Return to northeast Ohio for our summer foray weekend. For the first time we will explore the J.H. Barrow Field Station just east of Hiram, Ohio. It is the property of Hiram College with over 400 acres of varied habitat. There are many interesting student research projects carried on including aquatic and terrestrial ecology, agroecology and animal behavior to mention a few. There is interest in compiling a photo-journal of the species on the property. A student-created pamphlet has already been printed on fungi. Our foray may help add more species to their on-going project and those with digital cameras may assist with the photo-i.d. project?
Location: Hiram, OH , Portage County, is located at the junction of Ohio Rt. 82, Ohio Rt. 700 and Ohio Rt. 305. (Ohio Atlas & Gazetteer p. 42) [southeast of Cleveland, northeast of Akron-Canton, west of Warren, Ohio]
From the Ohio Turnpike take Exit 193 at Shalersville. Go north on Ohio Rt. 44 through Mantua and at Mantua Corners head east on Ohio Rt. 82 to Hiram. At the junction of Rt. 82, Rt. 700 and Rt. 305 go straight. Approximately 3 miles east off Ohio Rt. 305 is Wheeler Road. Go south (turn right) and J.H. Barrow Field Station is on the west side of the road (right-side) about 1 mile. We will strive to have the OMS foray signs in full view!
Accommodations: Hiram, OH possibilities…..1) Least expensive first! Camping at the field station on Wheeler Road. You may arrive Friday after 5 PM for set-up! There are no facilities/no hook-ups other than the Observation Bldg restroom which does NOT include a shower! Tents can be pitched on the lawn near the building and campers can park in the parking area.
2) Dorm housing is available but you will need to call Matt Sorrick, Director, Center of Science Education at 330-569-6003.
3) The Mahan House is a unique opportunity on campus. This 5 bedroom century house on 11763 Dean St. has a parlor, kitchen and one shared bath for $30-40 per night. Contact Nick Rudy at 330-569-6115 for reservations.
4) Positively the finest housing would be The Hiram Inn. It is in the heart of Hiram and offers elegant and charming accommodations. It is approximately $100/night, mention the Ohio Mushroom Society to receive their corporate rate. Call 888-447-2646 or 330-569-6000; www.hiraminn.com
5) Streetsboro, OH off Exit 187 of the Ohio Turnpike has a number of
motels. It is the summer season at Geauga Lake so they may be full and
have summer pricing. They are generally located on Route 14 East off this
turnpike exit.
Microtel Inn & Suites- 330-422-1234 or 800-771-7171
Holiday Inn Express- 330-422-1888 or 800-HOLIDAY
Comfort Inn- 330-422-6446 or 888-422-6229
Econolodge- 330-626-5511
Schedule:
Friday, July 15, 2005—Social gathering will be in Garrettsville, OH
on Rt. 82 approximately 3 miles. south of Hiram. Meet 6:30 PM or later
at OLDE MILL RESTAURANT/BREW PUB, 8148 Main St.. We will start with
homemade ice cream on their deck overlooking the beautiful Cuyahoga River.
Eventually we will head to the bar to continue our evening round-up. Parking
is on Main St. and also 1 block behind the storefronts across the street.
We will break-up our frivolity at about 9-9:30 PM.
Saturday, July 16, 2005 our foray will begin with the hospitality and
sign-in from 9
AM to 9:30 AM in the Observation Bldg at the field station.
The forays will be on the field station property with alternate opportunities at near-by Eagle Creek Nature Preserve, ODNR and possibly at Nelson Ledges State Park.
Lunch will be provided. Potluck contributions are always WELCOME!!
Our featured speaker will be Ernst Both, the Director Emeritus of the Buffalo Museum of Science. We welcome his return and for those who may not already know, Dr. Both is the author of "The Boletes of North America: A Compendium". His expertise on boletes helps us all learn. The topic of his talk will be “New Light on Bolete Relationships”. Here’s hoping we FIND some boletes to study up close!!
Saturday evening dinner around 6:30 PM will be held in Garrettsville, OH. Sean’s Pub & Eatery/Slim & Jumbo’s, 8101-8105 Main St.. For those who attend the Friday evening gathering you will see Sean’s across the street from our ice cream place. Parking is along Main St. or behind this restaurant. We plan on clearing out BEFORE the DJ begins…or stay and jam to the tunes? Your pick!!
Sunday, July 17, 2005 will continue our mushroom hunting, a ‘debriefing” and clean-up from 9 am to noon.
