Mushrooms are an essential part of ecosystems, affecting nearly every organism around them. They belong to the fungi kingdom, which is one of the most diverse groups of life on Earth. Today, we’re diving into the world of mushrooms with Dr. Patrick Leacock, a mushroom expert, in the Cook County Forest Preserve near Chicago. This area is home to 1,200 species of mushrooms, making it one of the most diverse regions in the country for fungi.
Dr. Leacock explains that forest preserves around Chicago are excellent places to find fungi. However, collecting mushrooms isn’t something you can do freely; you need a scientific permit for research and education. If you’re interested in collecting wild mushrooms to eat, you must check the regulations in your area, as they vary by state, federal, and county laws.
When collecting mushrooms for scientific purposes, Dr. Leacock uses various tools like tackle boxes, a pen or pencil, a collecting knife, a camera, a compass, a whistle, a ruler, and a GPS to record precise locations. Mushrooms are collected in paper or wax bags to prevent them from decomposing quickly, as they would in plastic bags. Safety is also important, so gloves and bug spray are essential to protect against insects and plants like poison ivy.
There are around 120,000 named species of fungi, with many more yet to be discovered. This group includes molds, yeasts, rusts, smuts, sac fungi, and mushrooms. Mushrooms are the most recognizable members of this group. They live mostly underground as thin threads called hyphae and only emerge as mushrooms when they’re ready to spread their spores.
In the oak woodlands, different fungi associate with different types of oak trees. For example, the smooth patch fungus is commonly found on white oaks, eating the outer bark and leaving smoother patches. While it doesn’t harm the tree directly, it can make the tree more susceptible to fire.
Another fascinating mushroom is the Laccaria, which has a mutualistic relationship with tree roots. This means they help each other: the fungus provides water and nutrients to the tree, and the tree gives the fungus sugars. About a third of the mushrooms in the forest have this kind of relationship with trees.
Some mushrooms, like the hen of the woods, are edible and grow on oak trees. However, collecting mushrooms in protected areas like forest preserves can disturb the soil and the ecosystem, so it’s important to follow regulations.
Another type of mushroom, the Amanita, is known for its gilled structure and universal veil that covers it when young. Some Amanitas are edible, but others are poisonous, so it’s crucial to know which species you’re dealing with.
Dr. Leacock has spent over sixteen years documenting fungi in the Cook County Forest Preserve. Research on fungi is still developing, as they only appear periodically, unlike plants. A small area of forest can host hundreds of different fungi species, but it takes years to discover them all.
Most fungi are still undescribed, with only about five to ten percent of their diversity known to science. If you’re interested in learning more about mushrooms, joining a local mushroom club is a great way to start. These clubs often host events where you can learn to identify different species and understand their roles in the ecosystem.
Mushrooms are not only fascinating but also vital to the health of our forests. By studying them, we can learn more about the intricate relationships within ecosystems and the incredible diversity of life on Earth.
Take a walk in a nearby forest or park with a notebook and camera. Try to find and photograph different types of mushrooms. Note their colors, shapes, and where they are growing. Use a field guide or an app to identify them. Remember to respect nature and not disturb the mushrooms or their environment.
Create a detailed drawing or painting of a mushroom species you find interesting. Research its characteristics and habitat, and include these details in your artwork. Share your creation with the class and explain what makes this mushroom unique.
In groups, role-play the mutualistic relationship between mushrooms and trees. Assign roles such as the tree, the mushroom, and other forest elements. Act out how they interact and benefit each other, highlighting the importance of their partnership in the ecosystem.
Choose a specific type of fungus to research in depth. Prepare a short presentation for the class, including its ecological role, any interesting facts, and its importance to the environment. Use visuals like slides or posters to enhance your presentation.
Find a local or online mushroom club that offers virtual meetings or webinars. Attend a session to learn from experts about mushroom identification and ecology. Share what you learned with your classmates and discuss how it changed your perception of fungi.
