Fungal Conservation with Gabriela D'elia from Fungal Diversity Survey
Alisa Nappa
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Photo credit: Fungal Diversity Survey Website & Warren Cardimona
 Some scientists estimate we've only described around 120,000 out of the 5,000,000 undescribed species waiting to be discovered. During the destructive anthropocene, we are losing biodiversity at an alarming rate, fasting than we can discover them. Citizen scientists and groups like Gabriela D'elia and the Fungal Diversity Survey are taking a stand and empowering people to find new species of fungi, catalog them and conserve them so we can protect and learn about them for generations to come.Â
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TRANSCRIPT
0:11 What is going on everyone? This is Alex door, your host of the mushroom revival podcast. And we love to geek out about the wonderful, miraculous spectacular world of fungi and mushrooms and all the wonderful things that they have to offer, and how we can form the most glorious, symbiotic relationship with them. 0:36 To connect back to nature and connect back to ourselves and admire just such a wonderful Kingdom or queendom of life. So we interview experts from all around the world, to geek out with us and go down that rabbit hole of fungi and mushrooms. And if you want to support the show, go to mushroom revival.com. Check out all the stuff we got over there. And 1:03 today, we have such a special human Gabriella, how are you doing today? It's a beautiful day. You just opened a window. We're ready to read the chat. You just You just got done with a freestyle rap about fungi. 1:20 What's up how you doing? Tell them tell the listeners who you are and what you got going on. Yeah, it's so wonderful to talk with you Alex. Yes, hello, I'm Gabriella Delia. That freestyle rap was not my finest moment. But I do recommend coming to the Telluride mushroom Festival at some point and listen to some more fungal based songs that I've had a chance to work on as opposed to just improvise. It's always a fun time. 1:54 i Let's see. I've been working and spending a lot of time with fun funky for about 10 years. I 2:02 am from the Rocky Mountains and Utah I grew up having 2:06 a close, very close kind of connection to the land around me I grew up with kind of dogs as my siblings and like the mountains and going to the creek nearby and always kind of like finding the places that were wet and moist in my neighborhood and just going to the creek with my dog and looking at the things floating in the creek and never finding many mushrooms for some reason. There are still very many mushrooms in Utah that I now am aware of in my kind of adult adult years but I've only ever found the like the common lawn mushroom just the Agaricus a white Agaricus mushroom growing and I made art as a kid and my parents were never like, they didn't tell me to not touch it. So I just always played around with these huge mushrooms and would like peel them apart and didn't think very much of them since it looks so much like the mushrooms that I buy in the store. So I didn't really fall in love with Bungie until I moved to Seattle. And I think just I mean, we've always been looking for something to really like divest myself into in nature. And the funghi caught me I you know, I just was in the city streets of Seattle, walking around as you do. And while the first time I saw mushrooms that really caught my eye were these huge, larger than my head 3:30 of a flush of ammo. Anita muscaria, of course, was on my college campus, I thought I moved to Seattle for college and I immediately find these mushrooms and I'm like 3:41 And I just spend like an an hour there looking at them and being like holy crap. I have never seen anything like this before. Who knew that there were these organisms that were so beautiful and red and vibrant and like all these different pieces of texture and the annulus and all these different textures that I had never seen in my life before. And I just started paying more and more attention to the mushrooms in Seattle started exploring out to Washington Washington state. 4:13 And a large part of what how I got into Friday was was like 4:20 by myself solitarily I just went hiking by myself and had these like 4:25 magical moments that I remember for the rest of my life of just like walking through this like abandoned like Boy Scout camp in the middle of cascades in Washington State and 4:38 just everything's covered in moss, the sunshine. It has this perfect angle of golden light coming in down through the forest. And I'm just looking at like tropes just like hundreds of individual mushrooms covering the mossy ground. And like these are just straight up out of dreams like I just started when I was following 5:00 mushrooms learning more about them. I just straight up with seeing things in your life that I was having dreams about. And so, long story short, it's all went downhill from there. And I just started learning more about them and now going to libraries to try to find books about mushrooms. One of my professors, I was studying Environmental Studies, I had to choose a focus environmental studies and my professor in a natural history course and I could study anything, anything in nature. And I said, Well, can I study mushrooms somehow she was like Sure. So I just followed a patch of aggressively pre Cox in the in the college campus lawn for a couple weeks and like drew them and measured them and noticed the all these larvae were inside of the the mushrooms, and it seems like the flying art larvae or whatever they are, rely on these mushrooms to exist and that these mushrooms are growing and they dry out pretty quickly. And then when there's no rainfall, I went to the library and sat down to try to to identify those species, which I'm very happy that I actually accurately identify the species. But it probably took me two days to do not back then which still does I think sometimes they opened the book, the most exciting book I found was all that the rain promises and more. Such a good book. Yeah, so fun time with that book. Yeah, the picture, I best pictures out of any mushroom book ever, like the best. 6:30 They must have had so much fun making that book. Yeah, I open this book. And I'm just like dumbfounded. You know, I just like sit there for the next three hours. And as long as time is I spent looking at mushrooms in the field, I spent even twice as much looking in this book. And I'm just like this, it gets into the culture, it gets into why people love funghi, the whole the whole, the whole experience was perfectly encapsulated in this book. And so I come to funghi from a love from from just being totally enamored by them by their beauty by what they can do for us and with us what they have been doing to this planet for since beyond our human time. 7:12 And I have had a company called Moon mushrooms. Where I did a lot of fungal education, I really liked kind of sharing what I call this holistic mycology which is seeing funghi as like a language and a philosophy, as well as 7:31 teachers and ecology. 7:34 And I started volunteering for fungal diversity survey in 2020. And 7:42 the I was I started with fungal diversity serving as their volunteer blog editor. And along the way, became their conservation coordinator. And I now am the director of the nonprofit. And 7:55 I really 7:58 that's where I spend most of my mushroom time is kind of building up fundus as best as we all can as a team and kind of just 8:11 Yes, wonders for short battle but diversity survey and I'm happy to kind of get more into that. But basically, that's who I am. And I also like to play music. I'm really into ceramics, I really like art and all kinds of other things. But when you can like other things besides mushrooms, you know, that's 8:31 what 8:34 I know. But I'm, I'm here. You're just so rich. There's so inspiring to so I don't know, do you like other things besides mushrooms? Alex? Not really. No, I didn't. I didn't know other things existed for the longest time. I'm just starting to explore them. And I was blessed this summer to first meet you. And it's been a long time coming because we have a mutual special human. John MC a lot of you I've known for 9:03 must be 10 years now. And I love that human so much. And he comes to me one day and he's like, I met the most incredible human and he's like beaming like, I'm the happiest man in the world. Like I am head over heels in love with with with this person. And I just went on and on and how special you are. And like the work that you're doing is just world changing and how happy you make him. So I was like, Okay, I gotta meet this human. And we met at Telluride and yeah, I mean you're you're incredible the work that you're doing is amazing. And so I'm happier on the show now and 9:47 yeah, um I won't spoil what you what you just told me before this recording but I'm so happy for you too. And and just I'm rooting for your both of your heart. 10:00 Penis and for the work that you're doing for fungi, both of you, and then with fundus, what what was the full name? I've just referred to it as fundus. But 10:14 yeah, well, thank you, you're very sweet. There. You know, all of us people that we have the pleasure of connecting with are so amazing in so many ways. So I'm very grateful and blessed to be in a amazing crew of of myco files and people doing amazing things together and really uplifting and supporting one another collaborating. So thanks for your podcast and for sharing all these voices and all the things that you've been doing for years to uplift, the amazingness of funding. 