Why it is better to share information than to hoard it.

            It is the only way to advance knowledge efficiently.  It saves time in that you do not have to discover knowledge which has already has been discovered by someone else.  Discussion groups are created for this purpose on the Internet.  I am sure there are groups for experts, on any subject, and also groups for beginners, on any subject, and everything in between.  I was particularly interested in a discussion group on wild mushrooms.  Information on wild mushrooms, for a beginner, is very hard to find in this country.  To identify a wild mushroom, using the available guides, requires experience.  The question is how does one acquire this experience without going to college and studying mycology?  Most cultures which have a tradition of wild mushroom consumption have a duel track system for learning about wild mushrooms.  Those interested in learning about edible mushrooms learn the basics from their family or friends who have that knowledge.  They also learn the common names for these mushrooms.  Those who are interested in studying mushrooms, go to school and take courses.  Mushroom guides are seldom used in countries like Russia since most Russians will start learning to identify wild mushrooms, from their parents, as soon as they start to walk.

Mushroom clubs, in this country, tend to assume that everyone, who joins, will want to become an amateur mycologist and tell them to get guides and start memorizing the information and mycological terms.  Most beginners are, at first, only interested in finding a few different edible mushrooms and when they see what they are expected to memorize they get turned off, and go to the store to get their mushrooms.  No wonder that mycophobia is alive and well in this country.  Very few people, in this country, harvest and eat wild mushrooms.  Most mushroom hunters are either immigrants or children of immigrants who came from countries where picking wild mushrooms is a common practice.

Let’s look at two authors who have popular mushroom guides out, Gary Lincoff and David Arora.  The first one was written in 1981 the second in 1986.  Both volumes are out of date yet no new editions are in sight.  Why?  My guess is that there is no market for them.  They are not written for a person who is interested in learning to find some edible mushrooms.  Mushroom books do not make it to the best seller list.  Why?  Because there is very little interest in mushroom guides.  Why?  Because they are written in such a way that few people understand them.  You have to go to college and take courses in mycology before they will make sense to you.  Another way is to keep reading and trying to understand them until you have them memorized and learn the definitions of the mycological terms used.  This is what people like Gary Lincoff and Noah Siegel did, as far I understand it.  Most people are not as obsessed about wild mushrooms and do not want to spend the time and money to go that route.

I would think that most of the experts are looking for a way to make a living from their knowledge.  Many of them wind up writing mushroom books, sooner or later.  To make this profitable it would be nice to have a large group of people waiting to buy their product.  Their income from these books would be much better if they could get out of the rut of writing them in the same way that they were written 100 years ago.  Start writing guides that the common man can understand and use, and you will be rich.  We now live in a computer age.  There is no need to memorize guides if they can be stored on a computer.  Searching is done much faster on a computer than leafing through a guide or guides. 

The second thing is to get more people interested in wild mushrooms.  The first thing the authors of guides have to do is get away from the old formula of scaring people about poisonous mushrooms.  Do not dwell on them as much.  Present clear but brief information on how to recognize and avoid them, then concentrate on the positive.  Distinguish between poisonous mushrooms and those that can cause gastric distress.  Do not call them all poisonous!  The second thing is to spread the word about the good eating and medicinal benefits that wild mushrooms offer.  This can be done well and effectively in Internet discussion forums.  These forums need to have support from the experts.  Until better mushroom guides are written, the experts are best source to identify the mushrooms which the beginners find.  Hopefully the experts also can help each other identify some of their own finds.  What do the experts get in return?  They can see what these people are finding.  This is like having a team of people looking for mushrooms for you, practically every day.  The group is bound to have a better chance of finding mushrooms of interesting to you, than you can by yourself.  You can actually request that people look out for the mushrooms that interest you.  Also you will be getting more people interested in wild mushrooms.  This would enlarge the group that will want to buy your mushroom books.

I started on wild mushrooms by being interested only in edible mushrooms.  After I learned to find and recognize all the edibles I could use, I became interested in none edible mushrooms.  First I was attracted to medicinal mushrooms, but later I found I got excited whenever I found some mushroom or fungi which I never saw before.  Whenever this occurred I wanted to share this excitement with the group.

The other exciting thing about wild mushroom hunting is the chance to find something that very few people have ever seen before, or even the possibility of finding something completely unknown.  It is like a treasure hunt.

This is what happened when I set out to find the fruiting body of Inonotus obliquus polypore.  It started as a quest that I expected would take many years or even the rest of my life.  Considering that very few people ever saw it and no one had a good picture, or description, of the fruiting body, I did not start off with high hopes.  I had a few advantage in that I live in an area where there are many infected birch and I am retired so I have plenty of time.  The lack of information about this fruiting body turned out to be an advantage also.  I wound up checking all birch, whether it had Chaga on it or not, whether living or dead.  The information available said that the polypore fruited in the summer or fall.  That is far too long a period to keep checking dead birch.  It sounded too boring.  I started my quest on August 1.  Just by luck I found what I believe is the elusive fruiting body on September 12.  None of the experts in the group would comment on it.  Complete silence even when I asked for their opinion as to whether they thought it could be the real thing.  I was very disappointed.  It does not matter to me if I get credit for finding and photographing it in the modern times.  I know I photographed it on September 12, 2008 and up to that time there existed no picture of it except for a small black and white photo in some foreign polypore book.  That is a high!

The information I was expecting to get from the experts in the group was who to contact to have my find confirmed.  No help there, even though I knew that some members had ways of confirming their own finds.  The direct approach did not work, either.  Nationally known experts would not answer the mail I sent them.  Eventually I thought of writing Leon Shernoff, the editor of Mushroom the Journal.  I subscribe to that journal and had correspondent with him when I was not getting the Journal when I should have.  He is a first class expert on wild mushrooms though not a specialist on polypores.  I asked him if he knew of someone who could could confirm my find or say it was something else.  Leon found an expert who was willing to look at a sample if I sent it to him.  Leon thought that I was mistaken and that I did not have the fruiting body of Inonotus obliquus.  He had Dr. Daniel L. Lindner of University of Wisconsin, at Madison,  look at the photos on my web site and Dan thought that it did look like the fruiting body which I thought it was.  The correspondence with Dr. Lindner has been pleasant and informative.  This might enable me to contact other experts that Dr. Lindner corresponds with such as Leif Ryvarden,  and Dr. Robert Blanchette at University of Minnesota.  Dr. Lindner is confident that the sample I sent him is the fruiting body of Inonotus obliquus and has placed it in their herbarium.  They had no specimen up to this time.  He plans to study it further and do DNA sequencing on it when he has some spare time.

I now estimate that this first fruiting body of Inonotus obliquus, that I found, occurred about September 1 to September 9 and I have a better chance of finding it again next year.  I will check the same tree but I know of many snags, at another location, and hope to find it there also.

I shared the pictures and information.  That is part of the high.  I hope this gets others interested in looking for mushrooms that are not commonly found.  I hope this will get other people to share their information instead of hoarding it.  Who knows, after you are dead, someone might remember you fondly because you shared some interesting knowledge you had :o)

Vladimir Gubenko