This proposed description is subject to improve as plans continue to develop. For questions call Pauline and Pete Munk 440-236-9222 or pjmunk3@yahoo.com
The USPS has issued another (the 7th) in their Nature of America series, this one called Northeast Deciduous Forest. To quote: “This series features the beauty and complexity of plant and animal communities in the United States.” This latest installment in the series features, among the cuddly and fearsome mammals, birds, and reptiles, two mushrooms, both good edibles. Having once been a philatelist myself (a word easily misinterpreted; I’ve seen looks of surprise upon my divulging such tendencies, and swear I once overhead someone mumble, ‘His poor wife, how does she deal with it!’). My zeal for collecting stamps has waned since my youth, but I still have enough residual enthusiasm left to applaud the USPS’s belated effort to give in to the hounding of mycologically minded folks to bring out a series of such stamps. The real philatelists among us would like a whole set of stamps (a sheet of 50 different species is the impossible dream of the most rabid fans) but for now we’ll have to settle for these two edibles shoehorned into the diorama of other life-forms. Scanning their abundance makes me wonder if I’m missing all the wild turkeys, black bears, white-tailed deer, long-tailed weasel, and eastern red bats, because my head is tilted earthward in search of fungi.
One could argue that another fungus is represented in the diorama, though it’s a pretty offbeat allusion. American Chestnut sprouts are illustrated: they are there because the chestnut blight fungus has killed the adult trees and the sprouts emerge from the roots of the dead chestnut trunk. The role fungi play in virulent plant diseases is rarely celebrated at mushroom forays. Though this does provide me with a convenient segue to plug the NAMA foray in LaCrosse, WI this July, as it will be possible to see a mature American Chestnut stand. Because the blight recently began attacking the trees in this stand, in a matter of a few years, they will very likely be reduced to such clumps of sprouts, which emerge from the perimeter of the well rotted chestnut stump and are illustrated in the USPS diorama.
But even though 3 different fungi are shown in the diorama, only one
of them has been circumscribed and fully featured within the frame of a
stamp. And even the Honey Mushroom has to share billing with a red
eft (eastern newt). The chicken mushroom suffered the misfortune
of having a cute little eastern chipmunk beside it, so guess which life
form is centered in the middle of the stamp and which is reduced to a fraction
of its full size and relegated to the far-right corner of the stamp?
And even that small piece is partially obscured by a garish white USA printed
over it. The indignity!
If you think I’m trying to whip up a tempest in a teapot, you should
scan the pages of the weekly Linn’s Stamp News (published in Sidney, in
southwestern Ohio). It’s often peppered with irate philatelists ventilating
over one issue or another. A recent, ongoing concern is the substitution
of permanent adhesive type stamps, in place of the old dry glue adhesive
which was licked to affix the stamp. The former could be easily soaked
off in water, so the stamps were presentable for mounting in one’s stamp
album. Philatelists are nothing if not passionate about their
hobby! Not unlike mushroom hunters… and when the same person succumbs
to both appetites, well, some things are best left unspoken!
Reprinted with permission from Spore Print, the Bulletin of the Puget Sound Mycological Society.
I was crawling on all fours over the slightly moist ground inhaling the aromatic smell of the small-leafed rhododendron and the fungal breath of soil awoken by spring. The pleasant warmth radiating from the strong subtropical sun was cancelled out by a cold wind blowing down from the snow-covered jagged peaks surrounding us. However, the sunlight was supposed to be a major help spotting the tiny stromata, the fruiting bodies of Cordydeps sinensis, the caterpillar fungus (called Yartsa Gunbu in Tibetan), which emerge with the first green sprouts of sedges in an otherwise brownish landscape. Sonam Doden, a Tibetan butter dealer from Dardsemdo, who agreed to take my friend Sherab Gyatsen and me on a Yartasa Gunbu hunt, told me that the shadow of the tiny fungus will help me to tell the strroma apart from all the other little brown objects that carpet the ground in early spring, such as rhody twigs and withered stems of edelweiss and asters. Finding the elusive stroma by its shadow sounded a bit better than the Tibetan folklore that the caterpillar fungus can be best spotted on a windless day, since only a plant with an insect as its root would tremble slightly.
We had been crawling around for over an hour now at 14,000 ft and had not found a single “bu” as Sonam called it for short. At least this mode of movement did not cause any altitude-induced shortage of breath. Scanning the ground so closely, I was reminded of the vegetation studies I had done in the early 90s in East Tibet, and in the absence of the fungus my mind kept itself busy by babbling names of plants I thought I recognized, such as Kobresia pygmaea, Notholirion bulbiferum, and Meconopsis horridula. Luckily, not far above us a Tibetan family had interrupted their beautiful singing, breaking out a few times into excited screaming. Apparently they were sharing their joy when finding some “bu.” Their success told me it should be only a question of time until we stumbled upon the elusive Yartsa Gunbu too.