10:48 So, so 10:50 give a little one on one on fundus. Yeah, happy to so fund this for sure. It's which is kind of an easier word to say a few nd is fun. This fungal diversity survey and long 11:06 fungal diversity survey was founded as a nonprofit in 2017. And 11:13 at that point, it was known as North American microflora project, which I'm sure some listeners have heard of. 11:19 And the creation of what we now call fundus really grew out of conversations and meetings at MSA at a microbiological Society of American meeting and 2012. And we have a great picture on the fungus website, if anybody wants to look, but it's, it's a photo of that first discussion. And it's like 100, professional mycologists. Academics myco files, like anybody who was in mycology, at that point was at this meeting. It's an amazing photo. And they pretty much shut down. I wasn't there, I was still, I was still learning so much about funding, how to manage MSA at 2012. I was it was a while ago for me. 12:05 I had just been really like turned on to funghi at that time. And they're all basically saying we don't know the fondly that exist in North America, we do not have a baseline of who is who, who, where they are, when they are we don't have a baseline understanding of the fungal biodiversity or distribution in all of North America. What do we do about it? And so a few years later, in 2017, 12:37 Stephen Russell and a bill she had co founded what was then called ma'am, there was an original board of directors, you know, like Christian Schwartz was involved Malaysia mosaic. 12:48 Various people had a hand in shaping and forming this nonprofit and it was a volunteer based nonprofit, it was volunteers working together to try to create some kind of programs and initiatives for people to start learning more about Funkey. 13:04 The first initiative was really to, to, 13:10 to sequence to DNA sequence, all funghi across North America, which is a huge endeavor and takes probably hundreds, really of millions of dollars, and probably hundreds, and maybe 1000s of people to contribute. So, you know, fast forward 2020 And there's been a lot of there were a lot of 13:34 incentives that were there were 1000s of sequences that were made. There were different projects that cropped up. And in 2020 map was rebranded so a fungal diversity survey or fungus for short, with a pretty much led by Sigrid Jacob, who's our current board member, also president of New York Mycological Society, she's a fantastically inspiring and knowledgeable person. And so we really changed our name and like kind of just three frustr our logo and our and our appearance so that our name was no longer outdated to the word to being associated to myco Flora that's old, if anybody ever has even maybe most people in Bungie at this point probably don't even aren't even aware of the term myco flora. 14:20 But we're now fungal diversity survey myco Flora was basically a term where I don't want to get super into this but since funghi were only recognizes their own kingdom I like using kingdom to drop the GTE becomes gender neutral. The words already there kin is in Kingdom and it takes it removes this kind of like, you know, archaic 14:45 like 14:48 king king queen sort of structure to things and I really encourage all the listeners to start using kingdom 14:58 and so 15:00 Bungie have had a long history of being sort of neglected and misunderstood, you know, they're still, 15:06 they're still grouped in with plants, they're still grouped in with a whole separate kingdom of plants. And they really are their own true kingdom, or kingdom, that was only established in 1969, which is, you know, like 200 years after plants were established as their own kingdom. So, they'll turn myco Flora kind of just literally means fungus plants. And, 15:30 you know, more accurately, 15:33 plants can be could be deemed as plant funghi, they can we could start calling plants like Flora might or Flora myco. Because plants wouldn't really exist without funghi the way they do. But at the same time, funghi wouldn't exist without plants. And so it's like, 15:49 anyway, funky is the the better name fungal diversity survey, it just actually champions who we do work for. 15:58 So that's pretty much how fun this started. And I'm happy to answer more questions and see where we go from here. Maybe talk about what it is that we do where? 16:09 Yeah, and I know, one of the things that you're you're really trying to incentivize is having as many people document observations of fungi on I naturalist and things like that, and then getting a lot of those mushroom species DNA sequence. So we have a wide global repertoire of data of what's out there, what new species are out there, and then, you know, how, how do these grow over time, year after year in different places. And you gave a 16:53 you kind of compared where we are with fungal conservation and 17:01 and kind of observation of the whole fungal kin kingdom of with with bird birding and how they're, 17:13 I can't in 2021, there was, you know, just over 700,000 birders that contributed 192 million bird observations, so about 266 per person. But for for mushroom myco files, there were about a third of the people contributing 17:37 228,000 Just about but they only contributed just over 2 million fungal observation, so about nine per person. And this was just such a stark difference. And one thing that that you brought up is that we don't really have a mushroom observation competitions, where there's tons of bird birding events and earning observations of competitions where people compete to who gets to see the most amount of birds and they win a prize and things like that. So there's not enough incentive in the mushroom community. So can you talk a little bit more about that of it? Is there any mushroom competition that exists right now? And are there any in the works that kind of incentivize people to make more observations and log the different mushrooms that we have in the wild? 18:32 Huh, yeah, that's a very rich question with so many different pieces. So to provide more context, I, I want to mention that so fungal diversity survey is is North America's only nonprofit for fungal biodiversity and conservation. 18:50 There are hundreds of nonprofits in North America that exists for bird conservation and bird biodiversity. 18:59 So, really, what we do at fungal diversity survey is We exist to document the diversity and distribution of funding. So who is where and when. And we do this mostly through engaging community scientists or myco finals. So people who just love funny are basically the people who we need most. 19:26 We there are a few 100 academic psychologists in the United States all doing incredibly important work. And at the at the kind of the place where we're at with funky is since we don't have a baseline that other countries might have. Europe has a much more, much more of an understanding on the funghi that are there because they've been studying by me for longer than we have in the United States. We really need to enlist the people who are already going out and foraging and already taking pictures of money. 20:00 rooms, the people in the clubs, the people who were already going out taking collections, bringing them back to the collections tables at forays. And 20:12 that's really something that we like to the eye and people like cigarettes like to compare to the success of community science seen in birding. And 20:25 many people are familiar with the platform Ebert. It's been around since the early 2000s. And it's a very successful crowd sourced or community science based 20:39 nonprofit that's that was started in collaboration with the Audubon Center and the Cornell Cornell Lab, Cornell University. And 20:51 it's a really inspiring model to see how much success has come from that sort of from that community science based approach for birds. There are 21:01 1000s of papers that have been written academic papers that have been written based off of community science bird observations from a bird 21:11 burners are I just I've been thinking so often about birders and like comparing it to my Schumer's and it's kind of an entertaining entertaining thing for me like there's there's movies there movies out there, it's called the the I think the big year right or I think that movies out there, it's a whole movie. On birders, it's like a hysterical comedy movie about like these three, like, I remember the the very funny actors who want to enter like going out and birding. And the the movie captures all the trials and tribulations of like finding the Great Northern Spotted something in the Antarctic realms. And like, I'm just sitting there thinking, like, when is the day where we're going to have movies based off of mushroom errs? Like I can see it now. I mean, we John, we're starting to get them on Netflix, you know? 22:02 Yeah, yeah. It's just a matter of time. 22:06 It is, it's happening slowly. And like, you know, The Last of Us is, everybody's talking about The Last of Us. And Ben Lillibridge with Mollema mushrooms, I think brought up a great point where 22:19 he said, like, what did Jaws do for sharks, while it kind of Li elicited a lot of fear in sharks, but also probably a lot of science and people getting into Shark Stan from that movie, as well. And I think that that's a great point to make that in a way, I think, on one hand, it's great that you're receiving more awareness, because that's really 22:39 what many of us are, like you with this podcast are trying to change and life. So that's when you get more understanding or appreciation. And on the other hand, a lot of The Last of Us theme was that funghi are terrifying, and that we should all run from them. 22:57 Which is not the case. Um, we I am looking forward to more media that that is not putting somebody in the fear inducing category. 