By Sophie Lui and Carol McGrath
Global News
Published October 7, 2023
8 min read
There’s a bit of a shroom boom happening in our midst.
Not the psychedelic kind. Rather, the amount of science, research and art involving ordinary mushrooms is exploding.
“The mushroom has become the zeitgeist of our time,” says mycologist Paul Stamets.
Global News had a rare chance to sit down with the world-famous mushroom expert at his home in the Gulf Islands of British Columbia.
Mushrooms are having a moment, and Stamets says we’re just starting to unravel the potential they have.
“Some can feed you, some can heal you. Some can kill you. Some can send you on a spiritual journey,” says Stamets, who shot to fame for being a proponent of psilocybin — the chemical that gives magic mushrooms their psychedelic power.
Stamets is probably the planet’s best known mycophile — a devotee of mushrooms — and he has been touting their amazing abilities (both psychedelic and non-psychedelic) for decades.
His research into the abilities of mushrooms and their roots, called mycelium, has shown that they can used as antivirals. Stamets is the lead author of a paper published in Nature on how to save bees from colony collapse, which is a major challenge for ecology and agriculture.
Bees are susceptible to a virus that is transmitted from mites. Stamets discovered that the mycelium from woodcock mushrooms can give bees immunity when it comes to fighting the virus.
And Stamets believes mushrooms have other-worldly capabilities, too. He’s received a grant from NASA to test if mycelium can create healthy soil out of the asteroid dust on Mars.
Stamets likens mushrooms to miniature biochemical factories, capable of breaking down even toxic products into something edible. “Mycelium eats oil, and then it can transform it into something that’s nutritious.”
Which means mycelium has the potential to remediate — or help with ecological disasters — because of its remarkable ability to decompose organic compounds.
It’s this understanding that prompted Shannon McPhail to pursue a solution to a longstanding problem in Northern British Columbia. McPhail is the co-executive director of the Skeena Watershed Conservation Coalition, which an area where there have been ongoing concerns with how old railway ties may be impacting this important fish habitat.
The Skeena is B.C.’s second largest salmon watershed. At over 54,000 square kilometres, it is bigger than Switzerland.
“It has all five species of wild salmon. We also have the largest strain of wild steelhead in the world,” explains McPhail.
The Canadian National railway runs through the Skeena Watershed. Rail ties which support the steel beams of the track are regularly replaced and the old ones, locals says, are left by the thousands beside the tracks. This is a concern because the ties are preserved with a chemical called creosote, a toxic oil-based substance.
The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has identified creosote as a carcinogen that may pose risks to fish and invertebrates.
According to the locals, these ties often sit in piles in the area for decades, leaching into the soil.
“They just leave them there. The only time they remove them is either they’re going to bring them elsewhere to bury them or burn them. And that just adds to the problem. It doesn’t cure the problem,” says Chief Na-moks, who is the hereditary chief for the Wet’suwet’en.
He says it’s the duty of his people to protect the Skeena watershed, a role they cherish.
“We don’t have major development on our rivers. It is pristine. We can drink out of our rivers, out of our creeks, out of our lakes,” he explains. “There are not many places on this planet where you could do that. We’re very proud of that.”
McPhail was looking for a way to help and found a possible solution involving mushrooms. She read case studies where oyster mushrooms were used to clean up fossil fuel spills.
“And then you were able to eat the mushrooms after. It was really, really interesting and that kind of blew my mind and I thought, it can’t actually work, can it?”
So she set a plan in action to find out by teaming up with local farmers Martin Hommel as well as Chris Zazula, owner of Aurora Sporealis in Hazleton, B.C.
Most mycelium love to eat wood and some can be trained to eat certain species of trees. The team experimented with several different local mushrooms. They placed pieces of mycelium in petri dishes with little bits of the railroad tie and waited.
“We tried Elm Oyster [mushrooms], Turkey Tail, Artist’s Conk, which is like a cousin to Reishi that grows up here, and Chicken of the Woods,” Zazula told Global News.
The victorious mushroom was Turkey Tail. It consumed the creosote, converting it back to its non-toxic base elements.
McPhail says they have lots more testing to do but it’s a start. “The worst we can do is we can make very toxic railway ties significantly less toxic.”