I marveled at all the small azaleas that blanketed the slopes. All were about half a meter tall, kept in check by browsing livestock. I recalled the beauty of these shrubs in late May. Once I drove by when all the surrounding slopes were ablaze in bluish purple from their tiny flowers. Set on fire, my chain of thoughts went on, probably all these slopes had been burned before to create good pastures. Uncountable slopes where dark spruce-fir forests or evergreen oak-spruce forests had grown were replaced by pastures and shrub lands owing to centuries of grazing and slope burning. This must have substantially extended the habitat of the caterpillar fungus in Tibet. The yak and its herders as the best friends of Cordyceps sinensis? Interesting idea.
I awoke from my thoughts when suddenly I realized I was looking at a miniscule brown something between tufts of gray grass. And it had its own shadow! But it did not move. Can this be it? Is this the needle in the haystack? Sonam and Sherab were sure it was Yarisa Gunbu. I got out my Swiss knife and was ready to dig it up. Wait a minute, Daniel, I told myself; first you have to document it. Get out the camera. I had come halfway around the world to find some Cordyceps sinensis growing in the wild after years of collecting info and data, especially on its importance for Tibetan nomads and farmers. Seven years after I first encountered it in Bachen, I was finally looking at a stroma pushing its way up from the soil.
Digging out the caterpillar fungus I first used my knife to cut the turf. Kobresia sedges have very dense root systems. Often Tibetans cut the turf into bricks and build walls out of it, definitely ancient green construction. Actually, most of the biomass of Kobresia is concentrated underground, a great strategy to protect itself from extreme weather and wide spread intense grazing. Luckily the victim of Cordyceps, the ghost moth larva, feeds off these sedges, which make up most of the grasslands all over the Tibetan Plateau, I was crawling over like a larva myself. Once I had carefully removed the humus-rich topsoil and tough roots of the sedges from the front side of the fungally transformed worm, I started carefully to peel back a thin layer of mycelium that encapsulated the insect part of the whole Yartsa Gunbu. Finally, the larva showed its yellowish body so I could take a photo of the whole organism in situ. We continued our search but found only two more “bu” within the next hours.
Around noon, in typical Tibetan hospitality, the fungus foraying family invited us to join their picnic. They had brewed a pot of tea, although to my tongue its taste does not invoke any memories of tea. It is better described as a kind of broth, since lots of salt and butter, most of the time rancid, is added. But a cup of soup is just the right thing on a cool spring day up in the mountains, even if it tastes rancid. This is the unique taste one has to accept to find culinary happiness in Tibet.
Fortunately I had my teacup with me. Every Tibetan always brings his own bowl with him wherever he goes, since it is also needed for eating “tsampa,” roasted barley flour mixed into the tea, a Tibetan’s daily staple.
Mixing tsampa into tea is a challenging exercise that takes practice and refined finger coordination. First, one has to guess the right amount of flour and, second, the flour gets mixed into the greasy tea with your index and middle fingers. Watching a Tibetan mixing tsampa in seems very simple, even gracious and clean. Actually, clean was a misnomer for two reasons—first, I was using my dirty fingers after digging larvae and, second, the procedure is rather messy for the underskilled. Luckily, I have developed an approach to minimize the mess. I do the first mixing with my knife. Yes, the blade I just used to cut the turf.
In the end the batter is supposed to turn into a kneadable mass. A Tibetan friend told me how he was being admonished as a child for not cleaning his bowl properly with the words “every dog is able to keep its bowl cleaner than you,” which makes perfect sense when considering that the bowl is licked clean after use before shining it with your coat. Along with the tea we vcre offered bread and a tasty string cheese. I felt regret that I only had some roasted almonds to share.
Chatting about our Yartsa hunt, we found out that the family was also disappointed with their meagre harvest. Sherab speculated that there might be so few specimens because the area was well searched. This was a plausible explanation as evidenced by the multitude of colorful dots in the brown landscape moving steadily, but trancelike in slow motion searching all over on this Saturday in late April. Also, it was the very first week of the season. When I looked closely at the dug specimen, it was apparent that the spore producing asci had not fully developed yet. This is bad news for Cordyceps. In an ideal world Cordyceps sporocarps should not be picked the first week or two until they start to release their spores to guarantee sustainability of collection. However, no such regulations are formulated anywhere yet, and so far Cordyceps seems not seriously endangered, a promising fact for a very precious organism collected intensely for centuries in Tibet.
