24 OregonStater.org C U LT UR E Uehling moved between groups, guiding their handson identification processes. “What do you smell?” she asked one student, who was holding a small white mushroom with a feathery underside. The group passed the mushroom around, bringing it carefully to their noses.“Some people say this one smells like green corn.” Several years ago, in my early 20s, I bought a mushroom field guide and became obsessed with fungi overnight. Before, the word “mushroom” had conjured up a mental image of gray button mushrooms from the grocery store. In my field guide, it was an entirely different story: Coral mushrooms reached up from the forest floor just like their namesake, with delicate branching limbs. Enormous puffballs ballooned from the earth, larger than a human head. Witch’s butter was smeared, jellylike, on tree trunks. My relationship with the outdoors was forever changed. I began to notice the fungi that had always been there — in forests, yes, but also on lawns, on the side of the road, or on piles of mulch. Every time I saw one, I had to drop everything and consult my field guide. That feeling followed me when I moved from the Midwest to Oregon. As a writing MFA student working with the Oregon Stater, I’m always looking for stories that connect people to place — and the wet forests of the Northwest seemed to be a fun- “WE THINK THAT WE UNDERSTAND MAYBE 5% OF THE FUNGAL SPECIES THAT ARE OUT THERE.” gal paradise. I found myself wondering what mushroom hunting looked like in this ecoregion, and what community might exist around it at Oregon State. My curiosity brought me to Uehling’s class field trip. “What we have here is very rare,” Uehling explained. “Most universities have maybe one mycologist in one department, but we have this kind of constellation of mycologists — probably a dozen mycologically oriented professors across different departments in the university.” Interdisciplinary interest in fungi extends well beyond the classroom and academia. Not only do mushrooms have a growing presence in the cultural imagination right now — one of the students on this trip sported a crocheted mushroom hat — but the science of mycology is also a growing field with surprising practical applications. “There are a lot of companies popping up now that use fungi to make interesting materials,” said Uehling. “Dairy-free cheeses, styrofoam alternatives, alternative leathers, nontoxic dyes. … The list goes on.” New uses raise new questions about safety, oversight and environmental impact. One of the problems is a lack of information. “Compared to other fields, [mycologists] have very little baseline data on fungal populations and their distributions,” said Uehling. Luckily, mycology is a field with a history of welcoming amateur enthusiasts like me — or like the students in Uehling’s class, whether or not they go on to pursue mycology as a career. “We’ve been partnering with regional mycology clubs and harnessing the power of citizen science to make a running list of every fungal species in the state,” Uehling said. Among the apps that make this kind of data collection easy is iNaturalist. It is user-friendly and AI-powered. Anyone can snap a picture of an interesting-looking fungus and upload it to its database. The result is a crowd-sourced library of geotagged continued continued
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