23:10 I saw this comedian one time, and he was like, Yeah, I really want to go to a Birding Competition. And be like, just strike up a conversation with someone and be like, so like, how many? What's your number? Because apparently, there's, in these birding events, like you have a number of like, how many birds you've you've described? And you'd be like, I'm 900, and whatever. And he'd be like, Oh, I'm, I'm to pay for like, what? Like, yeah, man, I've been coming to these for like, 10 years, and all I've gotten is pigeons and chickens. 23:47 He's like, I'm rooting for number three. Like I I've been coming to these for 10 years, and I still am at two. 23:56 Yeah, and they like have 23:59 like 24:03 yeah, let's start making badges for people. But um, 24:06 to answer your question about if that kind of stuff exists for funky, fun. This has created programs, first of which called the rare funding challenges. And this was inspired by a lot of the more kind of like competitive fun game planning gamifying mushrooming to get more people involved and how reframe mushrooming is super important, especially right now when more people are getting involved with 24:34 the activity or I guess the sport or something I don't know. But the science and you know, keeping especially those of us who are have been in this for years, reminding and keeping like ethics and and you know how we're going about mushrooming and how we're not just extracting mushrooms and keeping them at the center of what it is that we're sharing, I think is so important, since they're unnatural 25:00 organism they're growing out in the world, not just for human use by no means. And so keeping you know, the thought the thought of like, why am I picking these mushrooms? What am I going to do with these mushrooms? My picking them just to throw them back out into the forest at the end of the day? Or am I gonna take really good pictures of them, post them on I naturalist, take them home, send them to my friends for microscopy, am I gonna dry them and bag them and tag them and send them to my local Hungarian so that they can be used forevermore by scientists? These are I think, really important questions that people should be talking more about in the field. And the rare funky challenges are there. There are these like games, there are these challenges that we've created at fundus, where we make lists of rare threatened and under documented Bungie, which arguably every fungus is under documented. There's an estimated two to 10 million species of funghi on the planet. And about 5% of those, those theses have actually been described or given a name. And we have we're just that like the ncbc tip of the fungal iceberg. 26:17 Or I guess just looking at like the globalist mushroom of this huge mycelial thread. 26:24 But the rare funding challenges, we basically promote these rare mushrooms, some of which have only been found maybe like four or five times. Some of them are attributed that grow in close association with rare and threatened habitats, like 26:41 like madrones, or Atlantic white cedars. So if this rare threatened habitat is on the demise, then most likely the fungus that rely symbiotically on these habitats is is likely also in decline. So we're really promoting these species, we want people to go out and find them and help us understand them more so that we can build 27:05 build up what we know about these species, because often many of these species 27:12 we know not that much is known about the whole fungal kingdom. 27:17 Why a species fruits and when is going to be greatly different from why this other species fruits, and when. And there are so much discovery that community scientists and just anybody who's out there with a smartphone who has access to AI naturalist who knows how to take notes, she knows how to take high quality mushroom pictures. 27:37 They are going to change the game of mycology a lot. 27:42 I just had an image of like, 27:47 of live competition with with the with teams where you have like a team of five. 27:55 And there's like five teams and you have 90 minutes to pick as many mushrooms as you as you want. There's like drones videotaping the whole thing. It's live on Twitch and there's commentators and it's like Gabriella of the porcini squad. She just she's got stuck in a in a thorn bush like, can she escape? Oh, she just found like a whole patch of chanterelles. That's five points for the chanterelle squad. Or the porcini squad. Like 28:22 honestly, we need more of that we need more like things that get people excited, because, you know, I've been No, I mean, no desk to namah and stuff, but sometimes it can be a little dry with 28:39 as some people like to call them basket fellas with you know, there's no it's just like picking the mushroom just to pick the mushroom. And not uploading it to a naturalist not wanting to eat it not wanting to like just going out to go out which is beautiful. And I love that and that's incredible. And like everyone should be able to 29:02 enjoy nature just to enjoy nature and not have like, another hidden agenda behind it or a non hidden agenda but but also it's like yeah, the world is ending and we should also while we're out enjoying nature, we should help to conserve it as well. You know, and so, yeah, I mean, it is funny I've been at you know these events and and they'll ask me to fill out like a little piece of paper and I've always been confused and I've even like asked people and honestly like it's been a learning curve for me that I haven't really fully gotten over where you know, and it's just kind of like do I do this and upload to I naturalist Is this somebody else is going to upload for me like what? Some of these are going to have DNA analysis some are not like how do I know 30:00 When it seems like there's, from my point of view as I'm not, 30:07 I wouldn't call myself like a mushroom Hunter. I'm way more skilled in other areas of mycology. And like I'm way more skilled in growing mushrooms and working in the lab or like working with functional mushrooms, etc. Where I just kind of taxonomy and ID has never been my strong suit. I do it. I dabble. So going to these events has been a little. 30:35 Yeah, there's just been a learning curve that for me, it seems like maybe technology hasn't caught up yet. And there's, there's it's just where we're at if we have to fill out things with paper and pencil or, you know, it's slowly transitioning towards all i naturalist and paper and pencil was back in the day. So what what would you say from your perspective of 30:59 the whole state of the quote unquote, industry or like the where we're at with with observing and identifying fungi? Like, where do you see are the biggest gaps? And where where do you see where we can improve to like, educate people? Just getting into it on how they can pick pick this up really easily? Did that make sense? That was a long winded question. But 31:29 yeah, no, super another reach question. Um, well, I really want to mention at first that the president of gamma trends lizard and Brooke Reid, who's also been involved in the movement for a long time, they are very passionate about fungal conservation and want to see some stuff improving with nema. So they're all in to helping however they can. And that's something that Fundis and NEMA are kind of collaborating on together is, you know, how do we get more people involved in creating these high quality observations and creating high quality collections? So that's definitely something that is 32:08 being being understood or being better thought out? 32:14 The the 32:18 Yeah, the kind of the comparison of bird people have been, I do want to say that like Burton has 32:27 the first I think it's the bird, some kind of Conservation Act for birds. I'm blanking on what exactly it was called. But it first began in like 19. 32:39 Maybe the 19 teens like it was a long time ago, birding in the United States has about 100 year lead on, like, conservation relating to birding has about 100 year leading United States compared to funghi. So we're really just getting started right now. So it makes sense how birders have so much more infrastructure, so much more funding. I was reading that in 20, at the beginning of the year, at the beginning of 2022. 33:11 There's been now a new $90 million of funding approved by the Migratory Bird Conservation Commission, which started in 1929 to conserve or restore 116,000 acres of of like bird habitat in 18 states. And the grant was made through the North American wetlands Conservation Act that was created in 1989. And like, it's been well funded for so many years and do things like that exist for funding in the United States? No, not yet. And 33:45 the we're really on the like the leading edge of making this stuff more from a dream to reality. 33:54 The I will continue into that further in a second. But I do want to answer your question about kind of like what are the 34:04 you know, like you said, how do we get more people to be contributing community science? Or funding and how do we what are the what are what are difficult? What are kind of easy fixes. 