Now that it’s autumn – the temperature is cooler, daylight hours are fewer and there’s a bit more rainfall – the mushrooms are found in wet forests in every colour, shape and texture. They squeeze out of cracks and crevices, form clusters, sprout from decaying wood. Some species form miniature sports teams in brightly-coloured uniforms; others are individual blobs, wads of pink or grey, like congealed wool, or off meat, or something somebody spat out. There are those that seem to be clad in scales or spikes. Some are coated in slime or drool. Others erupt or implode. One, I know, will glow once it gets dark.
or, Close Encounters with Alien Jelly
By Bert Spinks
I am walking slowly through rainforest in Takayna country. The trees are thickly moss-covered and they reach to impressive heights, but I am hardly tempted to look up to the canopy. My eyes are glued to the ground. It is strewn with moist myrtle and blackwood leaves (like soggy cereal); mud and tree roots form a puzzle for walkers’ boots. But these aren’t what I’m looking at either. I am looking for mushrooms.
When I do look up, my eyes move to the laminated pamphlet I have in my hand. This is, of course, the ‘FungiFlip’ – the precious identikit for Tassie fungophiles. To open it feels almost like unfurling a sacred scroll. This is partly because the vast majority of writing on the FungiFlip is in Latin. There are just a few random epithets in English, which stand in place of official species names. These are esoteric phrases like ‘rapid bluer’ or ‘garlic odour’.
Otherwise, they’re tongue twisters. I find myself muttering an incantation as I read the names of what I see.
I’ll find a few fungi with more familiar names. Aficionados will know them well. There’s pixies’ parasol, which sprouts in eye-catching bunches of blue, as well as strawberry bracket fungus, which forms bright red clumps of foam that contrast vividly with their arboreal backdrop. I also catch sight of a stinkhorn, which looks like a prop from the Rocky Horror Picture Show, and the equally macabre dead man’s fingers, clawing their way out of the grave.
But not being a Latin scholar, I have long used the general lack of common, English-language names for our island’s fungi species as an excuse to invent my own. Around the forest in which I live, I have the tiramisu fungus, the Mexican lady, the cosmic psycho, the golden gremlin. There is even a mushroom that I call a ‘dingo’s donger’, though I don’t expect anyone to want to borrow this one.
It turns out that I’ve been doing this since I was kid. Once upon a time, a strange substance materialised overnight in my cousins’ back garden. Suddenly, we saw abundant tufts of white slime everywhere. We had no doubt that we had discovered extraterrestrial deposits. We called it ‘alien jelly’. But years later I found it anew; it was, of course, a fungus. The FungiFlip that provided the scientific name: Tremella fuciformis. It has other common names, as it turns out, but I have personally stuck with ‘alien jelly’.
What we see in such prolific amounts throughout autumn are merely the fruiting bodies of a vast network of an unseen kingdom. The funny shapes, the eye-catching colours are just vessels for spores. The curious figures -- porcelain dishes, tubas and trumpets, boiled eggs, foam cricket balls, collagen-filled lips and alien jellies – are each particular fungus’s way of trying to disperse reproductive material around a place.
Most of the fungi’s matter is mycelium, which takes the form of innumerable trailing strands, thinner than human hairs. They play a huge role in supporting the life of the planet. To tell us just how much mycelium there is in the earth, scientists will often give a figure of how much of it might be found in a teaspoon of soil. The information is bewildering; I’d almost comprehend better if it the data was explained to me in Latin. Let it be known, however, that there’s a bloody lot of fungi that we don’t see; that the mushrooms themselves are but a mere and anomalous sample of what goes on in the fungal realm.
There’s a growing cult around the fungal kingdom. We now encounter many people who describe fungi’s habits and abilities as a recommended blueprint for the behaviour of our own communities. Mushrooms are seen as a symbol for symbiosis: they are creatures of collaboration and communication. Some speak of the ‘wood wide web’, in which nutrients and information are transferred throughout a patch of bush by the fungi. In this mystical mycelial network, some researchers say, there are electrical pulses with patterns that appear to match the patterns of spoken language.
It’s as though we have, dwelling within the soil upon which I dawdle, a commune of kind-hearted fairies, who distribute resources justly throughout the forest, to plants and animals alike, chatting away as they do so. It seems they are socialists. Perhaps they recite Latin poetry.
Further along the track, I crouch down to have a squiz at a fleshy patch of slick silver that has spread itself across a decaying log, its ruffled sections like the leaves of a cabbage. I am, of course, looking at my old childhood hero. Here, again, is Tremella fuciformis, alien jelly. I now understand that it wasn’t dropped from above by extraterrestrials; probably, the pine bark in my cousins’ backyard was loaded with mycelium and that fruited through a damp autumn night. The adults were baffled but us kids quickly came up with a yarn.
Try as I might to stop myself, I tell stories to fill the gaps in what I can see or understand. What we can’t experience can only be understood through stories.
Still, as I learn more about the complex nature of fungi, so too have I grown in understanding of what’s possible in the world. Walking through the shadows of Takayna forest, I strain to make sense of this vast but invisible web of interactions. It is hard to grasp, but these peculiar, eye-catching forms remind me that the soil beneath my boots fizzes with life. The Earth expresses itself in an endless array of surprising and elaborate ways. Our imaginations can only try to keep up.
Written by Bert Spinks
Illustrations by Josh Pringle
Just before publication, we received the news that David Ratkowsky, one of the authors of the FungiFlip, has passed away. We'd like to say cheers to Dr. Ratkowsky for his contribution to our knowledge about Tasmanian mycology.
Grab a FungiFlip HERE.
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