Here’s a sanitized version of the provided YouTube transcript:
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Ecosystems affect nearly every organism that lives near them, including one of my favorite kingdoms of life, fungi. I’m spending the day in a Cook County Forest Preserve with mushroom expert Dr. Patrick Leacock to talk about how to collect mushrooms, how mycologists study them, and the relationship between mushrooms and the forest. The Chicago area has 1,200 species of mushrooms, making it one of the most mushroom-diverse regions in the country, and many of these are found right here in our publicly protected forests.
**Emily:** Where are we right now?
**Patrick:** We’re at a Forest Preserve outside Chicago in Cook County. There are lots of forest preserves around this city, and they’re all excellent places to look for fungi. Basically, any natural habitat is going to have mushrooms and other fungi.
**Emily:** But not everybody can go out and just collect mushrooms willy-nilly; you need a scientific permit.
**Patrick:** Right. For this Forest Preserve, we have a permit for research and education, but for collecting wild mushrooms to eat, you need permission, whether that’s public or private. State, federal, and county regulations vary, so you have to look them up for your area.
**Emily:** So when you come out here, you’re not just your average mushroom collector; you’re doing this for scientific purposes. What are some of the things you need when you’re collecting mushrooms?
**Patrick:** We have tackle boxes, a pen or pencil, some kind of collecting knife for digging up a mushroom or cutting it off the wood, a camera, compass, whistle, ruler, and GPS. We get a precise location, like within a foot, so I can go back the next year and find it again. We also use paper bags or wax bags for the mushrooms; we don’t recommend plastic because mushrooms sweat and decompose faster in plastic.
**Emily:** Okay, and you have gloves and bug spray.
**Patrick:** Yes, gloves and bug spray for protection against bugs. There are ticks, mosquitoes, and poison ivy here.
**Emily:** Safety first!
**Patrick:** Yes, safety first.
**Emily:** So it’s kind of an involved process.
**Patrick:** Yes, we record where we find mushrooms and write down notes on what they were growing on, collecting data as we go because it will go into their collections.
**Emily:** Right. Well, I’ve never been on a mushroom hunt. I’m excited to see what Cook County has to offer.
**Patrick:** Let’s go!
There are around 120,000 named species of fungi on Earth, with estimates of millions more species yet to be described. This includes molds, yeasts, rusts, smuts, sac fungi, and mushrooms. Mushrooms are probably the most recognizable members of this incredibly diverse group of organisms. They live out of sight as thin, web-like threads called hyphae until they’re ready to disperse their spores, at which point they emerge above ground as mushrooms. We’re on our way to meet some of the more charismatic ones.
**Patrick:** We’re here in the oak woodland, and the two major oaks we have here are red oak and white oak. They have a chemical difference in the bark, and the fungi pick up on that. Certain fungi are associated with white oaks and certain fungi with red oaks. This is a very common bark fungus on white oak, called smooth patch fungus, because it eats the outer bark, leaving smoother bark patches. The reproductive parts are these little white fruit bodies that form spores.
**Emily:** Does this damage the tree?
**Patrick:** It makes the bark thinner. It’s not technically a parasite because it’s eating dead bark, but it does make the tree a little more susceptible to fire since thick bark is a fire retardant.
**Emily:** Wow.
**Patrick:** This is a Laccaria, our biggest Laccaria, called okra purpurea because it’s okra on top and purple underneath.
**Emily:** Oh, it’s pretty!
**Patrick:** If we pick it up, you can see that purple color. This is a big gilled mushroom, and the gills are waxy. This is one of the fungi that are mycorrhizal with trees, meaning they have a mutualistic relationship with tree roots. They provide water and nutrients to the tree, and in return, the tree gives the fungus sugars.
**Emily:** Oh, they are buddies!
**Patrick:** About a third of the mushrooms in the forest have that relationship with trees.
**Emily:** Wow, that’s so interesting!
**Patrick:** Oak trees are our main mycorrhizal partners in these woods.
**Emily:** So this mushroom needs oak trees to thrive?
**Patrick:** It needs a variety of trees, but here it’s with the oak trees. This is hen of the woods, or Griffola frondosa, and it’s a root parasite on this white oak tree.