At this point it might be time to explain what all this fuss is about. This funky fungus, besides its larva-fixated feeding fancy, is a highly sought-after medicinal mushroom in the two ancient systems of medicine in Tibet and China. While there are plenty of fungi to go around for the 6 million Tibetans living right among them, the demand of 1.5 billion Han Chinese is a market force of a completely different dimension. The western market so far is relying on artificially grown mycelia, since most westerners don’t encounter enough social pressure to eat larvae.
In Tibet, the use of Cordyceps sinensis was traced back by Dr. Yonten Gyatso to documents of the 14th century. where it is mentioned in the Tibetan medicine text “Instructions on a Myriad of Medicines” by Nyamnyi Dorje. Some Tibetan doctors want to recognize Cordyceps under a different name in an 11th century text, but other Tibetan doctors and scholars insist it is clearly a lizard, not a fungus that the ancient “Blue Berryl” folio is referring to. In Tibetan Medicine Yartsa Gunbu is used as a tonic for general strengthening, boosting the immune system, and increasing virility and is prescribed for kidney and heart problems. It is also used for treatment of hepatitis B Unlike in China, where patients consume the whole fungus, in Tibetan medicine it is mostly prescribed in formulated composite remedies, which contain a variety of ingredients to balance each other, thus optimizing their efficiency and minimizing side effects. Tibetan medicine was formalized between the 8th and 11th Centuries. It absorbed a lot of knowledge from the Indian Ayuvedic system, but also integrated classical Greek elements, which arrived in Tibet via pre-Islamic Persia.
In Traditional Chinese Medicine Cordyceps sinensis is regarded as a powerful remedy for asthma and TB, and thus was rumored to help against SARS. However, its main lure is its tonic function, to speed up convalescence, prevent sickness, and boost the immune system and vitality. Of course, anything that boosts vitality will boost libido as well, which in turn is attracting the segment of consumers with the most disposable income, men over forty. Many Tibetans perceive the Cordyceps’ Viagra-like function as the main reason why the Chinese are paying a fortune for these caterpillars. When I asked some Tibetan men in Litang if they use some of the “bu” they gather, I was answered with laughter. “We don’t need to take that.”
Regardless of how the Tibetological discussion plays out regarding the first written reference to Yartsa Gunbu, currently the oldest Chinese reference to “dong chong xia cao”—the Chinese translation of the Tibetan name “winter worm-summer grass”—-is from 1757 by Wu Yiluo, but it was clearly used before that date in China. In 1736 the French Jesuit Du Halde, residing at the imperial palace, described how the court physician treated him successfully with the precious “Hia Tsao Tong Tchong.” There are other species used in Traditional Chinese Medicine, such as the brightly orange fruiting Cordyceps militaris. This entomogenous fungus grows all over North America and Eurasia and is also widely cultivated. I came across a Ziploc bag full of it in the office of a Chinese ecology professor, who swore that it had helped him to overcome his late afternoon exhaustion.
There are a multitude of studies demonstrating the medicinal potential of Cordycepin and other active components in Cordyceps sinensis. Results include lower bad HDL cholesterol, improved blood circulation, and better utilization of oxygen in the body. In 1993, the latter was brought to the attention of the western world during the track and field world championships in Stuttgart, Germany, when to everyone’s surprise Chinese runners won several long-distance races. This success raised eyebrows, and the coach partially attributed it to the fact that he had integrated Cordyceps sinensis in the athletes’ diet, which is not restricted as a performance-enhancing substance. This success, which was not repeated at the next world championships, is still being used to advertise Cordyceps’ capacity to enhance stamina, a scientifically substantiated claim. If I had true myco-vision I would insist that it is no coincidence that a stamina-enhancing mushroom—our term “stamina” referring to the threads of life spun by the divine Fates- is made of thread-like hyphae spun by the fungus, but I don’t really need to spin this thread too much, since the story of the fungus itself suffices.
Daniel Winkler, a PSMS member since 1996, lives in Kirkland, WA. Trained
as a geographer and ecologist, he works as researcher and non-governmental
organization consultant on environmental issues of the Tibetan Plateau
and Himalayas. He has published on forest ecology forestry, traditional
land-use practices, and medicinal plants and mushrooms. His photo essays
and articles are also published on his webpages at www.
danielwinkler.com.
Ed. Note: The first part of Dan Winkler’s article appeared in the March/April, 2005 issue of the Log.
Cordyceps potential as a wide-ranging insect control agent will be covered
by a substantial portion of Paul Stamet’s new book, Mycelium Running, due
out this coming September.