An exciting first step. Now the next one is testing it on a much larger scale, which means moving from the petri dish to the piles of ties and that requires the cooperation of CN Railway.
“We’d love CN to come in as a partner and actually help deal with this because their toxic legacy in this region needs to shift.” says McPhail.
McPhail says CN has been contacted but so far has not agreed to any further development with the remediation project. When contacted by Global News, CN had no comment on this project.
“The frustrating part is we shouldn’t have to depend on a nonprofit small organization in Hazleton to have to do this work,” McPhail says. “But this is our home.”
And remediation is just one of many remarkable things that are being done with fungi.
Some people, like Tarun Nayer, are using them in more artistic ways.
A trained biologist and a working musician, Nayer began harmonizing his passions during the pandemic. He literally started plugging his synthesizer into whatever he could find growing outside his home in the Northern Gulf Islands of British Columbia.
Initially, he tinkered with plants but when the fall weather began he started to notice mushrooms popping up.
“A little cluster of common and cap mushrooms came up and I was like, ‘well, I’ve been trying plants might as well plug into a mushroom. And so I brought a bunch of gear outside onto the lawn and plugged into the cluster, and it was really fun and cute.”
And he found they had some unique characteristics.
“In mushrooms, you just never know what you’re going to get,” Nayer says. “Sometimes you plug in and they’re going nuts. And sometimes nothing happens for minutes, you know, and then it will just go crazy again.”
The music varies, but it does sound like psychedelic noises used in movies about outer space.
Nayer gets sound from the mushroom by inserting two electrodes into it. A small electric current then passes through it and the changes in resistance from the mushroom are converted into various rhythms and melodies on his synthesizer.
“Everything around us has electrical properties, and you can use the fluctuations in the electric properties of the organic world to inform art and conversation.”
His sounds have become so popular that Nayer has loads of followers — watching how he travels the world putting on mushroom performances. These “shows” begin by sending the audience out to forage, and then Nayer uses what they bring back.
Foraging for fungi is something that seems to be growing in popularity, as is the demand for them at farmers’ markets. Sales have grown 20 per cent since 2018.
Paddy Smythe has a front-row seat to the fungi frenzy. He’s co-founder of Whistler Harvest, and can be found every week at the farmer’s markets in B.C.’s Lower Mainland. Smythe says a lot has changed since he first got into the business.
When he first showed up with Lion’s Mane mushrooms at the markets two years ago, reaction from customers was much different. “They kind of looked at it and went, ‘What is that? It looks weird.’”
Now, Smythe says, it’s flying off the shelves so quickly he can’t grow enough.
Most of his mushrooms are grown indoors but some can only be obtained in the wild. For instance, oyster mushrooms can be cultivated but chanterelles and porcinis can only be found by foraging.
Smythe’s partner Paul Cain does most of that work, and he knows just what to look for.
Cain says he was taught at a very young age to learn to identify the tree as opposed to actually looking for the mushrooms on the ground.
“If you learn to identify what mushrooms associate with the different tree species, you’ll have a lot more success.”
When he’s looking for chanterelles, Cain looks for fir trees but when he looks for lobster mushrooms he’s looking for cedar trees, “which produce prolific amounts of lobster mushrooms right on the base of the trees.”
He took a Global News team out foraging, and it didn’t take him long to find a bright orange fungus growing on an old tree stump. It’s called Chicken of the Woods or the Sulfur Shelf Mushroom, and Cain says it’s very popular among chefs.
Funny thing is that even though we consume them like vegetables, fungi are not plants, or animals, or even bacteria. They exist as their very own kingdom. There are more than 1.5 million species out there, yet only 10 percent have actually been identified.
And that is what mycophiles say is amazing, considering how much we are already learning from what little we know of the little toadstools.
From nature’s cleaner to foraged music to table top, there’s a bounty of possibilities on the horizon, and new reasons to elevate those little forest dwellers beneath our feet.
“Mushrooms check every box and bring people together in a community sharing their ancestral knowledge,” Stamets says.
“Mushrooms are colourful. They’re beautiful. They’re mysterious. They’re fun! After all, the first three letters of fungi…are fun!”
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