BULLETIN OF THE PUGET SOUND MYCOLOGICALSOCIETY
Number 358, January 2000
Electronic Edition is published monthly, September through Juneby the
Puget Sound Mycological Society
Center for Urban Horticulture, Box 354115
University of Washington, Seattle, Washington 98195
(206) 522-6031
Agnes A. Sieger, Editor
MEMBERSHIP MEETING
Tuesday, January 11, at 7:30 PM at the Centerfor Urban Horticulture, 3501 NE 41st Street, Seattle
Our speaker for January will be Paul Kroeger ofVancouver, B.C., who will talk about "Fungus in Human Affairs."
Long active in the Vancouver MycologicalSociety, Paul is once again their president, has edited theirnewsletter, has been their foray chair and exhibit chair, andchaired the North American Mycological Society's foray that washosted by VMS at Whistler in 1990. He is also currently presidentof the Pacific Northwest Key Council and chair of the LowerMainland Group of the Sierra Club of Canada.
For many years, Paul has worked for thepreservation of Meager Hot Springs near Pemberton, B.C., and was afounder of the Meager Creek Wilderness Society. An environmentalactivist, he was the subject of a memorable political cartoon afterhis discovery of the rare Tricholoma apium stopped loggingat Mt. Elphinstone, B.C. Subsequently the area was set aside for aprovincial park
Paul has worked as a mycological and botanicalconsultant for Canadian forestry projects. He also teaches mushroomclasses at the University of British Columbia. He published a newmushroom species, Melanotus textilis, with Scott Redhead andis one of the authors of an article about Amanita smithianathat appeared in Clinical Toxicology. Listening to him isalways a pleasure, and January's meeting should be a realtreat.
Would members whose last names begin with theletters A_G please bring a plate of refreshments for the socialhour?
CALENDAR
Jan. 11 Membership meeting, 7:30 PM, CUH
Jan. 17 Board meeting, 7:30 PM, CUH BoardRoom
Jan. 21 Spore Prints deadline
First US Stamp featuring A Fungus As The MainIllustration Brian Luther
On February 18, 1999, the US Postal Serviceissued a set of fifteen 33¢ stamps in their Celebrate theCentury series for the 1940s. (Each decade since 1900 is gettingits own special 15 commemorative stamps.) One of these stamps showsan SEM (scanning electron microscope) view of a species ofPenicillium with conidiophores and spores. This is the veryfirst postage stamp ever issued by the US with a fungus as the mainillustration! It is labeled Antibiotics Save Lives. These aregummed stamps (not self-stick) with information about the stampprinted on the back of each stamp. Individual stamps cannot beordered. They can be ordered from the Postal Service in thefollowing formats only: as the above souvenir sheet with 15different stamps ($4.95), as an FDC (first day cover full pane for$6.95), as an uncut Press Sheet of four panes ($19.80), as aCommemorative Panel ($12.95), or as an Heirloom Book ($34.95). Idon't have a current Scott catalog number for this stamp, but acolor picture of it can be seen on-line at http://www.stampsonline.com
Two previous US stamps have fungi on them, butthey are not the main illustration, rather what we call "MIDs" inmycophilately, which means that they have mushrooms or fungi in thedesign, border, or background of the stamp. Both are part of asheet of 50 different animal stamps issued 6/13/87. The first ofthese two MIDs is Scott Catalog No. 2297, in which the mainillustration is an Eastern Chipmunk, showing two Naematolomasublateritium sporocarps on wood. The second is ScottCatalog No. 2335, in which the main illustration a Red Fox, showingtwo different polypores on the log below the fox.
I had hoped to show the stamps in full color,but the logistics of that happening in Spore Prints didn'twork out. I've been collecting, studying, and researchingmushroom/fungus illustrated stamps (mycophilately) and oldpostcards with fungi (mycodeltiology) for more than 20 years, sofor more information about the foregoing stamps, or any of thehundreds of mushroom stamps issued by other countries worldwide,feel free to contact me. [see the roster for contact info]
SEM view of Penicillium
2297 Two sporocarps of Naematolomasublateritium in lower right hand corner, growing from the woodthat the chipmunk is on.
2335 Four polypore sporocarps on log.One species right of stick (with one sporocarp) and another species(with three sporocarps) to the left. Many generic possibilitieshere. There also could be small red mushrooms on the ground aroundthe log, discernible only under a lens or highermagnification.
