Fabulous Fungi

Mushrooms, they’re not just for pizza, soup and casseroles anymore.

They’re cleaning up oil spills in Central and South America. They’re being developed into safe and effective insecticides. They can even be made into hats, said mycologist Larry Evans.

Evans was in Columbia Falls last week to give a talk on mushrooms for the Flathead Valley Chapter of the Native Plant Society.

Evans grew up in Illinois on a Christmas tree farm. His parents were devoted mushroomers and his father would pay him a nickel for every morel he found.

“In 1977, I was lucky enough to take a course from the great mycologist Orson K. Miller, author of Mushrooms of North America,” Evans said on his web site. “Although he was on the faculty of Virginia Polytechnic University, Miller was also a visiting professor at Montana for over 20 years. I took his eight-credit class in mycology at the university’s Yellow Bay Biological Station. That’s when I really fell in love with mushrooms. It wasn’t long before I had Miller’s book memorized.”

After high school he ended up at the University of Montana and graduated in 1979 with a degree in botany and a minor in microbiology. Since then, he’s had a long and distinguished career studying mushrooms around the globe and in his own backyard in Montana.

On the local scene, Evans talked about morel mushrooms — the coveted fungi that sprout up en masse after forest fires. There are at least three different species of morels and some say there are even five. The blacks come up first, when soil temperatures reach about 42 degrees and then the grays and then the greens.

The greens like the soil to be warmer — in the 50s. But you don’t have to have a fire to find morels. They’ll often sprout up after a disturbance, like a logging operation.

All of the morels are edible, but Evans noted the greens don’t dry very well — they have a tendency to rot.

Evans in the past few years has also been doing work in places like Ecuador and Bolivia, where oyster mushroom varieties are being used to clean up old oil spills. Ecuador alone has 1,600 spills sites where waste crude was left. In some places, he said, the oil is 12 to 18 feet deep and as it gets rained on almost daily, it seeps into water table, threatening water supplies.

But mushrooms over millions of years have adapted the ability to break down hydrocarbons by releasing hydrogen peroxide compounds outside of their cell walls, which, in turn, breaks the oil down into digestable compounds.

“There’s a little bit of fancy chemistry going on,” he said.

The end byproduct, however is carbon dioxide and water.

Fungus can also filter heavy metals out of water. Heavy metals are positively charged, while the mushroom cell membranes are negatively charged. Run polluted water through the fungus, which is grown on palm oil waste, and it cleans the water of heavy metals.

Evans said it’s possible to grow a boxcar-sized filter in about 20 days — large enough to run a stream through it.

Such filters could be used to clean the Berkeley Pit in Butte, he said. The infamous pit is one of the most toxic waterbodies in Montana.

“We could reclaim it tomorrow,” he said.

Fungus could also be used to create insecticides with no harmful effects to the environment. Seventy-five percent of insect diseases are fungus, he noted, while in humans and other warm-blooded creatures, only 3 percent.

Fungi have already been developed to combat grasshoppers, but they could also be used to kill species like bark beetles, which have devastated western forests.

He said there are about 460 taxa of fungi that attack insects.

“The potential for using fungi against insects are huge,” he said.

But there is little political or economic will, as companies continue to promote pesticides that are poisonous not just to insects, but everyone, he claimed.

Fungi could also be used to build biodegradable packaging, which would keep deadly plastics out of the oceans. They can also be used to make clothing — Evans sported a hat he made from a conch some 20 years ago. Conchs are the hard fungus seen growing out of trees.

On a more local front, several mycological associations are going to get together this June and do a “bio-blitz” in Glacier National Park in an effort to identify as many species as possible.

Evans said the hope is to eventually complete a guidebook on local fungi.