34:17 The platform I naturalist that we've been speaking about, I will just kind of define it's a free open source app on your phone. It's also available on the internet and the media kind of the platform on the on the computer interface is usually has more, more more like accessibility, there are more things you can do on that platform. It's pretty cool to look into it's a an app that was created, I think about 15 years ago or so 10 or 15 years ago, and it exists as a naturalist app for people to take observations in the field of any organism. 35:00 and upload it to this app in a click. 35:04 You can look at maps across the globe of different observations of all organisms, plants, insects, fish. And then I've often joked that there's like, you can't do it for rocks. But I think a couple of years ago, this rock like identifying app came out. And I haven't tried it yet. I don't know how well it works. 35:24 The premise behind the app is that, 35:29 you know, it collects observations. And it's an easy to use. 35:36 It's easy to use portal to get people to start noticing their, what they're seeing in the wild. And by snapping a photo of it or recording a bird call, they can put it onto this Open Access database that anybody can find researchers, academics, anybody can have access to these observations. So it's no longer 35:58 it, it reduces the barriers of science greatly. And that's kind of what community science does. So it's no longer just these sort of academics from this university who are out conducting field work in a 36:10 maybe in a very formal way. But now people are less formally going out and putting posts of their mushrooms or insects on Thai naturalist. And so if 36:22 one thing basically what's happened is that, you know, people are starting to post pictures of mushrooms and actually quite quite a few before this call, I decided to look up some stuff but I'm just gonna rattle off because I thought that they were very interesting to me. I wanted to look up kind of the state of different species, different organisms on I naturalist. And so while there's like, a lot of people there are a lot of observations of plants and birds and insects, I naturalist, there are still surprisingly like tons of people. In comparison. Putting posts on I naturalist and I naturalist is a tool that, that we have found this use. We also like to use mushroom observer, which is basically the same thing, but just for mushrooms, and they have a field app that they've just released this past year. The field Alpha makes it very essential for people to do this kind of stuff in the field. 37:16 And so these 37:20 I just want to mention that like, in North America alone, there's on AI naturalist, so just looking at like the I naturalist dataset, anybody can post them a naturalist, there are 32 million observations from about 1 million people of plants. So that's a ton of observations, that's in the line is 11 million observations from about 431 people for sorry, Florida, 31,000 people with birds. So about half the people are contributing a third of the observations for birds as for plants, but if we go down next in the room, we have half of the observations that are for birds, just in North America. 38:07 So there's 11 million observations of birds in North America, about half of those 5.4 million. Those are the observation numbers for funghi in North America. So there's about a deficit of like half of the observations of birds. In North America, there's probably like, worldwide, there's an estimated 20,000 species of birds. And so in North America, there's, I don't know, I would think probably like five to 10,000 species of birds. And in fungi, we have absolutely like there's an estimated maybe 4000 species of funding in California alone. 38:41 And importantly, I wanted to note that there's about four to 3000 people, birders on AI naturalist people posting birding stuff on a naturalist. But there's almost the same amount of people posting funghi posts on an actual list, which is 40 422,000, which is basically the same number. And so the birders are basically posting twice as many posts as the funghi people, but there's a basically the same amount of people which is incredible to me, I would have never guessed that 39:13 you if anyone listening to this episode is a birder, like, true and true. Like please reach out to both of us and let us know why. 39:25 Because I don't get it and probably people look at us as mushroom people and they're like, What the fuck, like, the same way like, I love pretty much all of nature, you know, and so I appreciate birds, but like, I don't, you know, I've been on trips to like Costa Rica, or I just got back from India. And like, you know, we're doing a walk in nature, whatever and like, the person that we're with is just a birder and they're fucking into birds, like very much into birds. And it's it's a thing like Oh, 40:00 Are people you know it we run into other birders and it's like there's birders everywhere. And they're like, they're not just like, oh yeah, this is a cool bird. This is a cool tree. They're like, let's, let's see all the birds. And let's only focus on the birds, which I guess is like an equivalent to us, but they're like, way more burgers. And I feel like they're way more into it. And I don't get it. Like, there's tons of memes that you see online about burgers, like, it's a whole thing. Like it's a community of people that are like, they're fucking into it, you know? And like, I don't I, we get to crack the code, and just copy and paste to mushrooms on like, what the hell gets people so jazzed about birds? I mean, who knows? There. I mean, there's, there's a conspiracy theory that they're, they're surveillance drones. So there is that? 40:54 I think, you know, you speak to something that's like, ultimately, when it comes to conserving, protecting and taking care of our land, and those of us who want to protect our land and make sure that it's not going to be demolished or destroyed. So that, you know, it depends. There are so many reasons why people, it becomes also an ethics question, why do we protect land? Ultimately, it's for some kind of human enjoy purpose anyway, because it's either we humans want to see the beauty that we see and biodiversity or we want to be able to have the timber that we use, or we want to be able to 41:32 keep these land, keep the land, not fragmented. We want to connect the land and keep it together because 41:40 I mean, you know, according to us, that's a healthier ecosystem. And there are many ways you can measure health of ecosystems there are so many different ways you can you can Slice the Pie of what it is that we're doing, how we're managing forests or managing the ecosystems. 41:55 And you know, if if our if our intention is to I think a large part of our intention for conservation work in the past 10 years has been keeping lands connected. 42:08 And still funky and the word funky the word fugu to be added to find a Florida fungi Juliana fortune, the fungi Foundation, is advocating across the globe to incorporate the word finger into conservation initiatives from the top down fundus. And my work this our work altogether wouldn't be where I am without Julie and funky Foundation. And, you know, the more that there are organizations, there are foundations there, there are government. 42:43 You know, like I gave a presentation called the radical future of fungal conservation, and the radical future seems to be like mainstream seems to be like, Paul McCartney is like coming out on the soapbox being like Santa's funky and like, it's interesting how that is unfolding. But the more insiders and people who are in charge of making decisions, wherever you see, we protect plants and animals, they, without a doubt, leave out funding, and for work to be done, or projects to be funded for resources to be allocated, where it makes a difference for funghi. saying the word phone got adding it to two mission statements adding conservation as a part of club club, mushroom club missions, adding 43:35 conservation, adding thoughts of how what are we doing, what is the actual purpose of what it is that we're doing, it's going to make a really big difference for being able to conduct the work that fundus is doing and that plenty of other fungal nonprofits that are about to sprout in the coming years I'm sure are going to be doing as well. 43:53 Also, everyone should sign up for birding competitions. And don't look for birds just look down and be the only person looking at the ground the entire time and get every single person to be like What What the hell are you doing like, and then you then you talk to him about fungi, and then get them hooked about fungi, fungal conservation, and get all the birders now really hooked onto mushrooms. And then we'll grow our army of fungal conservationists together. 