**Emily:** Why is it called hen of the woods?
**Patrick:** Because when it’s fresh, it looks like a ruffled hen.
**Emily:** How can you tell it’s old?
**Patrick:** If you touch it, it will be squishy and probably have bugs in it.
**Emily:** So you wouldn’t eat that?
**Patrick:** No, it’s like rotten food. Some people refer to it as the dancing mushroom.
**Emily:** Oh, it’s a party mushroom!
**Patrick:** No, not that kind of party mushroom.
We’re on the other side of the tree from the other one; this is hen of the woods again, but this one is young. It will grow larger and be a good edible size.
**Emily:** Are people coming out here and taking edible mushrooms home to eat? Is that a problem in areas like the Forest Preserve?
**Patrick:** Different landowners, county, state, and national authorities don’t want people harvesting mushrooms. Part of it is disturbing the soil; walking on plants impacts the soil community. That’s a bigger disturbance than harvesting the mushroom because the mushroom is making spores, but the actual individual is down in the ground. You’re not removing the individual, just its reproductive parts.
**Emily:** Oh, and that’s what people eat?
**Patrick:** Yes, you’re eating the mushroom’s reproductive parts.
We found another type of mushroom over here that is also mycorrhizal with the trees. This is an Amanita mushroom, a type of gilled mushroom. Amanitas all have a universal veil that covers the whole mushroom when they’re young. Depending on the Amanita, you can get veil material left behind; this one leaves a cup at the base.
**Emily:** So it erupts out of that?
**Patrick:** Yes, the veil is like an egg stage, and the mushroom hatches out of that, leaving the eggshell and vulva.
**Emily:** And when you say it’s a gilled mushroom, you mean it has gills?
**Patrick:** Yes, there are gills underneath where the spores are made.
**Emily:** Classic mushroom!
**Patrick:** Yes, like the classic definition of a mushroom as a gilled mushroom.
**Emily:** Patrick, what’s this one?
**Patrick:** This is another Amanita, but it looks quite different. It’s yellow with a little bit of reddish on it. Instead of a nice vulva at the base, the universal veil breaks up and leaves what we call warts on the cap. The vulva is less firm and just breaks up as the mushroom expands. Some Amanitas are edible, while others are poisonous, so you need to know which species you’re dealing with.
**Emily:** That’s an important distinction.
**Patrick:** You don’t want to take chances with Amanitas because some of them are deadly.
**Emily:** These are classic mushroom shapes!
**Patrick:** Yes, it’s a gilled mushroom with a cap, stem, and a little ring.
**Emily:** It’s cute! It’s got a little skirt. Is that a technical term or did I just make that up?
**Patrick:** The technical term is “annulus” for a ring.
**Emily:** Or mushroom skirts!
**Patrick:** We saw this up north a couple of weeks ago, and I don’t see it around Chicago much, but this is Leotia, known as jelly babies by the British because they have a version of gummy bears called jelly babies. If you feel it, it’s very gelatinous, like a gummy bear.
**Emily:** Oh, it’s squishy!
**Patrick:** Yes, and that’s an Ascomycete, which has a different way of making spores. It’s making spores on this head.
**Emily:** Oh, instead of underneath. Interesting!
**Patrick:** This one is pretty charismatic.
**Patrick:** Yes, mushrooms come in every color. This is one of the purple ones, or violet, and this is a Cortinarius. If you’re going out hunting for edible mushrooms, there are groups like Cortinarius and Amanita that you want to learn to avoid because some of these are poisonous, and a few are deadly. Luckily, mushrooms don’t cause too many deaths each year, but a few do.
**Emily:** That’s a good message for anyone interested in learning how to identify and collect mushrooms, especially if they’re planning on eating them.
**Patrick:** Right. Depending on your region, there should be some kind of mushroom field guide that points out what’s edible and what’s poisonous so you can learn both.
