Pretty much every day, I fantasize about walking
away from my computer and home office and
heading out into the wilderness for a better
life. I mean, I spend more time in
nature than most folks, but I am still
very open to moving into the woods, building
one of those
in ground shelters that they show being built
on YouTube and just calling it home.
Since there are so many pragmatic obstacles with
this option though, I find that I usually
just load up with nature hobbies and forest
and tide pool days.
Today's episode is funny because by the end
of it, I am very clearly ready to
devote myself to becoming a mushroom explorer,
set up a genetics lab in my home,
and begin to start discovering and describing mushrooms.
It will be even more ironic if we
look back at this episode in a year
and I'm actually doing that.
Today's episode is a lot of fun if
you love mushrooms, especially psychedelic ones. Today's episode
is equal parts storytelling and cutting edge science.
Helen is kind and generous, and the episode
is a lot of fun. You'll hear that
I clearly had a blast, and I hope
you do too.
If you wanna learn more about cannabis health,
cultivation, and technique efficiently and with good cheer,
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As the cannabis market continues to compress and
crumble over much of The United States, there
are fewer and fewer cannabis and mushroom companies
that have a budget for marketing.
If you know of a cannabis or mushroom
company not run by cops, rats, or chemical
fertilizers
who should be an advertiser on shaping fire,
please let them know and let me know
too. It is by working together that regenerative
cultivation
expands. And we're now offering a smaller entry
package of commercials, so we're able to include
folks with smaller budgets. Thanks.
If you're here for the first time because
of the mushroom topic, welcome.
We do quite a few mushroom episodes here
at ShapingFire.
Be sure to check out Shaping Fire episode
85,
psilocybin mushrooms and brain chemistry with doctor Meeavy
Shields.
Episode 76,
comparing psilocybin microdosing protocols with guest Adam Bramlage.
Episode 22, treating brain injury with cannabis and
mushrooms with guest doctor Ethan Russo.
Episode 67, also also with doctor Ethan Russo,
migraine therapy using cannabis and mushrooms.
Episode 95, psilocybin mushroom analytical testing with guest
George Selhorn.
And number 70, cannabis mushrooms and terpenes for
Optum Health with guests doctor Ethan Russo, Tony
Vazura, Jeff Chilton, and Burner.
You are listening to Shaping Fire and I
am your host, Shango Los. We are in
our tenth year of Shaping Fire and this
is episode one twenty eight. My guest today
is Alan Rockefeller.
Alan Rockefeller is a mycologist,
photographer, and one of the most prolific citizen
scientists working in fungi today. He's spent over
two decades in the field documenting, collecting, and
helping identify thousands upon thousands of mushroom species
globally.
He's the kind of person who doesn't just
look at mushrooms, he tracks them across ecosystems,
photographs them in ways that'll make you fall
in love with them, and then takes them
back to his microscope
and link right down to their DNA.
Alan has described new species and has coauthored
scientific work on multiple psilocybin containing mushrooms.
But what really sets him apart is how
much of his work is, like, right in
the open. He's identified hundreds of thousands of
fungi observations
online, contributing to platforms like iNaturalist
and helping everyday people turn curiosity into real
science.
He's also a teacher at heart, leading forays,
teaching microscopy
and photography, and helping people not not just
to learn mushrooms, but to see them differently.
He gets people fired up about mushrooms.
Allen has appeared in major media including the
fantastic fungi documentary
and the first season of Hamilton's Pharmacopoeia
too. He's been featured in outlets like National
Geographic and the New York Times and like
so many other places.
During the first set, we talk in-depth about
Psilocybe cupensis as a species complex,
the split of the Psilocybe genus and modern
taxonomy,
and the factors that have led to nearly
all modern cultivated psychedelic mushrooms actually being the
same mushroom, just expressing itself in myriad ways.
In the second set, we talk about evolutionary
pressures on mushrooms, how new traits evolve, and
why nearly all the current mushroom identification
guides are offering information built upon insufficient descriptions.
And we finish the episode with a discussion
of wild versus cultivated mushrooms, the importance and
variety of secondary metabolites in mushrooms,
wood lovers paralysis,
mycelium versus fruiting body supplements, and the sheer
joy that comes from mushroom foraging with ultraviolet
flashlights.
All today on Shaping Fire episode one twenty
eight. Welcome to shaping fire, Alan.
Thanks for helping me on. Yeah. So glad
you could make it. I've been watching your
Instagram the last few weeks, and you have
been all over the place on the planet
recently. And I'm glad to have caught you
back home in the Bay Area.
Let's, let's get started right into the heart
of things. You know, most
everybody, who is at least in my audience,
has come to mushrooms because of psilocybin mushrooms,
why we're here today. And, you know, many
of us find our way to loving mushrooms
because of our joy found in the hallucinogenic
aspects, and that was certainly was for me.
And as I started to learn all about
the fancy and varied mushroom varieties and, you
know, seeing what was, you know, going on
down at the
in Oakland and seeing the different varieties. I
was really shocked to find that nearly all
of the different varieties
that are being modern cultivated by the people
I know are all actually
variety.
