Times.
Here's an excerpt from Mushroom Madness:
Fungi can cure or kill, nourish life, and also decompose it back into soil. Fossil evidence for fungi is limited, but the ability to analyze molecular data has led to revelations about the evolution of this extraordinary family of organisms. Although mycology (the study of fungi) is a discipline of botany (the study of plants), molecular research in the 1990s revealed that fungi are more closely related to animals than they are to plants. The current theory is that Fungi and Animalia are related groups that evolved from a protozoan ancestor more than 1.3 billion years ago, before going their separate ways.
It’s estimated that there may be as many as five million species of fungi, ranging from tiny yeast organisms to the massive Armillaria ostoyae, a species of long-lived fungi that is thought to be the largest living fungal colonies in the world—the largest and oldest known specimen is estimated to be 2,500 years old, and covers more than 3.4 square miles of Oregon’s Malheur National Forest, and is thought to have grown from a single spore. This “humongous fungus” is unusual, but A. ostoyae is not. It occurs in forests throughout the Pacific Northwest and parts of Asia. This is a parasitic fungi that can kill the trees it feeds on, but it is also an important recycler, converting its hosts back into compost.
This is the time of year when A. ostoyae produces fruiting bodies—the edible honey mushroom that is prized by mushroom hunters—but almost any mushroom one comes across is part of something much bigger than itself. That fairy ring of white mushrooms in the lawn, or the bright yellow sulfur mushrooms that appear like magic on the side of a tree in the garden are the fruit of unseen networks of fungi. Pick a mushroom and you are connecting with an invisible world.
It’s estimated that there may be as many as five million species of fungi, ranging from tiny yeast organisms to the massive Armillaria ostoyae, a species of long-lived fungi that is thought to be the largest living fungal colonies in the world—the largest and oldest known specimen is estimated to be 2,500 years old, and covers more than 3.4 square miles of Oregon’s Malheur National Forest, and is thought to have grown from a single spore. This “humongous fungus” is unusual, but A. ostoyae is not. It occurs in forests throughout the Pacific Northwest and parts of Asia. This is a parasitic fungi that can kill the trees it feeds on, but it is also an important recycler, converting its hosts back into compost.
This is the time of year when A. ostoyae produces fruiting bodies—the edible honey mushroom that is prized by mushroom hunters—but almost any mushroom one comes across is part of something much bigger than itself. That fairy ring of white mushrooms in the lawn, or the bright yellow sulfur mushrooms that appear like magic on the side of a tree in the garden are the fruit of unseen networks of fungi. Pick a mushroom and you are connecting with an invisible world.
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