**Emily:** This one’s pretty!
**Patrick:** Yes, that’s bright yellow. This is another popular edible called the honey mushroom because of the color. It’s Armillaria, and we have several species of those. They’re all tree parasites, living on dead or dying oak trees. This is a parasite on a tree, and it can send out cords to find another tree and colonize it. This is the humongous fungus.
**Emily:** I’ve heard about that!
**Patrick:** Yes, the first one found was 37 acres in Michigan, and then they found one a couple of square miles in Oregon, where it was one individual spreading from tree to tree over a long time. This is one of the largest fungi in terms of area it covers.
**Emily:** Good job, fungi! Would that make this mushroom one of the largest living organisms?
**Patrick:** Yes, but it depends on how you define “largest.” The biggest vertebrate is a whale, and the biggest plant is an aspen tree clone. This is one of the biggest fungi in terms of area it covers.
**Emily:** Good job, fungi, the humongous fungus!
So, Patrick, we have had quite the successful foray out here in the forest preserves, and you have done a lot of work in this area documenting mushroom biodiversity.
**Patrick:** Yes, I’ve been here for sixteen or more years documenting the fungi in this forest preserve outside Chicago, and this is just a small sample of what can be found here. Research on fungi is many decades behind plants because fungi come up periodically; they’re not out all the time. You have to repeatedly visit a place to record all the species over several years. I marked out a twenty-five square meter area, and a quarter-acre of woods can have 300 species of fungi.
**Emily:** That’s amazing!
**Patrick:** But it takes many years to find them all.
**Emily:** Do you have any estimates for how many undescribed or new species of fungi might be out there?
**Patrick:** Most fungi are undescribed. For fungi, we know about five to ten percent of the diversity.
**Emily:** So we have 90 percent of fungi species that are unknown to science?
**Patrick:** Yes, but that includes all the micro fungi, little plant parasites, and tiny things in the tropics and everywhere.
**Emily:** If someone wants to get involved in this research and collection, how could they do that?
**Patrick:** One way is to find your nearest mushroom club. I work with the Illinois Mycological Association and the North American Mycological Association, which is like the umbrella group. They have a national foray each year in a different state, and we find 300 to 500 species in three days.
**Emily:** Finding mushrooms can be really exciting!
**Patrick:** Yes, you found a bunch of good edibles, some mediocre ones, and this one, which we call the destroying angel. It’s one of the deadly Amanitas; it’s all white, tastes good, smells great, but it destroys your liver.
**Emily:** They’re so pretty!
**Patrick:** Join a mushroom club and hang out with me!
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This version removes any informal language, clarifies some points, and maintains a professional tone throughout the conversation.
Mushrooms – The fruiting body of a fungus, typically produced above ground on soil or on its food source. – In the forest, we found several mushrooms growing on the fallen logs.
Fungi – A group of spore-producing organisms feeding on organic matter, including molds, yeast, mushrooms, and toadstools. – Fungi play a crucial role in decomposing organic material and recycling nutrients in the ecosystem.
Ecosystem – A biological community of interacting organisms and their physical environment. – The coral reef is a diverse ecosystem that supports a wide variety of marine life.
Species – A group of living organisms consisting of similar individuals capable of exchanging genes or interbreeding. – The giant panda is an endangered species that is native to China.
Research – The systematic investigation into and study of materials and sources in order to establish facts and reach new conclusions. – Scientists conduct research to understand how climate change affects biodiversity.
Nutrients – Substances that provide nourishment essential for growth and the maintenance of life. – Plants absorb nutrients from the soil to help them grow and produce food.
Relationships – The way in which two or more organisms interact with and affect each other in an ecosystem. – The symbiotic relationships between bees and flowers are vital for pollination.
Edible – Safe to eat; fit for consumption. – Many wild mushrooms are edible, but some can be poisonous if not identified correctly.
Oak – A type of tree or shrub in the genus Quercus, known for its strength and hardness. – The oak tree provides a habitat for many species of birds and insects.
Diversity – The variety of different types of life found in an ecosystem. – Biodiversity is important for maintaining the balance and health of ecosystems.