44:26 I understand what we're poking fun at birders and I do want to say that they provide really beautiful models. And like, 44:35 you know, really what we want to see is all of the organizations who are focusing on insects like Zarzis birds and plants and forests and funghi we all want to collaborate together and share our data so that we aren't it is become like a war of the kingdom or something because that's not not what we want. And then also, I just really want to highlight that like, the reason I'm so passionate about 45:00 Understanding and conserving funghi is that 45:03 I think out of many out of almost all organisms funghi introduce the idea of connectivity. I think the most people are being blown away by the fact that like forests communicate and are connected to this web of mycelium, underneath the trees that mycelium is actually with ain trees as, as endophytes acting as their immune system. There's all these unseen, sort of like, mass corridor highways that we've never known about, I guess, in our past few decades of yours, that we haven't known about yet. So people are getting blown away and understanding more and more about the importance of forest connectivity. And that if you can, if you really protect a fungus, you're ultimately protecting its habitat. Because the more and more that we're learning about funghi, it becomes explicitly clear that this individual porcini mushroom, a boletus, Edulis, mushroom cannot exist without symbiotic hosts of spruce and fir forests. And that, you know, once we, once we steward land as a whole, based off of just maybe looking at one organism approach, we'll start to incorporate like the reasons why we're also doing this for insects and, and kind of the Northwest forest plan started to do this in the 90s. And, you know, really protected and how these different movements put forth because of the association between flying squirrels who ate truffles and say it being the northern spotted owl that off of the truffle fight off the squirrel and there's so much discovery and opportunity out there when it comes to funghi. I'm not I don't want to diss the birders, but I will say that there's probably more discoveries, there's definitely more discoveries and funghi than embers at this point. 46:53 Definitely. And one one thing that is available with fungi that you don't really see with birders is DNA sequencing. I be a little concerned if you were doing DNA sequencing with birds, I would I would ask about your methods, but 47:13 but it is something that we need, because there's so many mushrooms and fungi that you can't properly Id just based on macro scopic features and we're constantly seeing, you know, this mushroom changes slide name, blah, blah, blah with with, you know, more DNA sequencing. And so it's vitally important for our observations and data to DNA, sequence it to make sure is this a new species? Or is this actually a subspecies of something we've been calling five species just one name because they all look the same, right? And so where where does DNA sequencing stand? I've heard a lot recently about Oxford Nanopore being super revolutionary about cutting costs dramatically for DNA sequencing. 48:05 And what should people DNA sequence? And can they send it somewhere? Do they have to do part of the process at home? Where's this whole process? Stan? 48:20 Yeah, oh, boy, all of your questions, we could just spend like a day on each of your questions, honestly. Um, the Yeah, so DNA sequencing has kind of escalated a lot with more 48:37 better tech technologies that have evolved in the past 1020 years. 48:42 I think, let's see, I want to just keep my response focused. I DNA sequencing, as you said, is really kind of exploding our our ideas of our preconceived concepts of what species were what 49:02 DNA sequencing is so interesting, because so many of the species that we think are distinct species might only have like 9596 94% DNA similarities. And we're seeing the when it comes to funny, there are a lot more species groups or species complexes than we thought there once were. 49:23 DNA sequencing is a very helpful piece of data when it like it's a component to understanding a species at this day and age. We can look at a mushroom we can look at its colors, its taste its odor. When you're filling out those field data slips that are at the namah forays that you had mentioned before. Those field data slips are going to ask you for really important distinguishing characteristics of the mushroom that you're looking at. A lot of people don't grow up looking at mushrooms. If you grow up looking at trees, you might be more 50:00 are familiar with like, the opposite leaf patterns? Or, like, you know, which How do ID trees how to ID trees based off of bark or buds or flowers? Maybe you 50:13 are, maybe you haven't even learned how to ID anything in nature and that's totally fine. You there's you can always start learning but most people haven't been taught at a younger age or haven't been taught how to ID mushrooms. That's really something that not only is mycology as a science totally lacking and education and more and more people are making a difference of that nowadays. But, you know, how do we even look at a mushroom? That's like the one of the first lessons when it comes to like making a difference with this community sciences? Like what are we even looking at? When we look at a mushroom? What do we call these things? It's a Stipe. It's not a stock lens have stocks, there's a cap there's skills like the high medium can have pores or gills. Understanding what we're looking at it is going to make a really big difference with with building this community science, like liberative. Army. 51:09 And past morphology, or like what the mushroom looks like. 51:16 A 51:19 I would say 51:21 DNA sequences are probably like, very important stuff, they're like probably half as important as, as the habitat notes as taking good pictures of the mushroom in its habitat. A DNA sequence helps describe the DNA history of this mushroom and how it might be different or more of an individual than other mushrooms. 51:43 These, I like to highlight that out of 8000 DNA sequences that Fundis ran between 2017 and 2020. There were 8000 sequences, and about 14% of those were undescribed species. 52:01 And that's a huge percentage, there's lots of discoveries waiting to happen, like I like I keep referring to. And now we also need to train an army of people who can describe new species, because that's a whole leg of work as well. Now that we have these 14 percents that we see are undescribed. 52:20 And DNA sequencing, I like to say that like sequencing is like building a boat, there's many ways to do it. Um, there's this nanopore is an incredibly exciting, less expensive, more, it's a high throughput way of sequencing. So instead of maybe spending $15 on the sequence, you could spend $2 on a sequence 52:43 with which means that, you know, dropping, dropping prices that by 1000s, and 1000s of dollars, can be very helpful for organizations like us who are running on very little funding to try to do a lot of impactful work. 53:01 making these changes to less expensive forms of sequencing is something that we're looking into, we have to do a lot of sort of like research and design on the back end in order to start kind of using these tools. 53:15 And, let's see, I 53:20 there's also a lot of like back end work when it comes to sequencing when when you receive a sequence back, it's kind of like a mumble of Ca te GGA like lots of just mumbling bumbling letters, and most ordinary humans don't want to decipher it. So the I've experienced with fundus a lot of our like project work and what we want to do what we envision sequencing funghi, getting the sequences back, reading them, deciphering them, and then giving them back to the community scientists as a language they can understand takes a lot of coordination of people with many specialties. It's a large, like system that have an impact that we and work that we're conducting. And 54:07 the sequencing is is I would say, a really important part to understanding about understanding what fun you're out there. A lot of environmental DNA sequencing has also ramped up a lot in the past 1520 years. And that's kind of like the future of fun. The sequencing to me is that sure we understand maybe that this fungus this this, like, emanate of Floyd is has a certain set of DNA 54:37 that we can read, and then has anybody though, taking a soil sample from underneath that mushroom or in the habitat around that mushroom and seeing if that same DNA reads in the soil sample, and the more that we conduct above ground and below ground sequencing and cross referencing those will really help us understand 55:00 Not only fungal biodiversity in distribution, but I think it'll help start forming like, 55:05 why are these mushrooms fruiting? You know? Like, are there really? Is there really so much of this fungus out in the soil just existing? What what are the conditions that are needed for this one fungus to fruit. And we are going to start doing that in our California work. One of our kind of most exciting projects. That is kind of our largest scale project largest scale funding project so far is what we're calling ca fundus, or California fungal diversity survey. And I kind of the eye kind of glimmered at this a few A while ago, because this is part of a systemic change that we're actually seeing in our current time right now, which is, which is part of the radical mainstream future of funnel conservation. Were in the state of California, telephone California Taxpayers are actually paying to collect funding right now. 56:01 And through the state of California, yeah, yeah, through the state of California and the California Institute for biodiversity. When this has been granted, 56:11 funding and an organization, we work to collect all the funghi that we can at the state of California for at least three to five years to sequence those funds, so to assign