The Magic of Mushrooms
Professor Richard Fortey – Dr Patrick Hickey
Professor Richard Fortey explains the strange and surprising science of fungi, unlocking the story of their evolution, their mysterious life cycle and their value to both the planet and us.
Of all life on Earth, there’s something more mysterious yet more vital to our survival than anything else. Its birth is violent, much of its life is hidden underground. And only at the end of its life cycle does it reveal its identity. The mushroom. I’m Professor Richard Fortey. I’ve been fascinated by mushrooms all of my life. I love to collect and study them.
Many people think of mushrooms just as something to eat, or maybe as decoration in folk tales. But nothing could be further from the truth. They have a secret life so magical, so weird, that it defies imagination, and I’m going to reveal it as never before. I’ve set up my own lab to unlock the mysteries of mushrooms. I’ll discover their astonishing powers. What makes them the fastest… the largest… and some of the deadliest living things on the planet. And I’ll meet the people turning those powers to our advantage to create new medicines and new materials.
To discover what gives mushrooms their extraordinary abilities, I’m going to follow their story from birth, through life, to death.
A story so strange it seems almost alien, yet it will reveal why mushrooms are crucial to all life on Earth, and why they have a powerful connection to you and me.
The only place many of us encounter mushrooms is here. Cultivated edible varieties like these, are all most of us think about when it comes to mushrooms. We Brits can’t get enough. It’s a multimillion pound business in the UK. But there’s so much more to mushrooms than this fine example in the fresh food counter. This mushroom is just one species from an enormous kingdom, the kingdom of the fungi… and fungi are hidden away in all kinds of food products in this supermarket in ways you wouldn’t expect.
Look hard enough and every aisle reveals evidence of how fungi underpin modern living. Cheese. My favourite Stilton cheese, well, it’s blue, and the blue is a fungus. A lot of fizzy drinks have citric acid in them, and that’s produced by a fungus called Aspergillus niger in huge quantities. Many detergents also contain citric acid, just like fizzy drinks. Ah, here’s soy sauce, bread, Quorn, chocolate, fruit juices. Well, sometimes they have a bitter taste, which can be removed by another fungus. Salmon, red salmon. The red colour, I’m afraid, is sometimes due to a fungus called Phaffia. Some of the protein in pet foods, which keeps your animals healthy is actually produced by fungi. And, of course, booze. The fermenting activity of Saccharomyces, turning sugars into alcohol. Clearly, our supermarket shop just wouldn’t be the same without fungi. They’re hidden away in all sorts of ways in all sorts of products. They must have a series of special biochemical tricks up their sleeves.
But how exactly is it that they seem to turn up everywhere and affect so many parts of our lives? To begin to answer that question, I’m going to a place where I encounter fungi in all their forms. Head out into any woodland like this one in the Scottish Borders, and if you look hard enough, you’ll start finding them everywhere.
To me, they’re fascinating. Some may think they look like any other plant, but in fact, they’re a different organism altogether. Fungi evolved as a kingdom in their own right, distinct from plants and animals, over one and a half billion years ago. It’s thought that in variety, they outnumber plants by at least ten to one. And searching for them is my favourite pastime.
Some people might think of autumn as a rather gloomy time of year, but for me, it’s pure joy. I can take my basket, I can go into the woods… and I can do my mushroom foraying. I’ve been doing it for decades. What’s the thrill of it? Well, to the left of the path, to the right of the path, dozens of different kinds of fungi are erupting. But, I suppose, the most primeval feeling, the basic one, is still the thrill of discovery, the thrill of the chase.
You may not realise that what we call the mushroom is, in fact, just one type of fungus. It’s the form that we are most familiar with and it’s certainly the easiest to recognise. The head of the mushroom is its cap. And many have a stalk. Look underneath the cap, and you’ll often find a set of sharp ridges known as gills.
Well, now, this is, of course, the archetypal mushroom. It’s the one that the gnomes sit on top of. It’s the fly agaric. I can see other species really, really close to hand.
This is the king of the edible mushroom, the cep, the penny bun, porcini. The fact that it’s got so many names is a measure of just how highly regarded it is as an edible fungus. It’s one of the best.
But as well as the quintessential mushroom… if you look a little harder, you’ll find a host of other fungi that don’t look like mushrooms at all. Ah, well, here’s something completely different. Perhaps doesn’t look like a fungus at first sight to people. It’s one of the coral fungi. This is an ear fungus. They’re still fungi but they’re a very, very different sort of fungi. Yellow brain fungus. Doesn’t look like anything from this Earth, does it? It’s the beefsteak fungus. And you can see why – it looks a bit like raw liver.
In fact, this organism can take so many weird and wonderful forms, knowing what it is you’re looking at can sometimes be a challenge, even for an experienced forayer like me. Wow, now, that is something really weird. I’m not quite sure what’s going on. It’s absolutely extraordinary. That’s one coming back to the lab.
Almost every foray I go on, I find something new and intriguing. Time to take a closer look at exactly what’s in my basket.
This is our specially-built mushroom lab where I’ll be unlocking the mysteries of fungi with the help of mycologist Dr Patrick Hickey. Their first secret is their identity. So here we are with our haul back from the woods, and what a variety we’ve got in the basket. Of course, we notice things like the colour, of course. The smell.
Dr Patrick Hickey “oh, yeah, that’s got a really sweet smell to it, a very sweet odour.”
So fungus identification uses all your senses.
Dr Patrick Hickey “It’s a very sensory experience. But there’s another way we can really narrow down the mystery of a mushroom and positively identify it and that’s by doing something called a spore print. Every mushroom hs its own unique spore print and to do a spore print, we cut the stem off, and then place the cap onto a piece of paper and just leave it for a few hours. When you come back and lift it up, You’ll see the mushroom has deposited a layer of spores and they look just like fingerprints. It’s a bit like taking a fingerprint from a mushroom.”
These spores are like the seeds of a mushroom and the patterns they create can reveal some surprises, even when two mushrooms appear to look the same. So here we’ve got two similar looking… white mushrooms, but reveal the spores – one’s startlingly white and the other’s very black.
Dr Patrick Hickey “Yeah, it’s a key in the identification of the mushroom.”
So we have such a variety of colours. We’ve got a sort of purple here. We’ve got cream, we’ve got white, very pure white, rust brown, even pinkish. And I have to say what a beautiful pattern it makes too. I mean, aesthetically, very pleasing.
Dr Patrick Hickey “They’re wonderful. They’re just like the silhouettes of a mushroom, and that colour of the spore print is unique to that type of mushroom and they don’t change throughout the mushroom’s life cycle.”
The spore prints reveal that mushrooms are more varied and complex than they might appear. Their world is mysterious and little known, yet they have the power to affect our lives in unexpected ways. One of the most striking displays of that power takes us to the most unlikely place.