And that's that's shocking because they all express
themselves in such different ways. How is it
that the old school like Golden Teachers and
b positive and the the modern title and
Penis Envy and then even like the wild
looking Enigma and others, they're all essentially the
same genetic mushroom even though they look so
different. They're all the cubensis.
Yeah. Cubensis
is most of what people grow, although there's
a couple 100 species and people could grow
almost any of them. But, you know, it's
kind of like
how Brassica olyrica
is broccoli, kale, cauliflower, cabbage, and a dozen
other vegetables.
So it's just different cultivars of the same
species.
And so for people who aren't as experienced
with understanding how that happens,
this is mostly through,
you know, selective breeding, the ones that are
bred that you like,
mutations that you take advantage of and and
and the growing environment and things like that.
Right? So these are these are intentional things
that the breeder is doing to push and
pull the genetics in different ways. Right?
Yeah. Just like people do with plants, but
you can also
do something that's a little bit more like
saving pollen in your freezer where you cross,
different strains.
And so it's pretty easy to take a
couple of two completely different Cubenza strains,
get them to mate on agar, and then
have a new strain. Mhmm.
People
try to grow their cultivate their mushrooms in
an environment
that,
is most beneficial to the mushroom because most
of us, we're just looking for for healthy
and volume. Right?
If we were to grow
mushrooms in a less apt environment and and
and, you know, and stress them or push
them this way or another so they express
different parts
of their,
genetics.
Might we,
you know, use that using using the ideas
of nature versus nurture,
using this idea that we're
it poorly
into this different form,
might we be able to then capture those,
attributes in a new mushroom, or or does
growing it in a certain direction
not really help
with the, developing,
which parts of the, genetics are expressed?
Yeah. So when different environments, so it'll cause
it to express different phenotypes, but it won't
really change the mushroom at all. It'll just
look a little bit different. So,
there are people like Julian Matteucci who's doing
experiments with gamma radiation, and he found out
that the mycelium is growing towards the gamma
radiation source,
and that'll probably cause mutations
and do all sorts of crazy things, but,
that that's pretty rare. In general, people
just grow them.
But I've been trying to talk people out
of growing Psilocybe cubensis,
because it's kind of boring. It's not really
native here. It's not super potent, and it
kinda hurts your stomach, a lot more than
some of the other species.
What are the some of the other species
that you encourage people to look into? I
mean, there's hundreds of psilocybe species alone. Right?
And and and somehow we we landed on
cubensis. So I guess this is a two
part question. Do you know why we landed
on cubensis as the one we wanted to
work with the most, and what are these
other varieties that you encourage people to look
at?
So cubensis
is super easy to grow. It's really fast.
So to grow it is kinda like a
maybe a two month cycle,
and it also has, you know, it's very
heavy, so it has a lot of biomass.
So if you're growing it for sale,
it's really hard to make, you know, economic
sense growing anything other than QBENSUS.
But if you're growing it,
just to take them
or
for medicine or something like that, I think,
there's a lot of other better choices, and
they're not as big and chunky as cubensis,
and they don't grow quite as fast.
Mhmm. But you have
about a 100 different species in Psilocybe,
and then you have,
other genera like Paniolus,
Gymnopilus,
Plutius,
Folioti,
foliotina,
which is now connocebula,
but there's,
all sorts of different ones that, in theory,
could be grown.
The best ones are typically in painiolus
or psilocybe,
and Paniolis is actually really distantly related to
Psilocybe, so
that is likely to be pretty different. And
then also in Psilocybe itself,
you have
it's kind of split down the genus is
split down the middle genetically,
and we call it clade one and clade
two, and they have completely different psilocybin gene
clusters.
So it's very likely that
something that's, from the other clade is gonna
be much more different than something from the
same clade.
But, you know, there's a lot of different
chemicals
in these mushrooms that cause the effect. You
have, like, a dozen different tryptamines
and, all sorts of beta carbolines and things,
and that is we're just starting to figure
out, you know, what effect did those,
chemicals have.
For people who are
new to researching mushrooms, but they're excited about
it and looking for something, you know, we
mentioned that there are so many,
psilocybe,
varieties to look at.
What are a few that that you think
are engaging and show some promise
for people who kinda want a a leg
up on where they should look instead of
just kinda diving into the big pool of
philosophy generally? Like, you know, if we for
the people who are taking notes and are
like, oh, I'm gonna look at these because
there might be some interesting stuff there.
Yeah. I think,
my favorite one is psilocybe zapiducorum.
And so zapidicorum
is described from Oaxaca,
and this is one of the landslide mushrooms.
And so in Mexico, you find it growing
at the base of landslides.
So kind of a really crazy dramatic habitat,
but they can be huge. They can be
up to a foot tall, and they're extremely
potent,
with about 3%
psilocybin.
So
it is the strongest
wild psilocybin mushroom that has been tested,
and they're also really pretty. The stem is
kinda shaggy, and the blue staining is
very intense cobalt blue.
And so,
these, I think,
are much better for people to cultivate than
Cubensis if they want something that's better to
grow. Mhmm.
And they're not super hard to grow. They're
about a five month cycle instead of a
two month cycle, so they take a little
longer.
