Summer Continental MycoBlitz
- Kevin Kilbane
- Jul 9
- 4 min read
Eagle Marsh just received a BioBlitz inventory of its plant, insect and animal life. You can join citizen scientists all over North America for another inventory — this time for fungi.
The Summer Continental MycoBlitz takes place Aug. 8-17. “Myco” comes from the word mycota, another name for organisms known as fungi.
During the MycoBlitz, you photograph and submit a dehydrated sample of any mushrooms you see, even in your own yard. Mushrooms are the visible reproductive structure of a much larger fungus organism that lives underground or in wood, Steve Russell, the current president of the Hoosier Mushroom Society, said in a phone interview. Samples sent in from the MycoBlitz will be analyzed and given a DNA sequencing bar code for identification.
“One of the key things that most people don’t understand at this point is that most species of mushrooms that would exist within the state of Indiana are still undescribed,” Russell said. “They have no common name, but then they also don’t have a scientific name. The amount of work that’s left to do just to understand what exists is still quite substantial.”
He estimates 3,000 to 4,000 mushroom species may live in Indiana. He believes there probably are about 40,000 mushroom species in North America.
“The diversity on the planet, even in Indiana, is among the highest of any organismal group,” Russell noted. “You get every permutation of everything you can think of in terms of colors and forms and shapes and nutritional structures.”
Documenting fungi diversity
Russell founded the Hoosier Mushroom Society (hoosiermushrooms.org) in 2012 “to document the biodiversity that exists and to teach people about mushrooms and mycology (the classification and research of fungi).”
In 2015, Russell and the Hoosier Mushroom Society initiated an effort to identify and document mushroom species through DNA sequencing. The effort expanded nationally in 2017, said Russell, who moved two years ago to near Ann Arbor, Mich., to become director of the nonprofit Mycota Lab in Plymouth, Mich.
The MycoBlitzes and other mushroom foray events invite the public’s help with increasing mushroom identification. You can read detailed participation information at mycoblitz.org. Russell said the process is simple: Photograph mushrooms you see, upload the images to the iNaturalist smartphone app, collect and dry the mushrooms in a dehydrator, and mail dried specimens with their iNaturalist number to the Mycota Lab for free DNA sequencing and identification.
So far, about 1,200 people in North America have participated in mushroom surveys and identification efforts, he said.
You also can join in the Fall Continental MycoBlitz taking place Oct. 17-26.
If the MycoBlitz time periods don’t fit your schedule or you want to provide additional help, you can report mushroom findings and send in specimens anytime through the MycoMap Network at mycomap.org. The submission process is similar to submitting specimens during a MycoBlitz.
So far, about 20,000 specimens have been sent in from Indiana, Russell said.
Potentially significant work
“Since we don’t know anything about most of the species,” Russell noted, “you can’t even begin to assess what type of pharmacological benefit they might have, what type of ecological benefit they might have. You can’t know anything else about a species until you first know it exists. So I refer to what we’ve been doing as building a foundational dataset that’s going to allow other scientists in the future to be able to ask and answer the questions they can’t ask today.”
The research could be life-changing.
“Every time you walk out into your front lawn,” Russell explained, “there’s a possibility of finding a species that’s completely new to science that could have some type of significant impact in a future world.”
When, where to look
Rain has the most impact on whether we see mushrooms, Russell said. “The main correlation to when you’re going to find them is how much rain there was in the previous couple of weeks. So if we’ve had a lot of rain, you’re going to end up finding a whole lot of mushrooms.”
(This writer also has noticed many mushrooms in residential lawns and landscapes that receive regular watering.)
Some mushrooms only pop up during a certain season of the year, such as spring, summer or fall, Russell said. Most mushrooms also wait until the soil reaches a consistent preferred temperature before appearing. Once up, they typically are visible for a week or two before degrading and fading away.
“Most mushrooms have specific types of habitats that they like to fruit in,” he noted, “but you can find them anywhere there is organic material.”
Some mushroom species also associate with certain types of trees or plants, Russell said. The leaves of the tree or plant help convert sunlight into sugars, which then are transported to roots. The roots provide those sugars to the mushrooms. The mushrooms scavenge through the soil and break down material into nutrients and minerals wanted by the tree or plant.
If there are no trees or plants nearby, Russell added, fungi can get their energy by decomposing organic material in the soil, such as in a lawn.
Resources
To learn more about fungi, Russell recommends joining the Indiana Mushrooms Facebook group, www.facebook.com/groups/indianamushrooms. People regularly post photos of fungi they find and other group members offer information or a species’ identification. You then can go out and see where the same mushroom species lives in the wild, he said.
Using iNaturalist, www.inaturalist.org, usually also results in feedback and possible identification, but it sometimes can take awhile, he said. However, your iNaturalist submission documents the mushroom’s location and information that may be useful to a researcher in the future.
So get out there and discover the wild and fun world of fungi!
Fungi facts
While some species of mushrooms are edible, many species are not. For safety reasons, a person trained in mushroom identification should always examine a specimen to determine if it is edible, said Steve Russell, president of the Hoosier Mushroom Society.
Fungi organisms can be huge. We see only the mushrooms that pop up above ground. The main part of most fungi lives underground or in wood. One fungi in northern Michigan spread through more than 173 acres, a 2018 news report said. A single honey mushroom organism known as the “Humongous Fungus” lives in more than 2,380 acres in northeastern Oregon, news and magazine reports said.
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