National Geographic Adds Funga To Definition Of Wildlife

Merlin Sheldrake’s book Entangled Life is an excellent starting point to begin learning about the fascinating world of fungi. The iNaturalist and Mushroom Observer apps allow you to document mushroom observations from your front lawn, pasture, or anywhere you might visit, and have peers and trained scientists help identify what you’ve found.

Edible and medicinal mushroom kits like oyster mushrooms or lion’s mane are available online and are great for teaching youngsters about the life cycles of mushrooms. Educators can find resources on teaching children and youth about fungi at https://fungieducation.thinkific.com/ Kids and adults alike will enjoy taking spore prints, a simple project that involves placing a mushroom cap with the gills down on a piece of paper and placing a cup or bowl over the cap overnight, creating just enough condensation to prompt the spores to release and fall on the paper. The colour of these spore prints can be used to help identify mushrooms, although amateurs are always advised to err far on the side of caution when trying to identify edible mushrooms.

Before consuming mushrooms picked in the wild, be sure to first check with an expert, as many edible mushrooms have deadly look-alikes. Joining the Alberta Mycological Society (https://www.albertamushrooms.ca/) is a great way to meet other mycophiles and participate in identification events called forays with experienced mycologists. From the Wild will be offering a foraging tour in Vermilion on June 3 for a cost of $75 per person (https://www.fromthewild.ca/product-page/foraging-tour).

Finally, a visit to our beautiful provincial park after a rainfall is an amazing place to sit down, take a deep breath, and have a slow look around for what fungi might be growing alongside you.

Are mushrooms plants or animals? It’s a trick question; they’re neither. Fungi comprise their own kingdom distinct from plants and animals. In fact, mushrooms are more closely related to humans than to plants, sharing nearly 50 per cent of their DNA with humans.

As the fruiting bodies of many fungi, mushrooms are typically the sole visible traces of fungal organisms that live predominantly underground. Given their relative invisibility, fungi have not been given the same attention in scientific exploration as flora (plants) and fauna (animals). However, years of dedication on the parts of passionate mycologists—that is, scientists who study fungi—has recently led the National Geographic Society to include funga—that is, the recently proposed term for the kingdom of fungi—in their definition of wildlife alongside flora and fauna, opening up the possibility for future funding, research opportunities, education, and inclusion in conservation and agricultural policy frameworks for this massively overlooked area.

Other major policy gatekeepers, including the International Union for Conservation of Nature and Italy’s Institute for Environmental Protection and Research, have also joined the push to formally include funga in their own conservation policies and granting opportunities. Giuliana Furci, a Harvard University associate, National Geographic Explorer, and the founder of the Fungi Foundation, explains, “We demonstrated that funga was equivalent to flora and fauna, and then we built the three-F proposal for decision-makers to include the term funga in conservation frameworks. It’s three Fs, not two: flora, fauna, and funga.” Educators, ecologists, and laypeople in all areas can make a difference by using the three terms—or simply “plants, animals, and fungi”—together when talking about wildlife and conservation.

Fungi are essential to life on earth. Together with bacteria, they form lichens that slowly break down rock into fertile soil. Fungi were responsible for helping plants out of the water and onto land around five hundred million years ago by serving as root systems until plants could evolve their own. Even today, over 90 per cent of plants depend on mycorrhizal networks. ‘Mykos’ comes from the Greek term for ‘fungus’ while ‘rhiza’ means ‘root.’ Together, fungal hyphae—that is, fine tubular structures that split, fuse, and knot underground—and plant roots work together to exchange the essential nutrients and water acquired by the fungi for the sugars plants generate through photosynthesis. This relationship also helps protect plants from disease and drought.

These networks of hyphae are known as mycelium, and some have been shown to be electrically excitable, similar to the electrical impulses in mammals’ nerve cells.

Most fungi reproduce through the release of spores. Some mushrooms explode with a force that propels their spores faster than the speed of sound, albeit for only a few hundred microns. Other spores drift on the wind and get carried along in the earth’s atmosphere. From there, some trigger the formation of water droplets, leading to rain and snow. Others find habitable ground and begin producing hyphae, extending into the earth and building connections with plant life, fruiting mushrooms when conditions are ripe for reproduction.

Unlike plants, which produce their own food through photosynthesis, fungi actually live inside their food, secreting enzymes to digest the world around them. Their cell walls are made out of chitin, which is a major component in the exoskeleton of insects.

