Sense of Place Lecture: The Unusual Mushrooms of Cascadia
Dr. Michael Beug holds up a prime specimen from a mushroom hunt. Photo Credit: Sarah Fox
Join Mt. Adams Institute for a free online Sense of Place webinar on, The Unusual Mushrooms of Cascadia, featuring Michael Beug on October 13th, 2021, at 7 p.m.
About the Lecture
When: October 13, 2021 at 7 p.m.
Where: Zoom – Register here!
Cost: Free, suggested donation of $10.
Virtually every habitat type found anywhere in the entire Cascadia Region, from southern Alaska to Central California and from the ocean to the west slopes of the Rocky Mountains, can be found within just 40 miles of the Columbia River Gorge.
As a result of this incredible diversity, the Gorge is home to a stunning variety of fungi. Some species are common and found in many parts of the Cascadia Ecosystem, while others are entirely unique to the Gorge. Join Dr. Michael Beug for an introduction to some of this fantastic fungal diversity and learn about how much is still to be discovered.
Meet Michael Beug
Michael Beug started mushrooming in 1969 and began photographing fungi in 1973. He has discovered more than 50 new mushroom species and his photographs have appeared in over 80 books and articles. In 1975, he joined the North American Mycological Association (NAMA) and the Pacific Northwest Key Council and he specializes in identification of the Ascomycota, the genus Ramaria, and all toxic and hallucinogenic mushrooms. Currently, Michael is researching oak-associated fungi of the Columbia River Gorge, especially Cortinarius species.
Michael Beug wearing his “I see mycelium” t-shirt. A mycelium is a network of fungal threads or hyphae. Mycelia most often grow underground and in rotting tree trunks.
Beug was a trained chemist who worked in enzyme kinetics and taught chemistry, mycology, and organic farming at Evergreen College, in Olympia, Washington for 32 years.
“My students at Evergreen and my co-teacher and I did the research that put the end to the use of DDT in North America, which allowed for the recovery of Peregrine Falcons, Bald Eagles, and Pelicans as well as other top avian predators,” said Beug.
Now retired, he continues to contribute to the scientific community. He has given numerous lectures, is the former editor of the Mcllvainea. He chairs the Toxicology Committee at NAMA. And he’s also served four terms as President of the Pacific Northwest Key Council, a group that works to write keys for identifying fungi.
In other words- Michael Beug’s retirement hasn’t slowed his passion for science and the natural world...although it has given him more time to make custom wines from his vineyard and to discover new varieties of mushrooms.
You’ve discovered over 50 new mushroom species, including four more that you discovered over the last summer. How is it that new varieties of mushrooms are still being discovered in the Pacific Northwest?
“Mushrooms are very ephemeral. They haven’t had the tools to identify one mushroom from another,” said Beug, “There have been mushrooms I’ve seen only once, or twice in my life or sometimes there were mushrooms that I saw even fifty years ago, and I’ve never seen them again.”
“Because unlike a plant, the mushroom (which is more like an animal than a plant) is in the ground, you can’t see this fungal organism in the ground. You can only see it when it produces a fruiting body,” said Beug “It’s like an apple tree that you can only see when it’s producing apples. It’s invisible, and so there are things that can be there for decades and not produce a fruiting body and there are some kinds that never do.”
He said nowadays scientists can use genetic testing to identify new species of mushrooms and that there are potentially so many different kinds of mushrooms out there that it may take decades to identify them all.
“I did some soil samples, to see what was in the soil and it was so complex, there were so many new things that we couldn’t even begin to deal with it, so we just threw it out and never did anything with it,” said Beug
Recently Beug has been focused on studying Cortinarius species.
Cortinarius species grow in oak groves.
However, they are also highly elusive, even though Beug's house is “nestled in an oak grove in Husum” he had never seen any. Until one day he was taking a walk not far from his home and he found five different species of Cortinarius under the oaks. He took some to the lab and discovered that every single one was a new undiscovered species.
“A week later I went to see James Mantone at Syncline Winery and he said ‘I’ve got these big beautiful mushrooms in my woods and I can’t find them in any mushroom books. Well Syncline Winery is in an oak grove,” said Beug, “So I went out and I picked five or six species of Cortinarius and every single one was new to science. Not a single one was named. Out of the first fifty species of cortinarius, I found over the next 18 years only one already had a name. That’s how little we know about them.”
The Cortinarius busy season is right around the corner for Beug. Oak associated Cortinarius typically fruit in mid-November until there is a hard freeze.
“Some seasons there aren’t any and other seasons there are hundreds, it’s just a matter of looking in the right time in the right place,” said Beug.
Why did you start mushroom hunting?