And they need a little bit higher humidity.
You know, Cubensis is kind of tolerant of
it drying out a little bit. But other
than that, it's pretty much the the same.
So I've been trying to talk people into
growing something like Psilocybe zapatacorum
or Psilocybes subtropicalis
is another one that's closely related to zapatacorum,
also found in Southeastern Mexico.
And in cultivation, that one's been measured at
up to 5% psilocybin.
So that one is
about as strong as Zapateroam,
and it's smaller. People have been growing it
for for quite a while, and that's probably
about as good,
as far as the experience goes. But, you
know, I noticed that those species don't hurt
my stomach nearly as much as cubensis do,
so a whole lot less nausea
and a much better cleaner experience.
And you have to eat a whole lot
less mushroom for, for a similar effect. Did
you did I hear you say zapotachorum
grows to three feet?
I said one foot. One foot. Alright. Even
one foot, that's a big ass mushroom.
Yeah. Yeah. And they're not always that tall,
but, you know, in cultivation, it's it's not
uncommon to see people with, like, a whole
bunch that are all, like, nine inches long.
Oh. And in the wild, yeah, I've I've
seen them definitely a foot, maybe 14 inches
tall.
Wow. Alright.
So,
so, still kinda hitting on this idea that
we've been using doing Cubensys so so far
because,
I I want to encourage folks to break
break away from Cubensys because so many people
that I talk to, you know, regular enthusiasts,
kind of think that all of these mushrooms
that are that are in the hobby are
are all different, and and it's it's surprising
to find out that they're so similar.
I've heard, a mentor say to me that
that most of the modern strains, that we're
still using can really be, traced back to
a handful of original spore prints that were
circulating during the seventies and eighties. Is that
just lore, or does that sound pretty accurate
to you?
That's probably true, but it's also really easy
just to go out into nature and collect
a a fresh wild one. Mhmm.
But I think it's true that 99%
of what's cultivated,
comes from collections from a long time ago.
Mhmm. Because these kind of have stabilized genetics,
and, you know, they've already been bred for
more potency or a certain look.
And so, yeah, they probably don't really have
very much genetic diversity, but you could certainly
go to
Florida or Eastern Texas and and grab a
wild cubensis and
spore print that and cross it with one
of these modern strains to introduce a bunch
more genetic diversity.
And that sounds really awesome, although people don't
usually do it because
it doesn't really seem to benefit the cultivator
in any way, other than just kinda like
throwing a wild card, giving yourself the chance
of getting a strain that's
significantly different than its parents.
I see. So, there there really isn't any
advantage to freshening up the genetics if they're
just the same. If you if you happen
to hit the lottery and get a variety
that's atypical, well, that's certainly gonna be a
win. But if you're just looking to refresh
the old print, meh. There's not really much
advantage to it.
Not with Psilocybe cubensis.
And, you know, some species go senescent, and
senescence is when the DNA
keeps growing and growing and basically gets tired
and old.
And
that happens with some
species a whole lot more than others, like
with cordyceps militaris, it happens very quickly.
And with oyster mushrooms, it basically never happens.
And cubensis is is a little bit more
like oysters.
You know, it's kinda hard to know
it's kinda hard to measure senescence because there's
so many other variables, but
in in general,
there doesn't seem to be a whole lot
of benefit from going to, to a wild
print and getting, all of these
different,
genotypes,
in the DNA.
This is kind of a stretch of a
question, but I'm gonna go for it anyway.
You're talking about,
this, the the the genetics kind of losing
its its moxie after a while. And we
and we certainly run into this a lot
also in cannabis. Right? When we're making clones
of clones of clones.
You know, the the the plant that we
might be growing now might
while it's acting fresh and young for us,
it might actually be 20 years old itself.
Is is that kind of how what happens
in,
in mushrooms too? I've never really thought of
how, like, age and maturity
works in mushrooms. But,
do do they eventually kind of, like, lose
their
inertia as well?
You know, some species much more than others.
And Cubensis doesn't seem to do it much.
Another probably good reason why it was,
leaned on for for,
universal use and acceptance. Yeah.
Yeah. It doesn't really peter out like some
other ones might.
Mhmm. So as I was getting, prepared to
talk to you, I was learning about cuben
cubensis, and,
I I came across the debate about whether
or not, cubensis is really going to stay
one species or not, or rather if it's
a species complex. And as as I understand
that, that's a that is, a a group
of species
that,
are presently together.
But when they're looked at in more detail,
they'll find important ways that they tease apart.
Do you think that Cubensis is gonna end
up being a species complex and broken apart
eventually?
Yeah. And it it already is a species
complex, and so Cubensis is named after Cuba
where it was discovered,
but it's actually an Asian species,
and so it comes from Asia or Africa.
And if you go over to Asia and
Africa, there's a bunch of species that look
very similar and are closely related, So it's
already a species complex over there. And every
species
on Earth is moving apart just like all
the galaxies in the universe are moving apart.
So,
everything is speciating.
And
in fungi,
no one really knows what a species is.