them with some kind of DNA sequence, and to house them in fungi area, or like mushroom libraries. If your listeners have heard of them, I think spunk area could be a really cool, like metal band name. But this is an unprecedented project. It's the first time in my knowledge so far that anybody is being paid to collect academic grade funky collections outside of academia. So you know, we're really building up a mycology hub in Michroma ecology workforce. And I want to say that so many of these people we have hired to be out there in the field. Um, they come from a community science background, there are not that many professional psychologists who wants to spend time out in the field collecting. And 57:11 these people who come from a community science background are oftentimes, just as knowledgeable in field mycology practices, as professionals can be in field mycology practices. So that's pretty cool with mushrooms and mycology and where we've gotten so far. And now, I'm really excited to see the future Fundis. And how we can further kind of expand this model of statewide conservation efforts of not only documenting the distribution and biodiversity, but integrating this data into state conservation strategies. That's a big part of what we're doing so that we can feed pipe we can pipeline this data into like, nature surf or Natural Heritage Program, so that it can actually start to be fed into the people who are making decisions. That's a big piece of what it is that we're doing. And this model just began in the past at the end of 2022. And we're really excited. The people that we have on our team are just like, some of them are so excited when they when they got the job, they were like, oh my god, I'm gonna pop champagne this weekend, like I'm going to be paid to collect mushrooms over the you know, the next yield season or something. So it's a very exciting thing. And we are, I'm just really excited about talking and forming connections to other places and other lands, other biodiversity initiatives, who wants to get this ball rolling in their state or in their city? You know, we have this this unprecedented model taking shape, and it is really cool, what is going to happen, and then in the coming years for fungal documentation and conservation. 58:48 That's awesome. And it seems like there's kind of six main steps, which is also a circle. So the first number one being a team of citizen scientists going out in the field observing, documenting, you know, 59:04 posting on AI, naturalist mushroom observer, getting all their observations in one place. Second step is sequencing the DNA. 59:14 Third step is, 59:17 is bio informatics analysis. So, basically, like all the jumbled of code, the four letters that you're getting back, like what does that mean? Are they are these new species? What am I looking at? 59:30 Step four is describing any new species or writing the papers and getting these new species kind of 59:41 legitimately in science, I guess you would say, And step five is working with the red list and working with legislation getting these things, you know, protected past 59:54 and in 59:56 recognize by government 1:00:00 Other systems so they are, you know, recognized protected. And then steps six would be because of all that, then they can, you know, these organizations such as yourself and citizen science scientists everywhere other organizations can get fun funding, which in turn goes back to step one of funding more citizen scientists to go out and have a whole season of mushroom hunting paid for to document more mushrooms and a whole cycle continues, which is super exciting. And you know, how do we make this whole cycle really sexy really fun, really engaging for people who are new to this or old to this, you know, who have been mushroom hunters forever and like just haven't been posting as much on I naturalist or mushroom reserver haven't really been have no idea what you know, DNA sequencing is and but they collect 1000s of species every every year, but they just put it in their basket, you know, I did. And that's the end of it. So exciting work. And I'm so thrilled to see that the state of California is starting to recognize this I'm so excited for organizations such as Fundis and the work that Giuliana furred chi and so many other amazing people are doing to put fungi or fungi on the map. And so congrats. This is this is great. 1:01:30 Where 1:01:34 Where do you see is the main gap? You know, of all six steps that I just kind of listed? Do you do you feel like there's one in particular or are they all kind of lacking? Pretty generally and we just need more people in all of them. 1:01:52 I love how you just describe that full circle. Did you just think of that? 1:02:00 Yeah, I mean you you're describing it I'm just I'm just relaying it back you know? 1:02:07 Um, gosh, you know, my first kind of gut instinct is just it's just everywhere you know, the more that people learn about fungi in schools the more people 1:02:18 have a state mushroom Utah we just passed our state mushroom being bullied as Angeles is porcine the more that pal yeah everywhere yeah friends who are sharing to each other like the importance of mushrooms Hey, if you have a friend who's who's 1:02:36 doing work with plants and animals and they haven't mentioned funky at all ask them about fun he asked them like Why aren't funding included here 1:02:46 and 1:02:48 um 1:02:50 I there's a lot of 1:02:55 there's a lot of ambition there's a lot of excitement I'm I'm looking forward into the coming year a fundus, where we can like a lot more eloquently house this like hub where we can say here's how you can get involved if you're a company, an individual, a club, a school, 1:03:15 here are the things that you can do. We have plenty of resources on our website for you to begin understanding kind of like your place within all of this and where you might want to go. 1:03:28 And, um, I cannot help but mention that funding is a big part of this. A lot of nonprofits exist from like foundations, foundation funding state funding. And like I mentioned, the funding sources don't reference funky they don't state funky. So it's more of a burden for a nonprofit to say like to be teaching the people why funghi are so important in addition to looking for funding. And so it really comes down to the people who are have fallen in love with Bungie 1:04:06 and our connections our friends and family and people who already understand the importance to like, take some accountability with that and like choose something that you can integrate into your life with helping funghi like I really like helping people help funghi there are many ways to do that. And I think that the more people we can get engaged with like not just thinking that fantastic fun, these incredible movie or the entangled life really got them inspired but like act on it, go do something so that you can incorporate funghi into your life that is something that is beneficial or that you see is helping them I think the more people spend time outside the more people are odd and and just beautified is definitely going to help because that's that's totally where I found it was just being like wow, these are 1:05:00 Wonderful organisms with so many 1:05:05 functions and beneficial 1:05:10 balancing the health of ecosystems, sequestering carbon allowing soil to be like a sponge so that water can actually be retained in it, allowing our soil to actually grow food and to allow plants and animals to be biodiverse. 1:05:27 You know, the characteristic like larger animals and like orca whales, and giraffes and whatever are usually the ones with more conservation like flare. And I think during this time, right now, many of us are seeing that like, these inconspicuous groups like funghi, and bacteria within the soil, are the ones that are most poorly understood that the larger life really depends on so. 1:05:52 Yeah. 1:05:54 Okay, very. 1:05:58 What's the word very, 1:06:01 totally drawing of like, confrontational, not confrontational. What's the word that I'm thinking of? 1:06:13 AI and machine learning. 