Compared with plants and animals, knowledge of and interest in fungi in Western culture are just in their infancy, but exciting possibilities are already on the horizon. Mycotextiles and mycofabrication involve the use of fungi to create various materials to sew and build with, providing sustainable alternatives to leather and non-biodegradable materials like plastic, glass, or metal.

Mycoremediation involves the application of fungi to digest and remove pollutants in the environment. Research has shown mycoremediation to be effective in cleaning up oil spills as well the Chernobyl radiation. Oyster mushrooms (Pleurotus ostreatus) have been particularly effective and easy to cultivate for mycoremediation projects.

Mushrooms are also increasingly recognized for their medicinal qualities, with several varieties like reishi, cordyceps, and lion’s mane available as supplements from various vendors around town. Last year, Health Canada announced a research investment of nearly $3 million through the Canadian Institutes of Health Research to support clinical trials to examine whether psilocybin, the psychoactive constituent in psychedelic or “magic” mushrooms, could be used effectively in concert with psychotherapy to treat alcohol use disorder, treatment-resistant depression, and end-of-life psychological distress in advanced-stage cancer patients. Similar clinical trials are in progress in the United States, Britain, and elsewhere, with promising preliminary results.

On a spiritual level, fungi are profound teachers of the cycles of life, death, and rebirth, and spending time observing them over the course of a season can result in ineffable understandings that cannot be acquired otherwise. Many of the fungi that produce the mushrooms that we can see are saprotrophic, meaning that they derive nutrition from decaying organic matter. In fact, if saprotrophic fungi did not exist, the earth would be buried under layers upon layers of dead material lacking the ability to transform into new life. This was precisely the case during the Carboniferous period 290 to 260 million years ago, when plants first began to produce the lignan that would grant them the support to grow into trees taller than a few feet. At the time, fungi had not yet worked out how to decompose lignan, and for tens of millions of years, dead trees could not decompose. Today, fungi expertly decompose dead trees into nourishing new soil that begets new life.

Despite these strengths, their unprotected status means that many fungi are under threat. “The same threats that affect plants and animals, such as habitat destruction, climate change and overharvesting, also affect fungi. We hope that by including fungi, current and future Explorers will know the [National Geographic] Society supports projects that aim to understand, illuminate, and protect these critical organisms,” says Ian Miller, Chief Science & Innovation Officer of the National Geographic Society.

Furci says, “We’ve been looking at protecting habitats through conservation frameworks that focus on large, charismatic species and explicitly excluding a whole kingdom of life. It’s about being scientifically correct and it’s about habitat protection for the organisms that connect it all.” She continues, saying “Once you discover fungi in nature, your vision of nature will never be the same again.”

To read the National Geographic article on the addition of funga to their definition of wildlife—the first cover story on fungi in the magazine’s 130-year history—visit https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/article/kingdom-funga-fungi

To watch a short film on flora, funga, and fauna featuring Furci, visit https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2DsnWcWeyoI

Merlin Sheldrake’s book Entangled Life is an excellent starting point to begin learning about the fascinating world of fungi. The iNaturalist and Mushroom Observer apps allow you to document mushroom observations from your front lawn, pasture, or anywhere you might visit, and have peers and trained scientists help identify what you’ve found.

Edible and medicinal mushroom kits like oyster mushrooms or lion’s mane are available online and are great for teaching youngsters about the life cycles of mushrooms. Educators can find resources on teaching children and youth about fungi at https://fungieducation.thinkific.com/ Kids and adults alike will enjoy taking spore prints, a simple project that involves placing a mushroom cap with the gills down on a piece of paper and placing a cup or bowl over the cap overnight, creating just enough condensation to prompt the spores to release and fall on the paper. The colour of these spore prints can be used to help identify mushrooms, although amateurs are always advised to err far on the side of caution when trying to identify edible mushrooms.

Before consuming mushrooms picked in the wild, be sure to first check with an expert, as many edible mushrooms have deadly look-alikes. Joining the Alberta Mycological Society (https://www.albertamushrooms.ca/) is a great way to meet other mycophiles and participate in identification events called forays with experienced mycologists. From the Wild will be offering a foraging tour in Vermilion on June 3 for a cost of $75 per person (https://www.fromthewild.ca/product-page/foraging-tour).

Finally, a visit to our beautiful provincial park after a rainfall is an amazing place to sit down, take a deep breath, and have a slow look around for what fungi might be growing alongside you.