Most of the world’s mushrooms are missing. According to mycologists, or fungus experts, fewer than 10 per cent of the world’s species have been identified by scientists, depriving humanity of potentially vital resources in the fields of medicine and forest management — not to mention culinary arts.
So where are all of these fungi hiding?
Many of them are probably in Myanmar, say the members of MyMyco, a collective of around 50 mushroom enthusiasts who are trying to catalogue the country’s native fungi and study the benefits and dangers they present to humans.
“Myanmar is really diverse in its microclimates,” says MyMyco co-founder Adam Nicholas. “It’s got wetlands, dry zones, high-altitude spots, mountains and hills, so there are a lot of opportunities for different types of mushroom to exist.”
Since they set up the group last year, Nicholas and co-founder Evelyn Yu Yu Swe have led regular excursions into Myanmar’s parks and forests to photograph fungi, most of which can be found perched on tree roots or rotting logs.
They then upload the photos to MyMyco’s Instagram account, where expert mycologists from around the world help identify the species in the comments and speculate on their properties.
“We’re slowly building a body of information that doesn’t currently exist, while also educating people on mushrooms,” Evelyn tells dpa.
Last year, for example, MyMyco members documented a lingzhi mushroom, also known as Ganoderma lucidum, growing in a park in the centre of Yangon, Myanmar’s main city. The species has been a staple of Chinese medicine for at least 2,000 years, and in recent years, it has become a popular supplement among cancer patients. However, few people in Myanmar are aware of the mushroom or its medicinal value.
Educating Myanmar people about the uses of local fungi falls squarely upon amateur mycologists. Since emerging from military-imposed isolationism less than a decade ago, the country has experienced a boom in discoveries in the fields of paleontology and conservation biology.
However, these breakthroughs have not been matched in mycology. This has less to do with a lack of interest than with the fact that mycology has been underfunded around the world for decades.
Despite the fact that around a billion people in the world suffer from fungal diseases, few scientific institutions invest significantly into mycological research. From 2007 to 2012, the Medical Research Council in Britain and the National Institutes of Health in the US spent less than 2.5 percent of their infectious disease research budgets on mycology. The effects of this neglect are accentuated in underdeveloped countries such as Myanmar.
“There haven’t been any major taxonomic studies of mushrooms in Myanmar since the 1950s,” Evelyn says. “Aside from five or six species, most Myanmar people are afraid of mushrooms.”
With mushrooms plentiful but knowledge scant, Myanmar people are regularly poisoned by mushrooms they misidentify. Last year, mushroom foragers in one town told MyMyco members that 10 people had been killed by poisonous mushrooms in the preceding seven months.
“They said that was a relatively small number,” Nicholas says.
MyMyco’s members hope to prevent mushroom poisoning through a process known as ethnomycology. Evelyn explains: “There are communities around Myanmar who have been foraging mushrooms for generations. They have information about what’s OK to eat, what’s medicinal, what’s poisonous, and what’s poisonous in one state and medicinal in another.”
If these local traditions are not documented soon, she says, they may be lost as imports of foreign mushrooms increase and as traditional cultivation methods give way to modernization and urbanization.
Food and health benefits aside, MyMyco offers city-dwellers a pleasant, child-friendly way to connect with nature.
Evelyn says: “There’s something really rewarding about foraging. You go outside and hunt for treasure. You find something that you can either eat or take home or study, and you have a physical reward for the activity. People really love that”. – By Jacob Goldberg