1:06:16 Many people do not like this topic. And I'm going to bring it up. Because we do need more people in the woods connecting with nature without any screens, and no technology just in the fucking woods. But technology can help us, you know, if we take out our phone, it's an amazing camera. We can connect right to eye naturalist or mushroom observer and help fungal conservation. big topic right now. Controversial. That's the word I was thinking of. 1:06:49 This so AI machine learning is a big topic right now. Super controversial. But you know, as I was, you know, preparing questions for this episode, I was like, you know, I even jumped on chat GPT. And I was like asking chat, GPT like, Hey, how can we help with fungal conservation? And it was giving me answers. And I was like, how can we improve the cost of you know, like, fungal DNA sequencing, and I was like, it was giving me answers. And I was like, Holy shit, this is nuts. And honestly, it's in the beginning stages, and every week, and it's improving. And I know, in the last few years, there's been companies coming, coming out like, 1:07:31 like, funky vision, that is using AI machine learning technology to where you can snap a picture of a mushroom. And it helps with, quote, unquote, up to 93% accuracy, helping with the identification of the mushroom, which I'm a little sketched out about, I'm like, don't trust that fully with eating any mushrooms. But, you know, it is we are starting to utilize technology for fungal conservation. And even I just read an article 1:08:07 recently about people putting in a molecule on chat, GBT. And it it searches any any alteration of that molecule for drug discovery, an even scours all the existing patents of any alteration of that molecule, and sees what is leftover of what you could do. Which brings me to the thought of can you put in the code of a DNA sequence into chat GPT? And will it get can we use it to help like, hey, there's like 400 subspecies out there or whatever, waiting to be discovered. With this just small little change. And maybe it'll get smart enough to be like, hey, look in in like conifer forests at this elevation at this moisture level, and you'll find that I don't know, you know, 1:09:00 so I have like a part to this question, but I'll just ask this one first because I'm rambling right now but where do you see the use of AI machine learning technology in this whole field of fungal conservation? Are you for or against it? Kind of a little bit of both? 1:09:23 Wow, um, well, the the idea you just had of like searching a DNA barcode. That's something I've had to a couple of weeks ago and I love when this happens because it's like this like coevolution thought that like people are tuning into you individually but on a large scale which shows that there's something there for sure. 1:09:44 I you know, you can you can search a DNA barcode you can blast a DNA code which is on like bold Barcode of Life database, you can blast it that's what normally happens anyway to copy paste something and look at it in the live 1:10:00 worry of DNA codes however 1:10:03 not the right people know to do that, and I've definitely been inspired to be like weak How can we just kind of integrate that technology into something that most people are now familiar with and might be you know, it easier accessibility thing going on as a possibility? I definitely want to 1:10:27 I want to separate that of course, I don't take my phone out all the time when I'm not in the field 100% of the time with my phone 1:10:36 taking observations I naturalist like not me I don't know if 1:10:43 everybody I don't I kind of have a hard time thinking that any of these people who are who are fields collectors are always in the field with their phones. I think there's like a separation of technology that even though we're really like proponents of it that we as humans want to like still separate ourselves from like I what I love doing is just going out and finding mushrooms and honestly I do really like to take pictures of them and so most of the time I'll have some kind of camera not all the time though and sometimes I just bring back the mushroom and then take pictures and at home and do a lot of notes at home but I just definitely appreciate being in outside and the medicine of being in in nature with funghi just listening to them spending time with them is absolutely fuel for what I do and that can't be removed from from my years. 1:11:38 And the 1:11:41 so just stating that there's that I want to recognize that and 1:11:47 with AI especially an eye naturalist I want to highlight that it's um 1:11:53 when you are getting when you're eating a mushroom you want to have three sources telling you that yes, this thing is edible. 1:12:02 Mushroom edibility is no joke. There's no like, well, it's like a 95% match to this edible mushroom. It seems like all you get when you're eating a mushroom is one thing. I think that's where most of the people get into funghi is through edibility and through, like, can I eat this and through their stomachs, which is awesome, because food brings people together. And that's one of the really cool things about mushrooms is that they're edible. 1:12:26 It brings so much interest and curiosity. So that whole kingdom 1:12:31 the I would say if you're using a naturalist to ID something and you want to eat it, get a real person that you know contacted mushroom club, contact your local mycologist. And also ask them if it's edible, I would never rely on the web to tell you if something is edible or not. And with AI at least with an eye naturalist, whoever's been contributing to that for the past 10 years mushroom pictures, they have seen that the when you add a mushroom observation to it, if you add anything to it, it comes back with what this could be immediately when you're posting it. Which is really helpful for humans normal everyday people who want to learn more because oftentimes, it'll give you a pretty, pretty good usually it's pretty accurate, the ID that I naturalist provides to you. 1:13:23 But in the past 10 years with mushrooms, it has excelled night and day. Because so many people are adding their mushroom observations I naturalist because so many identifiers are helping the system by adding correct IDs and double double backing on those IDs. It's been helping the AI get smarter and smarter. So now when you add something it's when you get something I do mind that it's there's a much greater chance it can it can really recommends a lot of the nuances to mushrooms nowadays compared to just two or three years ago because more people were using it and also providing their accurate human based ideas. AI is going to be really helpful for learning and for 1:14:09 aggregating data and things. Maybe like, you know, Ebert, since they have community sourced data, they have certain 1:14:17 I guess it's not really considered machine learning, but they have machine filters, which are going to be very important that I guess might be also 1:14:26 the AI probably helps the filter continue to learn. But there's definitely always going to be a human hands to it you are, we greatly rely on human volunteers to be vetting our Bundist biodiversity database. If you want to add your observations to Aina take it one step further and add to our projects on this biodiversity database, which is our better database. You'll get likely a quicker ID from a human and you're contributing to this database that's embedded so we have ideas going through it and making sure it's a hybrid observation like 1:15:00 Quality observation, and taking this as like a data set to put toward conservation. So the people are always gonna have I, in my opinion, we're never going to be removed from like, especially when it comes to mushrooms, there's so many tiny nuances like in the telephony and group it's like, unless a person tastes or smells this mushroom, and like can give you there are sometimes mushrooms that if they have this odor, they're gonna belong here. If they don't have this odor, they're gonna belong there. So I have an impossible time imagining a future where humans are not 1:15:34 central to our work, but machines are going to help us that's for sure. 1:15:41 A couple quick things. And I'll try my hardest not to ramble. But I visited so many years ago, I visited the New Hampshire mushroom company. And they're a group of engineers. And I can't remember, it's been 1:15:57 probably close to 10 years now since I went to visit so I don't remember who I was talking with. But they were talking about this technology that they developed. And this was back at, like 10 910 years ago, where they basically, they're like, Yeah, we could go out and forage for mushrooms. But there's got to be a better way to like find them. And so they develop this thing where they're like, Oh, we know that my Toki likes, you know, I'm just totally making this up. But like, the west side of oak trees at this high elevation at this moisture level, near whatever. And so they used a combination of like, Google Maps with some some other things to find all clusters of oak trees at certain elevations that, you know, this moisture level near this creek or whatever. And they basically just like autogenerated specific locations where they can search and they they said that with all mushrooms that they inputted, when they went to the actual pin, the GPS pin, they found mushrooms like 95% of the time, 1:17:06 which is crazy. And they're like, yeah, it freakin works. Like we just did it. We they're like, Yeah, we had a couple of beers. And they're like, yeah, what if you know what if this actually works, this would be funny. And they're like, it actually worked. And 1:17:19 it makes me think of, there's this show on. It's a National Geographic show called Lost Cities where this guy uses this, like radar technology called LIDAR, which basically like scans the environment. And that's my basic understanding of it. And you get back this like super detailed 3d map of wherever you're looking at. And he's been using it to discover like Lost Cities and things like that. And I think Merlin Sheldrick used it in Panama to map out mycorrhizal connections underground. Maybe I'm wrong with that, but I think I remember him saying that. And so it just makes me think of, you know, whether we could use that technology as well of like, you know, scanning environments, and, you know, seeing, you know, the best spots to look for certain mushrooms and things like that. of, you know, now it seems ridiculous in 2023, but, you know, 2040 it's going to be like, oh, yeah, you you looked for mushrooms, the old fashioned way. Whatever, you know what I mean? You just, like, went out and blindly looked for them, you know, like, without any help, like, 1:18:37 like, before, if I tried to describe like GPS to someone, it'd be like, what, you know, but now it's like, I use GPS for everything. And so I'm just, you know, I'm trying to think like 2020 years down the line of what what are our young in our new generations are going to use to look for mushrooms and we're going to like, damn, back in my day, I was filling out little slips of paper with a pencil and like, 1:19:08 you know, it's gonna be wild, you know, looking back and seeing what we used and 1:19:16 this was the same conversation I had with 1:19:24 the Hungarian in in England, they're talking about how they had everything written down on on pieces of paper, and they're just starting to catalogue it 1:19:35 on the computer, all their all their different, you know, 1:19:41 specimens and they're like, we're this is a massive undertaking, but once we have it all digitally documented, it's going to, it's just going to totally skyrocket our research because we have it, you know, we could search it via a computer, everything could just be so much easier. So 1:20:00 Um, 1:20:01 I'm like rooting for people not using technology and just getting into the woods and getting away from technology. And then at the same time I'm, I'm kind of, I feel like there's a lot of hope that we can use technology to really skyrocket fungal conservation and Conservation of Nature in general. Insects for birds, for plants for everything. 