“I did it for food. I started in graduate school,” said Beug “They are delicious. I don’t eat the store-bought mushrooms, they don’t taste good to me. Most of them are Agaricus and Agaricus make me sick, even though they’re edible. I happen to be sensitive to it,” said Berg. “This is true of all foods, even if there are some foods that almost everyone can eat, there are some people that can’t handle them. The same is true with mushrooms.”
Beug took one bite of wild mushrooms and knew he would never go back.
“When I first tasted morels, they had this meaty texture and they tasted like a New York steak, they didn’t even resemble the flavor of the mushrooms in the store,” said Beug “and I thought I’ve got to learn about these things.”
“So a couple of months later my wife and I went out mushroom picking and there were all these beautiful big red mushrooms with white spots all over the top and we collected them and brought them back to the chemistry lab at the University of Washington,” said Beug “Nobody had a clue what we had.
So Beug did some testing.
“It took me a couple of days. And it turned out it was Amanita muscaria group and it’s the most famous mushroom in the world,” said Beug “It’s in children’s books, it’s in Alice in Wonderland, and yet people knew so little about it. So I took a non-credit course, I’d never taken a biology class before, except in the ninth grade. And gradually over the years, I turned from a chemist into a biologist because I just found mushrooms so fascinating.”
What’s so special about mushrooms?
“Their critical roles in the health of forests, and their uses in medicine. Penicillin comes from a fungus, virtually all antibiotics have fungal origins. We’re discovering all kinds of new medicinal mushrooms with the potential to fight cancer,” said Beug, “And the mycelium themselves, the interaction between the tree and the fungus in the ground is critical to the health of the tree. In fact, trees can communicate with each other, trees can talk to each other through the mycelium.”
Do you have a mushroom named after you?
“I do have a mushroom named after me,” said Beug “You never name a mushroom after yourself but it’s Cortinarius beugii and it was named by Dr. Joe Ammirati at the University of Washington.”
“I’ve named a blue chanterelle. I named it Polyozellus marymargaretae after a very lovely lady that I used to mushroom hunt with who was dying of Alzheimer’s. It’s a beautiful mushroom, not particularly delicious, but a very good mushroom for dying fabrics. I’ve named two new morels and a russula, and a whole bunch of new things,” said Beug.
As a mycologist what are your thoughts on psilocybin? (Psilocybin is a naturally occurring psychedelic prodrug compound produced by more than 200 species of fungi.)
“I am a total supporter. I’m not fond of the recreational use of it as it can be dangerous in unsupervised situations but it is not addictive. I’ve lectured at the Los Angeles Natural History Museum and Goldengate Park and at National Meetings about psilocybin,” said Beug, “I think psilocybin is probably the single most important medicinal drug out there to deal with depression and to get us out of the opioid crisis.”
“It’s gotten quite popular. I saw the cover of Newsweek had a whole row of mushrooms and they called psilocybin the new Prozac,” said Beug. “Oregon passed a new law that is eventually going to make it legal to consume mushrooms in a supervised setting...and there are new laws which are being prepared in Washington which should go on the ballot next year, and there are movements throughout the country.”
Beug said he’d been to psilocybin conferences and enjoyed being around people who used psilocybin.
“The people that are using psilocybin are just mellow and quiet, and it’s a very joyful atmosphere. It's not at all like being in a bar with people drinking alcohol,” said Beug. “Alcohol is far and away the most dangerous and deadliest legal drug out there. Psilocybin is far and away one of the safest drugs out there yet it is illegal. It’s illegal because Richard Nixon hated African Americans and he hated the anti-war movement and so the cannabis and psilocybin laws were passed to get the police into black neighborhoods and attack the anti-Vietnam war movement. It was a racial and politically motivated move and so neither had really anything to do with THC or psilocybin.”
I see psilocybin as a way out for people who have trouble with alcohol abuse, tobacco abuse and domestic abuse as psilocybin can help improve all those things. It can also cure PTSD. In tests, it has also cured about 70% of people suffering from PTSD. And we have a lot of people suffering from PTSD in the country today, not just from the wars, but from COVID, especially amongst hospital workers.”
What do you hope people take away from your lecture on the Unusual Mushrooms of Cascadia?
“I just want them to be impressed by how beautiful and diverse the fungal kingdom is. And to see all the different services that are provided to us human animals by this almost-animal called a fungus,” said Beug. “They’re not a plant, they produce a fruiting body, but they do not produce their own food. They differ from animals because they digest their food externally, they break down organic matter from the soil, but they can’t make their own food, they rely on plants and animals for that just like we do”
Want to know more about mushrooms? Register to participate in Michael Beug’s Sense of Place lecture or check out his book Mushrooms of Cascadia: an Illustrated Key.
“Everything in the book can be found within a 40-minute drive of White Salmon and Hood River,” said Beug. “We have such an incredibly diverse habitat here. We’ve got a marine ecosystem, we’ve got rainforest, we’ve got a semi-desert country, we’ve got oak forest and glaciers, so we’ve got it all.”