It's it's pretty amorphous,
and so
that's, kind of an interesting thing, but, you
know, biological organisms
just do that over time. They they never
stay the same. They're always changing and adapting
and mutating,
and so,
the cubensis that we have
is mostly one species, but there's a couple
of them, like natal superstrain
and tranci
are actually Psilocybe
okratio centrata, which is pretty common in South
Africa
and Kenya,
places like that.
And that one,
has only recently been recognized as as its
own species, but if you sequence the DNA,
you can tell it apart pretty easily.
And it has pretty different effects than a
regular cubensis, and almost everybody likes it better.
So, if you wanna grow something a little
bit different,
but don't wanna go go, like, to a
completely different thing, that's a a pretty good
option,
is just get a a natal super strength
or, or Transkei print, and,
every everybody that tries them says that they
they really like the experience of those, and
they're they're pretty strong compared to your standard
cube.
I heard a little bit of hope in
there, and I wanna I wanna pull pull
that out because I think we can should
all use as much of that as we
can today. You you made this great simile
between,
the speciation
of mushrooms,
to be akin to,
the expansion of the universe. And most of
the time, we are focusing on how,
humans on Earth are are, you know, destroying
the environment and limiting species and moving species
more towards,
extinction.
And and and the hope that I think
I hear in here is a suggestion from
you that that that mushrooms might be getting
more numerous and more varied,
as time goes by. Did did I interpret
that correctly? Is that what you're saying? Because
that's that's a cool thing if true.
Yeah. Well, that's that's definitely true. You know,
every every organism on earth is always splitting
in different species,
and it's really hard to say what a
species is because it takes thousands of years
to make a different species.
And,
you know, the mushrooms don't really care what
we call them. They just are kinda doing
their thing, but their thing definitely an involves
getting more diverse.
And, you know, it's not just mushrooms, all
the plants and bacteria. Everything on Earth is
getting more and more diverse as time goes
on.
So I used to be really focused on
freshwater animals and plant species, and I had
35 aquariums. I was really into it. And
it blew my mind when suddenly the taxonomy
for the shrimp that I had been breeding
for sale was changed from Neocaridina
heteropoda to Neocaridina
davidi.
And I was all like, what the hell?
Like, can they do that?
And then and then I realized that this
was this actually happened with
psilocybe too where it got broken up and
half of the mushrooms
got renamed.
For those of us who are not on
the inside of how that played out, would
you just kinda tell us the story of
how that happened? Because I I found it
pretty interesting.
Yeah. So every genus has a type species,
and that type species is the official representative
of that genus.
And so a long time ago, we used
to figure out what was related to each
other just based on what things looked like
and the microscopic
features.
And
within the past twenty five years, all of
a sudden, we've been able to DNA barcode
things. And with this DNA becoming cheap and
accessible,
all of a sudden, we get some real
insight into what's related to what. And it
turns out that we were only right about
half of the time.
And the other half of the time, we
were wrong, and that's due to convergent evolution,
where two things that are not closely related
have similar ecological pressures and end up looking
real
similar, but if you check the DNA, then
you realize, oh, they actually arose from completely
different places,
evolutionarily,
and so that happens all the time,
not just with mushrooms, but with shrimp
and plants and birds and, you know, just
about everything else.
And
so the type species of Psilocybe
was Psilocybe Montana
and has been that way for a very
long time,
you know, over a hundred years. And, you
know, people were happy,
to call them that. And it turns out
that half of the Psilocybes didn't stain blue
and didn't have any effect if you ate
them, and the other half did stain blue
and had effects when you eat them. And
psilocybe montana was in that group that did
not stain blue and didn't have any effect.
So with the DNA barcoding, people realized,
actually,
these ones that don't stain blue are quite
a bit different genetically
from the ones that do,
and if you make a phylogenetic tree, so
that's a tree of life, you can see
that there's a whole bunch of other mushrooms
that are in between them,
and so genera need to be monophyletic, which
means that they all arise from a common
ancestor.
So you can't have a genus that has
a whole bunch of things from different branches
of the tree of life all crammed together
into one genus.
So,
that presented a problem in Psilocybe because,
the type species of Psilocybe was, you know,
Psilocybe Montana,
and
that meant that all of the blueing ones
needed to have a different name
than all of
the non blueing ones. And so the type
species
of Psilocybe was Psilocybe warora,
which is
from New Zealand. And that's that blueing puffball
that you find on tree ferns there.
And,
and then the type species of,
well, you know, type species was Montana. But,
you know, basically,
it looked like what had to have happened
was that all of the psilocybe that were
blueing needed a new name.
And so what they did, and and by
they, it's Gaston Guzman and a few of
his collaborators,
is they submitted a pro proposal
to the International
Nomenclature
Committee, and they proposed that they change the
types pieces of psilocybe to psilocybe samilaniata,
the Liberty Cap.
And then
they used,
the name diconica for all the other ones.
And so that was a good idea, so
we didn't have to rename all of our
psilocybes to a different genus.
You know, that would have been unfortunate since,
they have psilocybin and everything.
So now the Deaconicas
are their own group,
kind of closer to Gallerina, and the psilocybes
are,
retained the psilocybe name. And,
and that kinda added some nomenclatural
stability
to all of this.