1:20:25 Any thoughts on that? Yeah. 1:20:29 Yeah, totally. I've always got fast for you. I've always got something to respond with you. I'm the I tried not to ramble, but I totally just rambled. 1:20:42 Well, I don't think you did. The birds. Okay. I want to mention, Subaru, and Ebert have come out with like, in the newest, some of the Subaru cars that are like within the past year or two or something they have in their GPS, they have like an E bird for something that you can just like pop an Ebert observation into, and the car will orient you to the location. 1:21:10 And I think birds and mushrooms are slightly different, because a lot of the people who there's still that weird? I don't know, I don't know if it is there's, I understand some of the secrets with mushroom spots. There's some things you respect with mushroom spots. But that's a larger question. I think as we go into, like the open source of the of some of these rare threatened species, how open source there are these things? Do people really want these things to be? What are the pros and cons of that? 1:21:44 And 1:21:46 the obviously, what was I gonna say? 1:21:52 You just mentioned so many things. The, you're talking about? Like? 1:21:59 What are you talking about? You're talking about? 1:22:03 A lot. I touched on a lot of different topics all over the place. So my bad. 1:22:10 I went down a lot of different rabbit holes. So my brain was going in all different directions. So 1:22:18 mapping of different areas and using technology to look for mushrooms. 1:22:26 I'd also like to mention that you're totally right. I mean, mapping is not a new thing people have, you know, for at least 20 or 30 years in my knowledge, people have mapped possible habitats of these certain mushrooms because if this mushroom grows with this Douglas fir, here's the habitat of the Douglas fir, go find those habitats, you'll probably find the mushroom, right? I think a lot comes down to in person teaching as well, where there's something to say that's different if a person can recognize a Douglas fir tree, and can recognize that these are stands of Douglas firs, I don't need to reference a GIS map though it can be helpful if I'm trying to overlay this trailhead and see how many Douglas firs might be here. But recognizing species in in the wild as a human as you're encountering them, being able to recognize you know, this is a spur spruce Dan or this is an Aspen's or Hemlock where reishi might grow. That is a whole other 1:23:27 I think, really just valuable piece of our field and how we're learning together that can't be taken. The machines can't take away from us. 1:23:38 Yeah, no, and this is a Zen phenomena, which is, you know, the second you see a tree, you stop seeing a tree. 1:23:47 Or the second you name a tree, you stop seeing the tree, right of like, and this is something I constantly have to like, go back on. Especially when I I want to label like a Latin name. You know, it's like, okay, but don't stop there. You know, smell it, touch it, feel it, hear it, you know, like everything, look at it, be with it. And don't just don't just like name, the Latin name and then just be like, check. I know it. You know, and I do that all the time of like, I'll just like scan and I'll look at a mushroom and I'm like, Oh, I know that boom, Latin name. And then I'll look away. And it's like, now like, smell it. Like every mushroom is unique. Even if they share the same Latin name. It's like, Yeah, but those two are so different. And this one is on a new day and it's like in the new location and, and the duff smells different and like, you know, this one has a weird.on it and you know, and like appreciate it for what it is and appreciate just being in nature, you know it and it's, it's like can we do both? Can we can we name the Latin name can we work with technology can we use 1:25:00 Though take pictures, can we do all these things? And also, can we take our shoes off and like get our hands on the dirt and like, just be there with no agenda. Other than just being with the mushrooms and being with the fungi being being in the woods. And that's a hard balance to do. But the rewards of of that balance are inconceivable. And honestly, I hope everyone 1:25:31 gets those rewards of just being in nature and not having a thought other than just feeling the presence of of the beauty of nature. So if and if that's the only thing you get out of this, other than you should support Gabrielle's work and you know, definitely observe fungi just go out in the woods, please and like be with mushrooms. 1:25:57 And birds if you're absolutely I think it's 1:26:01 an instant 1:26:03 fish. I think you just spoke to that very well, I I think yes, it's totally not only possible but necessary you kind of need 1:26:14 for at least for me to like to invest a lot of my life and trying to organize this like a mass community science movement, I need my direct one on one experience with nature with like, unadulterated just me feeling 1:26:35 my senses within through nature and having no, I'm not on anybody's time, not on anybody's, whatever location dollar, it's just taking, I wouldn't get it have gotten into this if it wasn't for those moments. So I think they come hand in hand and then 1:26:53 that's, 1:26:57 I think, also, I think they can come together. Because often, often I'm out you know, and I'm just enjoying myself. And like I mentioned that sometimes when I'll just find a really beautiful mushroom and. And I'd also like to say that as I'd like to challenge me and some of us to think about how we can incorporate that into community science even more. Because an observation, a naturalist observations, always evolving just like ourselves. It's not like this observations, a stagnant thing that like it was made at this time, it's going to change. Throughout time, once we start to know more about things once we start to have a larger perspective, the DNA sequences will get better and better in the future, we might process a full genome of this species and how it's related. 1:27:47 The notes what people draw realizations are always a moving, 1:27:53 moving, evolving thing and so even our community science observations alone I'd like to challenge aren't, aren't as aren't just stagnant as what may seem and I yeah, I love how you're ending us off with this because I love incorporating the you know that we noticed mushrooms often because we only smell them we like our full senses are usually involved with being out there and 1:28:19 incorporate incorporating as much as we can, as much as we have our like full human bodies into that into that experience is I think going to be the most prolific and the most impactful. 1:28:33 So I can continue, I have like a million more questions. And honestly, I feel like every one of the questions I feel like we could talk about for a day, minimal, but it's already been an hour and a half and I gotta I gotta cut it off. 1:28:48 And we'll continue in Telluride. So everyone come to Telluride and come mushroom hunting with us. And, and anywhere else, you know, we're there in spirit. And so where can people find you? Where can people follow your work? Learn more about Fundis you personally, etc. 1:29:11 Yeah, anybody can go to fundis.org 1:29:15 we have all of our resources, our free resources and educational videos really fun stuff on the website. We have an email newsletter from good decoded, which is a really good way to stay involved in what we're doing. You can find it on substack as well. We have social media for more diversity survey. And 1:29:38 that is that is that it I live in upstate New York so if you're gonna want to go mushroom with me, that's an easy, easy place to hang out with me and appear and plenty of forays throughout the years. I'm excited to be seeing all of you there. 1:29:52 Hell yeah. Well, that is a wrap. Thank you everyone for tuning in and tuning in for another episode of The 1:30:00 Metro Bible podcast, wherever you're listening, please, you know if you want to, if you'd like what you heard and you're a first time listener or a longtime listener you want to support definitely leave a review. Transcribed by https://otter.ai