We regret to report the death of long-time PSMSmember W.L. (Bill) Sheridan. Although he had been unable to walkfor many years, he maintained his membership and interest in theSociety. He will be remembered as a retired member of the US ForestService and very knowledgeable in the field of mycology.
AVANTI Southern Italy mycologicalforay trip 1999 or Italy on 200 dollars a day Lynn Phillips
One of the many things I've learned from DickSieger is that the only way to get out of helping with the annualexhibit is to get out of town. And this year, after helping withthe exhibit in many ways over the past 13 years and feeling a bitburned out, I decided the best plan would be to leave the countryon a mushrooming expedition! (I of course made sure that I haddelegated my chores to even more competent replacements first.) Ihad heard Denis Benjamin rave about his trip to Italy with amushroom tour two years ago, hunting porcini and truffles inTuscany and Umbria. He was planning to go with the same group thisFall, even bringing his wife, Vivien, who is not nearly as gung hoabout mushroom hunting as he. That was a good enough endorsementfor me. So I talked Fran Ikeda into joining me to share a room andexpenses, and we got in on a cancellation. The rest of our group of27 was made up mostly of people from the eastern US, which was nicebecause they were more familiar with hardwood forests like Italyhas and the mushrooms that grow in them. Our leaders were a coupleof Italians, one from D.C. and the other from northern Italy. Thisis their fifth year of leading groups as an excuse to get togetherfor some, hopefully, quality mushroom hunting in Italy. And, forsomething completely different, they decided to foray on the islandof Sicily and in Calabria (the "toe" of Italy's boot).
We all met up in Palermo and spent a weekchecking out Sicily. The autumn rains hadn't come; the weather waswarm and dry, and sunny and the mushroom hunting was not good. Wemanaged to get out into the woods only about three times. We didfind some mushrooms every time we went looking. The main edibleswere Lyophyllumdecastesi, Armillariamellea, Boletusedulis, Tricholomaequestre, and Lactariusdeliciosus. We saw russulas and Amanitamuscaria, and one day I found a huge shelf fungus, a 10+lb. Polyporus giganteus, which I had hoped was a Grifolafrondosa, growing on a beech tree. We met most of the Palermomushroom group, at least 20 people including women and children, onour first foray, and even though most of us couldn't speak eachother's language, we managed to communicate using Latin names ofmushrooms, plants, and trees. The kids were fun. We sang songs andplayed Ping-Pong (at a restaurant in the middle of the woods wherewe ate the first of many huge, mushroom-laden meals), and I believewe actually found a few mushrooms.
When we weren't in the woods, we went around inthe bus, sightseeing. Sicily is a beautiful, rugged island and haslots of sights to see. Over the centuries, everyone who wentanywhere in the Mediterranean managed to stop and invade it. It'sbeen occupied by the Greeks, Romans, Normans, Spanish, Moors, etc.lots of interesting history! I had picked my share of boletes andeven a few matsutake in the weeks before I left Seattle, so I wasjust enjoying everything. Did I mention that it was warm and sunny?But some of our people were grumbling a bit because we weren'thunting enough or finding much. The foraging mentality of our groupof American mushroomers was interesting. In the towns, when we tooka break, people would come back with wines, cheese and olives, boarsausage, cookies all sorts of goodies and pass them around the busuntil they were consumed. In the woods, they would come back withchestnuts, herbs, and bits of plants to identify if we weren'tfinding much in the way of mushrooms.
My most memorable foray of the whole trip was onthe flanks of Mt. Etna, on the other side of Sicily, later in theweek. The mountain was rumbling the whole time we were on it. Ikept saying, "I find this very disquieting. Isn't anyone elseuneasy about this?" But those East Coast guys didn't experience Mt.St. Helens and weren't concerned. Then Lina, a Sicilian mushroomer,told me (I think she didn't actually speak English) that themountain had belched up three feet of pumice onto a coastal townonly a month before! A few days later, from the rooftop deck of ourhotel, I saw a river of lava and huge sparks of exploding rocksfrom the crater in the pre-dawn darkness. It was time to braveScylla and Charybdis in the Strait of Messina and head for themainland.