But, yeah, it's,
it that was done about 2014,
and, I I think that was a good
idea. It's interesting too that, I was understanding
that the way taxonomy works,
the name actually,
some were arguing you should stay with the
nonpsychoactive
mushrooms. But, of course, it would be it'd
be, you know, bizarre to have the psilocybin
name with the with the letters for psilocybin
in it describing
the non hallucinogenic
mushrooms.
It seemed the way that I read it,
it sounded like they they decided, okay. You
know, we'll let the psilocybe stay with the
hallucinogenic mushrooms just kind of like as an
administrative
decision because
changing all of the, you know, the science
and all the people who are into it,
they they just seemed like a monumental move.
Did I do I have a good read
on that that they just, like, it it
it was a it was a nonscience
more administrative decision because it just made more
sense as far as, like, study usability?
Yeah. That's exactly right.
And so,
this is done through a proposal to conserve
the name,
and I just pulled it up here. It
was published in 2007.
So in 2007,
it was Scott Redhead
and a few other mycologists,
for the Mexican mycologists, Laura Guzman and Gaston
Guzman,
and they all wrote this little proposal.
And so they're basically asking for an exception
to the nomenclature rules, and that was accepted.
And so,
I kinda dodged that bullet back in 2007.
Does the does the mycology community
at that level
I mean,
from from being involved with aquariums and cannabis
as much as I have been, I understand
how there can be full full contact drama
at these high levels of science. But did
did a move like this happen relatively undramatically,
or was it messy at the time and
it's easier to look back at it than
than to have lived through it?
I think everyone was just relieved
that it was accepted and that we didn't
have to,
make all those name changes.
But, you know, the mycologists
generally get along pretty well. You don't have
a whole lot of drama. And one reason
for that is that there's really no mushroom
there's no money in mushrooms.
And so with something like the cannabis world
where there's a whole lot of money involved,
it causes
all sorts of drama,
but with mushrooms it's kind of the opposite
where there's really there's almost no money in
it,
kind of a mixed blessing because it keeps
all the people that just care about money
away. So the only people that study mushrooms
are people that actually care about them,
and you don't have disputes over money,
but it also means there's really no money
for research. So there's tons of new species
of mushrooms that gets get discovered every day,
and
very few people are actually
publishing them and and writing up the new
species.
It's amazing how in just common conversation with
people about mushrooms, how many people think that,
you know, the mushrooms that are to be
discovered
have been discovered.
And if there is any kind of discovery,
you're gonna need to go to some super
exotic place,
you know,
at the Epic Equator or something. But the
more I have listened to you, there are
new mushrooms
everywhere, and I think it'd be really helpful
to people un to understand that more.
Yeah. There really are. In fact, if you
go out just hiking in in the woods,
anywhere in The United States and if it's
been raining really well and the season's good,
you'll discover
50 to a 100 new species
per day.
And they're new and that they're unknown to
science, so there's no scientific name for them.
They haven't been formally described,
but we see them all the time, and
some of them are extremely common. Some of
the most common edibles in grocery stores, some
of the most common mushrooms that you might
see a thousand times a day,
even those don't have names yet.
So that's a that's a really
incredible,
you know, claim to that there's so many
even, you know, even where I live in
the Pacific Northwest, you know, we had we
do have a lot of mushrooms here, but
still, that I could go out and find
so many just just walking.
Do you think that they are,
they are
undescribed and unknown to science simply because of
what we were saying earlier that there's not
really money in it to for people to
go out and spend their time that way?
Yeah. That that's exactly it. And it's not
like they're unknown. I mean, if you get
a field guide to the Pacific Northwest,
every mushroom will be in there, and they'll
all have names attached to them. They just
won't be the right names.
So there's two ways we deal with that.
One way is that we misapply names,
and so we will borrow a name from
Europe
and apply it to our mushroom even though
we know it's different because we don't have
a name.
And that's extremely common. If you just flip
through a field guide, probably half of the
names in there are misapplied European names, and
the other way we deal with that is
adding temporary names. So whenever I sequence the
DNA of a mushroom, when it doesn't come
back as
something that is described that has a name,
I will assign it a temporary name, and
that name gets used on citizen science websites
like iNaturalist
and Mushroom Observer,
and even written about in scientific papers. That
way, at least we have something to call
all of the names, and these names might
be something like,
Enteloma
species California
82,
and that's because we have eighty eighty two
species of entilloma that we have sequenced in
California that we don't have names for. And
most of those are probably
unknown to science.
So that is a whole lifetime's worth of
work right there for somebody.
But
you can also,
apply a provisional name.
For example, you have Psilocybe gendalciana,
and that is an unpublished name.
And it's gonna be published in the future,
but for now,
it's just it's just a temporary name.
But at least when we see it, we
can communicate to other people,
about what it is that we found, and
it's really important to have names for mushrooms
for two reasons.
One of them is so we can talk
about what we found, and when you're doing
research
on a mushroom, so you're gonna do a
chemical analysis,
you have to be able to communicate exactly
which mushroom you analyzed.
And so if you read any of the
older papers on the chemistry of fungi,
they'll be using the wrong name.
And so they'll say that they tested one
mushroom, but they actually tested a different mushroom,
and they these will be different chemically.
