FUNGI’S POTENTIAL ON OUR REMOTE COASTLINE

A mysterious world of wonders

Branden Walle balances on a fallen cedar, home to hemlock seedlings, moss, and countless other unseen organisms. The rainforest canopy allows dappled sunlight to flicker through. Waves can be heard lapping the nearby shoreline of Kapoose Creek on the remote west coast of Vancouver Island.

“Let’s climb that bank. I haven’t explored there yet,” says Walle, who ditched his UVic biochemistry PhD and sold real estate for a while before returning to his first love: wild mushrooms. Now he works for a company seeking new medicines.

To look for fungi is to enter a still largely mysterious world of wonders. Fungi are all around us, changing and manipulating life on Earth. Scientists believe the kingdom Fungi contains between two and five million species, yet roughly only 150,000 species have so far been formally discovered and described. From coprophilous, or animal-dung-loving, fungi to mycorrhiza fungi that live in symbiosis with green plants, the diversity and abundance of fungal life is mind-boggling. Some mycorrhizal varieties produce deliciously edible fruiting bodies, known generally as mushrooms, and others manifest deadly poisonous ones like the aptly named death cap. The big takeaway for amateurs is know before you pick.

Wood wide web

Fungi have puzzled taxonomists (biologists who group organisms into categories) for years. They seem to elegantly straddle the worlds of plants and animals. They look like plants, but don’t produce food through photosynthesis the way plants do. On a cellular level they are more animal than plant. The groundbreaking work of University of BC scientist Suzanne Simard is shedding light on a subterranean fungal network by which trees share resources—a “wood wide web.” Fungi recycle carbon and activate nitrogen, phosphorus, and other essential elements. Humans have used yeast fungi for thousands of years to ferment foods and drinks. Researchers use slime mould to model transportation and other networks. Every day, doctors prescribe life-changing medications derived from fungi. From the shamans of ancient cultures to modern-day therapists, people have ingested fungi containing the compound psilocybin to plumb the depths of our subconscious minds.

After crossing the log, Walle claws his way up the bank. “Look. A morel. They love disturbed sites like this,” he says, pointing out how soil has sloughed down the bank.

Walle studied biochemistry at university. However, the prospect of pursuing a PhD as an impoverished student before ending up as a lab assistant prompted him to quit. Growing up in Victoria, he spent many autumns hunting with his dad and foraging for wild mushrooms in the Sooke Hills. Those youthful forays sparked a passion for mushrooms that stayed with Walle. After leaving post-graduate studies, he continued to forage and learned to cultivate mushrooms.

Citizen scientists

“Mycology is unique in that it’s largely driven by citizen scientists,” Walle explains. “I’d say that mushrooms are definitely having their moment right now.” Mushroom foraging is no longer the purview of a nerdy fringe. It’s mainstream. According to Walle, the COVID-19 pandemic propelled public fascination with fungi to another level.

Fungi's potential

PHOTO BY MATT NEWFIELD

“More people were getting outside and exploring their backyards,” Walle says, adding that social media sites dedicated to mushroom identification suddenly lit up with activity. He found himself going down the online rabbit hole with fellow fungi aficionados like Melanie Hess. Hess is president of the South Vancouver Island Mycological Society (SVIMS), an organization with some 300 dues-paying members, with heavyweights of BC botany like field guidebook author Andy MacKinnon among them.

“I began noticing all these bright orange and yellow things growing on the forest floor in the middle of winter,” Hess recalls, about her initial adventures with wild mushrooms. “Mushrooms introduced me to a whole new way of observing. Are the gills waxy? Is the stipe [stalk or stem] slimy? Is there an odour? Does the mushroom change colour after you pick it? It goes on and on.”

Miniature pharmaceutical factories

In 2017, the TV series Star Trek: Discovery introduced the astro-mycologist Paul Stamets, a character named after the real-life mycologist, who spends a lot of time at his futuristic Cortes Island getaway. Stamets also figured large in the 2019 film Fantastic Fungi by American filmmaker Louie Schwartzberg, which brought the magical world of fungi to life on the big screen. He has been one of the most vocal, if at times controversial, champions of the life- and planet-saving benefits of fungi, calling mushrooms “miniature pharmaceutical factories.”

It’s an apt metaphor. Fungi produce bioactive molecules known as metabolites. These chemical compounds interact with other organisms in “spectacular” ways, says Dr. Eric Brown, a McMaster University biochemist and Canada Research Chair in Microbial Biology.

Penicillin, one of the most widely recognized and prescribed medicines in the world, was discovered by accident in 1928 by Dr. Alexander Fleming. After returning from a holiday to his lab at London’s St Mary’s Hospital, he noticed mould [a type of fungus] growing on a petri dish of Staphylococcus bacteria. The mould appeared to be preventing bacteria from growing around it. This simple but keen observation led to the discovery of an antibiotic derived from the fungus, Penicillium notatum, that would go on to save millions of lives.

Fungi’s role in neurochemistry

Blockbuster cholesterol-fighting statins, the antibiotic Cephalosporin, the migraine medication Ergotamine, and the antifungal drug Caspofungin all come from fungi. And so does Cyclosporine, an immunosuppressive derived drug from the fungus Tolypocladium inflatum, that is used worldwide to prevent organ transplant rejection. “If you knew what I know about the way cyclosporine interacts with targets inside a cell, it would blow your mind,” Brown says over the phone from his McMaster University lab. “There’s no way a chemist could dream this up in a synthetic laboratory environment. Fungi are propelled by millions of years of interspecies evolution to create certain chemicals. We don’t know what they’ll be useful for. We just know they’re not created by accident. Nature doesn’t make mistakes,” Brown says. “And it all involves neurochemistry.”

For example, fungi of the family Ophiocordycipitaceae, commonly known as zombie-ant fungus, infect ants with a pathogen that hijacks the insects’ nervous systems to serve its own reproductive needs. The fungus alters the behaviour of the ant, causing it to attach by the mandibles to a plant leaf or stem until it dies. During that time, fruiting bodies grow from the ant’s head, eventually rupturing to release fungal spores. It’s an almost unbelievable parasitic relationship that could have come from the mind of a sci-fi author.

Nature—the part easily visible to the human eye—hums with vitality. But there’s another world out there, the world of microscopic fungi that is everywhere but not always visible. Somewhere on this biological frontier, fungi await discovery. As Walle wades through head-high salal bushes, it feels like he’s searching for a needle in the proverbial haystack. However, for a fungiphile, the hunt never gets old.