An Upside To California's Sopping Winter: A Once-In-A-Generation Mushroom Season
On a sun-dappled trail in the woods of Calabasas, Jess Starwood narrows her eyes and gasps with glee. Scrambling up a leafy hillside, she points to a small hump in the ground, covered in leaf litter. “That’s a shrump,” she says – a mushroom hump, where a mushroom may be pushing up the ground as it emerges. There were times when Starwood, an author, naturalist and foraging guide, would walk this trail and consider herself lucky to find even one mushroom. Today, on one of the hikes she regularly leads, we uncover nearly 50 mushrooms of 10 different species pushing up through the ground, growing out of damp logs, or springing from the dark earth.
The reason? A slew of rainstorms walloping California throughout the winter, creating the ideal conditions for mushrooms to thrive. Experts are calling it a once-in-a-generation shroom boom, with highly saturated soils extending the mushroom season far past its usual peak of January and February. That’s brought enthusiasts in droves to forage mushrooms for cooking and medicinal uses, and given researchers a rare opportunity to survey the breadth of fungal diversity that is usually hidden underground.
EDIT
But with historic amounts of precipitation, this year the conditions have been ideal. That’s offered a thrilling chance for researchers like Diaz to study the huge variety of mushroom species that don’t always reach the surface. So much about the life of fungi is secret. Siegel says in southern California, probably half the mushrooms are undescribed. That’s part of the reason for the Fungal Diversity Survey (FunDis), a citizen science project that catalogs mushrooms in order to better understand them. Diaz points out that the Los Angeles basin is recognized as a biodiversity hotspot – over the past 150 years, a strong knowledge base has been built for the plants and animals here, “but not for the fungi, which comprise a separate kingdom upon which plants and animals depend”. The reason why fungi here have been understudied is because most of them only become visible at a macroscopic scale for short periods of time, when environmental conditions are favorable for their reproduction. Put another way: plants make themselves easy to identify, Siegel says: oak trees are there all the time. But take that oak tree and bury it underground, make it microscopic, and for one week each year, have it stick out an acorn to see. “That’s what mushrooms are doing.”
FunDis has enlisted mushroom hunters from across the state to explore permitted lands and make high-quality, well-documented collections of macrofungi, which are dried and sampled for DNA sequencing. Diaz recently foraged for the project near the southern California town of Lake Elsinore, where he found many species, including Inocybe fraudans (which smelled like red hots and rubber), Telamonia (which smelled like Play-Doh and citrus), and some bolete (which smelled metallic or like dried blood). When he got home, Diaz dried the specimens and logged the notes; now he is preparing to take tissue samples for DNA sequencing. The dried specimens will be deposited in research collections (fungaria) at California State University East Bay and the University of California, Los Angeles.
EDIT
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/mar/19/california-mushroom-foraging-shroom-boom-fungus