The other reason it's important to name fungi
is for conservation
because if something is very rare, you have
to have a a name for it. So
you can say, oh, we have to save
this really rare thing.
It doesn't really work to be like, oh,
we gotta save all of these unnamed
things.
But if you publish if you find a
mushroom, you sequence the DNA, and it does
not match anything in GenBank or any of
the other DNA data
databases,
then you can say, oh, this mushroom
only occurs
in this one little forest.
And, you know, maybe it actually occurs other
places, but if it's only known from one
place, then you can say, well, it probably
shouldn't cut down this forest because
maybe it goes extinct if you cut it
down. Maybe this there's something special about this
tract of land here.
But there are so many unnamed mushrooms that
you could literally go into any forest anywhere
in the world,
collect a whole bunch of fungi, and find
novel DNA barcodes
there.
And
that that's kind of a cool thing,
you know, about fungi and just,
we're just starting to to learn about all
of them. But really, just a very small
percentage of the fungi are named,
probably between
110%
of the fungi out there are named,
and the rest of them,
do not have names. And so it's more
likely to have a name if it's big
or if it's psychoactive or there's some reason
for people to pay attention to it. You
know, most of the fungi in the world
don't make mushrooms,
and most of,
but even most of the mushrooms,
still remain unnamed.
That's so that's startling. Everything you just said
there is very startling. The fact that so
few of them have been described properly
and and that you know, it's inspiring too
that there's that there's so much, you know,
exploring left to do. I I've got a
hit on that part, though, that so many
of them
are are misnamed and that European names have
been brought over and misapplied and so many
of the guidebooks are,
you know, somewhere between vague and wrong.
When they when when they're when they're in
the book
and it's all put made to look so
orderly, it it it feels like science.
But to but to find out that many
of them are misnamed is is,
surprising.
What do you recommend for people who
want to make sure that they are learning
accurate
taxonomy
and and I guess to some degree nomenclature
for these mushrooms? Is there a, do you
does everybody kinda have to start with the
these early books that have got so many
inaccuracies
and then over time, they weed them out?
Or or do you recommend for people getting
into mushrooms to, like, skip that whole consumer
layer of books
because of the inaccuracies
and start
somewhere else with a more scientific based book?
Well, there really are no books that have
all of the updated names because as soon
as you publish a book, you know, it's
a snapshot in time, and
the the names keep changing,
and as our understanding keeps evolving.
But there's certainly a newer book is is
gonna have less of a learning curve, you
know, when you try to use the the
newest best name, as opposed to an older
name, but older books still work fine.
Also, old names or misapplied names, the wrong
name is still way better than no name.
If somebody uses a name from a hundred
years ago, I'll still know what they're talking
about.
It's just that maybe we have a a
better name now that more accurately reflects,
its its true genetic relationship.
And I guess you might have a name
from a 100 years ago that that that
might not be the right name. We were
but at least you know what that name
the four of them that that name was
broken into. And so you go, alright. I'm
gonna go look at these four.
Yeah. Exactly. Mhmm. And, you know, long time
ago, almost every gilled mushroom was in Agaricus.
So Amanita muscaria
was named Agaricus
muscarias,
and old scientific names are still valid. So
you can still call it, you know, Agaricus
muscariac,
Muscaricus, and that's not
wrong. It's just that we have, a more
updated name now that that more people know.
Right on. Alright. So, we're gonna take a
short break and be right back. And when
we come back, we're gonna start, with a
conversation about the the kinds of pressure that
you need for mushrooms to evolve.
You are listening to Shaping Fire, and my
guest today is mycologist,
Alan Rockefeller. And, you know, without these advertisers,
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Welcome back you are listening to shaping fire
I am your host shango Los and my
guest today is mycologist
Alan Rockefeller
so before the break we were talking about
how many different varieties there are still
for us to to describe and all the
room there is for,
folks to explore in the mushroom world. And,
you know, Alan, we
these mushrooms, they continually
change because of pressure
from the environment, whether it be, you know,
weather or nutrition or even humans.
Will you tell us a little bit about
about,
the arc
of of change? Like, you mentioned earlier that
this happens for a long over a long
period of time because they don't work on
the same clock as humans.
But also over that kind of time,
the pressures
are different than the ones that we as
humans experience.
So do we will you illustrate that with
us for, like, you know, a story or
two about about what you've seen influence,
mushroom evolution?
Yeah. So that's one of the cool things
about mushrooms is that the evolutionary
pressures are so different than they are
with plants or animals,
and so that makes plants and animals very
easy to understand because they all you know,
the plants have their pollinators,
the animals have their predators. But with mushrooms,
the evolutionary
pressures are mostly things that we don't know
anything about and that we can really just
not even comprehend.
And so that makes mushrooms
very mysterious,
and that's why the reason I'm so drawn
to them
is that they are just
really mysterious. And, you know, I always tell
people anytime
you have a question about mushrooms with this
that starts with the word why, the answer
is always the same.
I don't know. Nobody knows.