In Calabria, I finally got a chance to swim inthe sea, which was warm and wonderful. We had a few moremushrooming expeditions into some lovely mountain areas with beech,oak, chestnut, and pine woods. We saw wild goats across rockycliffs and tame sheep and cows up close. My faviorite mushroomthere was a very sturdy and phallic looking Lepiota procera, which grows in local pine woods and whichwe named, after drinking way too much Vino locali, Pinusviagris. OK, maybe you had to have been there! In Calabria, wealso toured a Pleurotus eryngii farm. That's a very popularcultivated mushroom in Italy. But the best thing was that we werejoined by eight of the Palermo mushroom group whom we had met onour first foray. They stayed at our hotel and went out with us,foraying and eating and drinking and singing. I love the Italians,they'll sing, especially my favorite opera arias, with very littleencouragement. I was sorry when we all split up, but found moreItalians to sing in other towns. At our last stop in Naples, ourlocal mycologist was also a professional actor and singer. His bestfriend is a volcanologist at Mt. Vesuvius. So we got a veryinteresting tour of the volcano, with samples of rock from variouseruptions and information about a unique lichen that grows there,and also some lovely singing!
It had been so dry around Naples that we didn'teven bother going out in the woods. We had our final mushroombanquet, after two weeks of many delicious meals with lots ofmushrooms and seafood and local delicacies (and a few mediocrehotel meals), and our last night of camaraderie before our groupwent their separate ways.
My brother had driven down from Germany to getme, and we stayed one day too long in Naples we got rained out onthe Isle of Capri. It was still raining farther north when we wentthrough Perugia, Gubbio, and Urbino bolete and truffle country. Iwas told by locals there that the season wasn't good and was over;it had been too dry and the rains came too late.
The last mushrooms I saw were in the outdoormarket at Heidelberg the itty-bittiest littlePfifferlingen(Cantharellus cibarius) that I have ever seen,with a label on them "from USA." It was definitely time to comehome!
Ducks Done In By Fungus Tom Spears
The OttawaCitizen, February 2, 1999
via The Arizona Fun-Gi, Summer 1999
from the Spore Print, May 1999, Los Angeles Myco.Soc.
Bird lovers poisoned one-tenth of a flock ofducks wintering at Billings Bridge, killing as many as 27 duckswith kindness and moldy food. Autopsies at the Ontario VeterinaryCollege in Guelph show the birds died of pneumonia, caused by"massive" infections of a fungus called Aspergillusthat attacks birds' lungs. "That's the same fungus that grows atthe back of your fridge," said Ken Ross of the Canadian WildlifeService. "It's the stuff that makes moldy bread turn green."
Normally well fed birds can fight off thefungus, and it only kills weakened or starving birds whose immunesystems are in bad shape. "But this time the amount of mold was toomassive," he said. The surviving ducks in the flock of between 200and 300 are all right, Ross said.
The moldy food was given to them by well meaningpeople, not their natural bottom of the river diet of plants andsnails.
Ross said mold is also a common problem at birdfeeders, where a batch of seed may get wet, then freeze and thawrepeatedly. "The difference is that with feeders the birds fly awaysomewhere to die. You don't find them with their feet in the airbeside the feeder."
FUNGUS DUPLICATES INSULIN George Davis
Spore-Addict, Pikes Peak Myco. Soc., July 1999, via
The Arizona Fun-Gi, Arizona Mushroom Club,Fall 1999
Diabetes is a disease that affects the way ourbodies use food. Normally, during digestion, the body changessugars, starches, and other foods into a form of sugar calledglucose. The blood then carries this glucose to cells throughoutthe body. Insulin, a hormone normally produced by the body, is usedto convert the glucose into energy as needed. In diabetes,something goes wrong with the process of turning food into energy.In one form of diabetes the pancreas cannot make insulin; in theother it does not make enough or the insulin cannot be usedproperly. The treatment for insulin-dependent diabetes is dailyinjections of insulin and a rigid diet. Injection of insulin is theonly way to treat this disease at present because digestive juicesbreak down insulin given in pill form, rendering it useless.
Researchers for Merck have found a leaf fungus in theCongo that is able to duplicate insulin's effect and survive thetrip through the digestive system. The tiny molecule of this leaffungus stimulates the individual protein and is not affected bydigestive enzymes.
The leaf fungus molecules have only been testedon animals. There have been no serious side effects, and the fungusnearly duplicated insulin in the ability to suppress blood sugars.There is no projection on when human treatment will begin, but theMerck research team is confident that the molecule, or some variantof it, will be successful in treating this serious disease. Thisalso is a clear indication of the importance of jungles and rainforests to the world.
