The mushroom that can remove E.coli from water sources

Hi there 🍄 

This week’s highlights include a guide to the delicious golden oyster mushroom and a strain of Colombian mushrooms that could be grown in outer space.

Nature’s fearless alarm system

Fungi go boldly where few beings can. Bioindicators are living things that, usually, reveal the presence of pollutants and indicate the health of an ecosystem. The best bioindicators are abundant and easy to measure, meaning they have a certain set of symptoms sparked by toxicity. Fungi, plants, and animals are all bioindicators.

For example, frogs 🐸 are pretty good bioindicators. They have sensitive, permeable skin, which means they absorb toxins well, and their lifecycle spans both water and land. This makes them susceptible to habitat changes in both places, and population decreases can be the first indicator of ecological stress. So if frogs are effective, consider the huge advantages of fungi (and the amount of frogs we don’t have to lose).

Fungi 🍄 are bioaccumulators, meaning they absorb their environments, like frogs’ sensitive skin, and their colonies exist just about everywhere. Different varieties can monitor global moisture levels, soil composition, air quality, nitrogen levels, pH levels, and the list goes on. Because fungi are abundant, it’s also minimally invasive and usually the most cost-effective way to start environmental monitoring projects. And they roll up their sleeves to get the job done…

Take the Cortinarius caperatus and some Boletus mushroom species, for instance. They effectively absorb radioactive compounds, like cesium-137 from the soil. Cesium-137 typically takes 30 years to decay on its own. In the last three decades, radiotrophic fungal colonies have sprouted around the desolate Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant, using melanin to thrive in high-radiation environments.

Read more about mushrooms as bioindicators.

A non-native species among the hardwoods

The golden child of the oyster mushroom family with about 40 other siblings. Oyster mushrooms have risen in popularity over the last few years and are one of the easiest mushrooms to grow at home. This is good news, given that they’re a non-native species to the North American continent that’s wreaked havoc on other fungi strains since 2012. More than one cap grows out of their majestic and delicious stems, and they’ve been a culinary stable worldwide due to their delicate flavor and sweet smell that’s not unlike popcorn.

Traditional medicine 🧺 uses these golden bouquets for various ailments, like high cholesterol, diabetes, and treating infections. They also pack a high antioxidant punch with nutrients like potassium, zinc, fiber, vitamin B5, phosphorus, vitamin D, and more. It makes sense, then, why these mushrooms were first cultivated in Germany during WWI as a food source to help food shortages.

Speaking of bioaccumulators 🌊 , oyster mushrooms are another powerhouse cleaning crew for toxic waste. One 2020 study on pollution in the Chicago River found that the mycelia of oyster mushrooms removed up to 99.74% of E. coli from the field water sample over 96 hours. Oyster mushroom mycelia was even found to clear toxic ash residue from water sources in a 2018 study of California wildfires.

Read more about golden oyster mushrooms.

Around the web

• 👥 Functional mushrooms in your body: A new study investigated the effects of yogurts fortified with various adaptogenic ingredients on leaky gut syndrome. The results showed that yogurts with maitake mushrooms had higher resistance values, suggesting that it may be an effective treatment for leaky gut syndrome.

• 🪐 Culinary mushrooms in outer space: Daniela Osorio "Dani" Payán, an analog astronaut and Mechatronics Engineering student at the Universidad Autónoma de Occidente in Cali, Colombia, and her team at the European Space Agency effectively grew a strain of Colombian mushrooms with organic solar cells and an automated system that can be used in space. Mushrooms are a rich source of Vitamin D and the team hopes that future astronauts will be able to grow and eat their own space-grown mushrooms.

• 🌀 Psychedelic mushrooms in the U.S.: Lena Beck profiled the growing psilocybin industry in Oregon for Modern Farmer, meeting with growers and practitioners alike to discuss the wide gaps between the legal red tape and practice of therapeutic measures.

Featured artist: Adham Faramawy

Adham Faramawy is a mixed media artist using moving images, sculpture, painting, and photography to “question ideas of the natural in relation to marginalized communities.” They grapple with social and ecological implications in their works, which speak to each other across their mediums and installations. In the 360-degree dance film, My fingers distended as honey dripped from your lips… // 2019, four dancers move around the viewer while fungus starts to appear and metabolize the video.