alt Hacker NewsAn unstoppable mushroom is tearing through North American forests
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I had a mushroom farm in Northern Michigan some years ago and we grew Golden Oysters, among other species. I think our winters are too cold for them to really establish themselves, but I was hearing reports of them 'going native' in Southern Michigan as long ago as 15 years.
Like the farmer in the article, I also wondered about the apparent lack of effort in growing native species. My area has a wonderful native oyster Pleurotus populinus; exceptional in taste compared to other oysters, but I have never heard of anyone cultivating them.
I’ve enjoyed reading up and growing various mushrooms. They vary from tasty, medicinal, to deadly. Lions mane is a blast to grow and tastes pretty good, some say lobster, and you can cook them like steak. Plus they just look awesome. Supposedly has various health benefits too.
The scariest stories, beyond the usual “oops I ate a death cap,” to me are people growing oyster mushrooms and finding their house infested. Oyster mushrooms popping their heads out of every crack and nook in bathrooms, crawl spaces, and kitchens. Basically any crevice with moisture.
[]https://www.reddit.com/r/mushroomID/comments/rlozpo/these_gr...
[]https://old.reddit.com/r/microbiology/comments/lwpjas/theres...
2026 was already quite interesting and now I have marked “Unstoppable Carnivorous Mushroom” on my Bingo Card.
I would have thought all the fungus had long ago traveled around the world? Don’t they move easily on the wind or on items shipped from place to place.
Wonder if I'll be able to add a new entry to the list of "mushrooms that supposedly grow in my region but cannot be located within 100 sq miles of my home" soon.
I often read about invasive species from a Western point of view and some of the most aggressive and hard to keep under control species come from Asia. Is the Asian ecosystem equally invaded by Western species? Are forests, gardens, or lakes in Asia overrun by European carp and grey oyster mushrooms? Or is there something about the environment and ecosystem in Asia that makes those species uniquely invasive and resistant?
For example the Japanese knotweed evolved to grow on the side of volcanoes and survive the occasional lava flow. It's a uniquely harsh environment which prepares it for thriving in any "gentle" garden in the world. But the mushrooms didn't evolve in any particularly bad environment, so why are these species outcompeting local ones? Why are they so fit for a new environment?
I know I have some selection and survivorship bias because I only know of the species that made it, not the ones which try to invade and fail so that's why I'm curious if this is a special situation, or more or less expected because a known percentage of species from any part of the world end up outcompeting local species from another.
The larger picture is: we humans are fighting an oncoming tsunami (exponential fungal growth) with sandbags. And puny ones, at that.
It's the same with any invading species. Go pluck all the Japanese honeysuckle and knotweed (not the fault of the Japanese, BTW: we planted them!), kudzu, golden oysters, garlic mustard, invasive rose, and so on that you like. Smash all the spotted lanternflies in your entire city! Etc.
Those populations will barely hiccup, and then continue.
We have no real plan, maybe not even a real ability, to stop any of them. They are establishing themselves high up in native populations, largely due to lack of controlling pressures (generally a lack of predator/grazers, and parasites).
We're in a painful transition point, spurred on by human travel and long-range commerce (shipping by ground, sea, and air). Even if we began (somehow!) bio-filtering everything we shipped right now, it's too late.
There will eventually be a new balance, or at least a new temporary equilibrium. Unfortunately, a lot of things we like are going to be displaced or even extincted by the pressure of this rapid change, whether it's songbirds or oranges or a significant percentage of the human species.
We are constantly learning more about how utterly vital fungi are to all the various land ecosystems on the planet. I fear that we could see some ecosystems collapse due to the large and fast changes in their fungal makeup.
Wonder if this will have the Wolf phenomena: Where wolf populations explode until there is no food left.
The author starts out depicting themselves as some sort of cloning scientist... and clearly not only isn't that, but isn't very informed on mushrooms.
Many, if not most, wood-decaying mushrooms (those that break down dead wood) rely on killing nematodes to supply nitrogen, which is otherwise short supply in their diet. They use adaptations that resemble glue pads, tripwire nooses, or even hydro-pumped harpoons to trap the "helpless nematodes" (oh, the humanity! Won't somebody think of the worms?). It's not rare; it just wasn't known until circa 2000. And it's not unique to the invading fungus; our native oysters were where this discovery was first made.
Spare me the "poor defenseless prey animal" BS, and tell me about the known or suspected ecological impact - the reduction in fungal diversity is relevant, at least.
I tried to read TFA to learn about what's going on. It's an article about an invasive species of mushroom, right? I'd like to be informed.
The first sentence is:
"The razor blade of the newly unpacked surgical scalpel glints in the late Autumn light."
So I just immediately stopped reading.
This style of writing is exhausting and too common. It's an article about mushrooms, not a spy action thriller.
It feels like there had been some shift over the past decade that has been pushing / encouraging this style of writing, and I'm not sure what's caused it or what the solution is.
It's getting to the point that I'll need to use an LLM to summarize any article I care about to just extract the relevant info.
That would be particularly ironic if it was an LLM that generated the article.
A company grows these (and other mushrooms) in a warehouse here in Zurich to supply restaurants and grocery stores, which is probably one of the reasons these mushrooms are now found in the wild.
I "hunt" (in German you use the verb "collect/gather") mushrooms in the forests around Zurich and I haven't seen these yet. They also don't appear in my Pilzfürher app specific to Switzerland. But I have heard they are here. From pictures I've seen of them in the wild I might dismiss them from a distance because I could mix them up with two common yellow mushrooms here - one poisonous.
(I'm going out to search for morels this weekend)