Board Notice: A PSMS annual report andby-laws, etc., will be put out at the March banquet.
A NEW TREE OF LIFE FOR PLANTS
Fungifama, South Vancouver Is. Myco. Soc., August 1999
ST. LOUIS, MO, 9/4/99 _ A five-year effort toreconstruct the evolutionary relationships among all of Earth'sgreen plants has resulted in the most complete "tree of life" ofany group of living things on the planet, a team of 200 scientistsfrom 12 countries announced today. The team has revealed that thegroup traditionally thought of as "plants" is really four separatelineages, or kingdoms green plants, brown plants, red plants, andfungi with one kingdom, fungi, being more related to animals thanto plants.
The green plant lineage is the largest of thefour plant groups, comprising about 500,000 species, including allof the Earth's land plants (trees, shrubs, grasses, flowers, ferns,mosses) and some of the aquatic plants, such as green algae.
In addition to dividing life on earth into fivekingdoms instead of two, the team has overturned the traditionalbelief that the so-called "land-plant invasion" was led by seawaterplants. Instead, the research team has found that primitivefreshwater
plants provided the ancestral stock from whichall green plants now on land are descended and that this ancestorspawned every green plant now alive on earth.
The research team is part of the Green PlantPhylogeny Research Coordination Group, funded in the United Statesby the National Science Foundation, the U.S. Department ofAgriculture, and the U.S. Department of Energy. The team'sdiscoveries hold profound ethical, intellectual, ecological, andeconomic implications for science, medicine, industry, andsociety.
Further information on the team's research andreferences to scientific papers can be found at the following website: http://ucjeps.berkeley.edu/DeepGreen/DeepGreen.html
Mushrooms Tuscan Style Jack Czarnecki
A Cook's Book of Mushrooms, via NJMAnews,July_Aug. 1999
2 TBs olive oil 1 tsp salt
½ cup onions, chopped 1 tsp sugar
½ cup broth or water 1 TBs soy sauce
8 oz fresh wild or domestic ½ tsp dried savory
mushrooms 2 tsp corn starch (optional)
Place olive oil in a skillet over medium heat.Add chopped onion and sauté until slightly brown. Add½ cup water or broth, then add 8 oz. fresh wild or domesticmushrooms and cover the skillet. Summer for 30 minutes. Themushrooms will greatly reduce in size and be completely coveredwith liquid. Add salt, sugar, soy sauce, and dried savory and stir.Simmer another 5 minutes. If thickening is desired, stir in 2 tspcorn starch that has been dissolved in ¼ cup cold water.Blend until thickened and serve. Serves 4.
A TWIST OF FATE George Thompson
Potomac Sporophore, September 1999
His name was Fleming, and he was a poor Scottishfarmer. One day, while trying to make a living for his family, heheard a cry for help coming from a nearby bog. He dropped his toolsand ran to the bog. There, mired to his waist in black muck, was aterrified boy, screaming and struggling to free himself. FarmerFleming saved the lad from what could have been a slow andterrifying death.
The next day, a fancy carriage pulled up to theScotsman's sparse surroundings. An elegantly dressed noblemanstepped out and introduced himself.
"I want to repay you," said the nobleman. "Yousaved my son's life."
"No, I can't accept payment for what I did," theScottish farmer replied, waving off the offer.
At that moment, the farmer's own son came to thedoor of the family hovel.
"Is that your son?" the nobleman asked.
"Yes," the farmer replied proudly.
"I'll make you a deal. Let me take him and givehim a good education. If the lad is anything like his father, he'llgrow to be a man you can be proud of."
And that he did. In time, Farmer Fleming's songraduated from St. Mary's Hospital Medical School in London, andwent on to become known throughout the world as the noted SirAlexander Fleming, the discoverer of penicillin.
Years afterward, the nobleman's son was strickenwith pneumonia. What saved him was penicillin.
The name of the nobleman was Lord RandolphChurchill. His son's name was Sir Winston Churchill.
Not being ambitious of martyrdom, even in thecause of gastronomical enterprise, especially if the instrument isto be a contemptible, rank-smelling fungus, I never eat or cookmushrooms.
. Marion Harland, Common Sense in theHousehold:
A Manual of Practical Housewifery, 1873