And so we have so much to learn
about mushrooms,
and, yes, those evolutionary pressures that are shaping
them, but most of those evolutionary pressures are
things that happen
deep underground
or inside of a log. So we just
don't have any idea what's going on, but
it's definitely chemical warfare
with other species of fungi and bacteria,
viruses.
And, you know, we know that they like
rain, so some mushrooms will adapt to drier
areas,
by maybe the cap not opening up so
much. So it's more like a puffball on
a stick. We see that a lot in
more arid areas.
But for the most part, we just have
no concept of what these pressures are, and
the evolution has been really interesting. You have
all of these crazy chemicals,
all of these pigments,
and you have mushrooms that are almost any
color of the rainbow,
but
nobody
really has any idea why any mushroom is
any color, whether it has a benefit to
the mushroom or not.
If it does have a benefit, how does
that work?
It's just completely
mysterious.
Well, while we're talking about color, I was
gonna ask you this during the third set.
Let's put it in here.
You know, the the the mushrooms that are
commonly called albinos but are usually leucistic in
the in the modern cultivation world, they're they're
they're they're very wanted, like, you know, the
albino penis envy and and others, albino Louisiana.
And,
is any of the
the
is there an attractive aspect to the leucistic
part about its functioning? Or is it just
because an a leucistic mushroom just, like, looks
cool because it's so different? Is there anything
biologically
about it that makes it more preferable
than the non leucistic variety?
Well, a lot of those albino strains do
tend to be pretty strong. So maybe they're
putting more of their energy into producing alkaloids
since they don't have to produce all of
the
pigments.
But that's just a guess. It seems like
these pigments
are missing
occasionally just by chance, and that can happen
in any mushroom, just sometimes, like, one in
a thousand, you'll come across a mushroom that
is just missing its color, and typically there's
several different molecules
that all mix together to make the color
of a mushroom. So, usually, it's just missing
one of them.
And so for example, the spores
often have a dark color, and
often the the darkest color,
is missing giving
spores kind of a reddish look. So that'll
be the red spore varieties,
but sometimes,
other pigments are missing and you get other
colors, and then sometimes all of them are
missing, and the spores just end up being
white
or clear in a normally dark spored mushroom.
I think with the spore color, that's one
one pressure that we've kinda figured out what
that does do because
the ultraviolet light, the UVA and UVB from
the the sun
sterilizes,
you know, breaks the DNA chain, sterilizes the
spores. So it's more likely that dark spored
mushrooms are found with a wider distribution,
something like copernellus
micaceous or some of these safherellas.
You'll find the same mushroom all over the
world. Whereas with the white spore mushroom,
it's much less common that you find the
same exact species on different continents,
and that's probably because when you have a
white spore mushroom,
any ultraviolet that hits it will just sterilize
the DNA in there and and kill the
spore.
Wow.
Developing their own sun suntan lotion.
One of the wildest discoveries that I've come
across in mushroom science was that the genes
responsible for
psilocybin
seem to have jumped between
species. And I I learned this this term
for horizontal gene transfer, which again
put puts us kinda in the the realm
of things we don't know and magic, I
guess. But could you explain what we know
about horizontal
gene transfer in fungi and and how what
that tells us about the evolutionary role of
psilocybin
in these mushrooms?
Yeah. So, normally, in evolution, you get your
genes from your parents,
and, you know, things get passed down that
way.
But, occasionally,
in nature, you find these genes that are
not from the parents, and they're just completely
different, and so you'll find genes from a
completely different organism
inside of another organism, and that's called a
horizontal gene transfer. And there's a lot of
ways that can happen. There's bacteria, and there
are viruses that will insert foreign DNA from
one organism into another. That's how Monsanto
makes all of their transgenetic
crops as a bacteria called algal bacterium,
but it also can happen just due to
physical damage. Like, if you take two completely
different types of mushrooms,
back back together, and sometimes
DNA from completely unrelated organisms
will stick together, and occasionally,
it continues to function.
And so this psilocybin
gene cluster,
got inherited
in psilocybin
about thirty million years ago or got inserted
with horizontal gene transfer, and
that's quite a while ago.
You know, humans have only been on the
Earth about three hundred thousand years, so these
psilocybin mushrooms are
much older than humans.
And so we can only guess as to
how and why that happened.
But just looking at all of the DNA
sequences, we can kind of figure out when
these organisms
acquired these
genes. And I think it's actually pretty common
in nature that horizontal gene transfer happens.
It's just that usually it's not in such
an iconic thing as the
psilocybin gene cluster, so we usually don't notice
it.
But there's a lot of different mushrooms that
have psilocybin, and they are not all closely
related.
We have six or seven genera,
and
the psilocybin
gene cluster
for most of them is
the same gene. And so they definitely did
not evolve independently.
Psilocybin involved
in something and then got transferred horizontally
to all of these
different mushrooms. But we don't know what that
was.
No. We don't know what it is. There's,
there's a paper by Jason Slott where he
found some similar genes in the apheliales,
and that is a group
of crust fungi. So it's possible that
they got the the gene from some crust
fungi, but it's also possible it came from
somewhere else. Maybe it came from something that
went extinct, and now these genes live on,
in the mushrooms, but the original organism that
evolved them is no longer here.
So when when when I was,
reading about horizontal gene transfer, I was thinking
it was more about,
mushroom to mushroom, different varieties
reaching each other with their spores. But now
I realize it's it's it's it's much bigger
than that.
Do you think that we could be
still experiencing horizontal gene transfer regularly
now, but we don't know it because it's
gonna take tens of thousands or hundreds of
thousands of years for it to evolve? Like
like, somehow it always seems like all of
these these crosses happened, you know, all these
millions of years ago. But but re based
on what you're saying, they could also be
happening right now, but we're never gonna be
around to see them.
Yeah. Well, the product that's slow is the
evolution,
you know, the mutations
over time
and a beneficial mutation,
doing better than another one. But horizontal gene
transfer is a very rapid thing. It happens
just, you know, basically instantly.
And so you just all of a sudden
have these genes,
transferred from one organism to another, and I
think it probably happens all the time in
nature. It probably happens inside your body every
day, and you just don't even notice it.
But,
you know, so I think it's rare that
we do notice it.
Mhmm.
So when we were we were talking in
the first set about,
how many of the, mushroom species are yet
to be, discovered
and that, you know, you are out in,
you are out in the forest and elsewhere
finding new, psilocybin species yourself along with others.
I know this is a very speculative question,
and luckily, it doesn't start with the word
why. But do you do you think that
we've even found half of the psilocybin
expressing
mushrooms out there? And of the ones that,
are still to be found,
do you think that they are,
you know, clustered in some part of the
world because of
the environment that seems to be more friendly
to psilocybe?
Or do you think that,
they're just as likely to be anywhere at
this point just because they've had so much
time to spread around?
Well, I think we've probably discovered about half
of them. Mhmm. And certainly a lot of
the bigger, more common ones that are found
in places where a lot of people live
are more likely to be named,
but even in a state like California that
has people all over it, you know, there's
there's new ones being discovered here. There's probably
new species of psilocybin mushrooms to be discovered
in in every state,
and then some groups are just studied a
whole lot less than others.
For example, psilocybe
is generally pretty well studied because they're so
iconic, but gymnopilis
and paniolis
are two other genera that are extremely common,
much more common than psilocybe, and
they are
kind of a taxonomic
mess and that some species were described, but
we don't really know which names go with
which species.
And there's a whole bunch of them that
just don't seem to have names. And so,
you know, a lot of in North America
where there's tons of people around, you know,
a lot of the new psilocybin discoveries are
gonna come from Paniolus,
Gymnopyllus,
gonaecibula,
inosibiasis,
some of these other genera that,
people don't pay quite as much attention to.
You know, we've been talking And then Go
ahead.
The second part of your question, are there
some parts of the world that are more
conducive to
psilocybin mushrooms? And, you know, that's really the
cloud forest habitat.
And so cloud forest is something that we
don't get in The United States, but you
don't have to go very far south of
the border,
before you start getting cloud forests in Mexico.
The furthest north is,
a place called El Cielo in Tamaulipas,
just a little bit South of Texas. And
then as you go further south in Mexico,
you get more and more cloud forest. And
the cloud forest is one of the most
diverse ecosystems
in the world,
and it's something that you see between
1,000
meters and 2,500
meters elevation.
And these forests get a whole lot of
rain, and then,
most afternoons, the clouds come in. Very often,
it rains,
kinda every afternoon.
And so you get a lot of
precipitation
there, a lot of humidity.
And if you go down in elevation, it
starts to get real hot and things dry
out quicker. So then you get into the
tropical
ecosystems. And then if you go up in
elevation, it starts to get very cold. And
so in these tropical ecosystems, the mushrooms that
tend to do well
are these smaller white spore mushrooms.
And as you go up and it gets
colder, the mushrooms that tend to do well
are larger.
So that's where you find a lot of
your really big porcini and chanterelles,
up at the high elevations. But in the
middle, you have the highest biodiversity,
and you go into these cloud forests, and
the plant diversity is just insane. You have
hundreds of species of trees per acre.
Whereas here,
on the West Coast Of The United States,
you know, we might have five or 10
species of trees per acre, and the fungal
diversity follows the plant diversity. And then if
you start looking at the mushrooms, you'll see
cordyceps
everywhere.
There's thousands of different kinds. And then those
are the habitats that you find the most
diversity of psilocybin mushrooms.
Just sometimes we'll we'll find
10 different species of psilocybe in in one
day in in some of these places,
just because the habitats are so diverse.
Just hearing you describe that space is so
inspiring. I mean, it sounds like a science
and photography
wonderland. It sounds really wonderful.
I'm curious whether or not these these these
cloud forests that have got all of this
very delicate biology,
are they starting to get trampled
by,
folks around the world who are interested in
these and other mushrooms who are,
you know, looking to explore it? It sounds
like a delicate environment and if it's at
the top of the list, I can imagine,
you know, citizen scientists and corporate scientists and
university scientists and, you know, backpackers and, you
know, all these people going to this area
to to see the beauty and then maybe,
like, you know, become famous by, you know,
finding their specialty mushroom or something like that.
And it and it makes me have concerns
for the environment itself. Is it is it
so early that we're not seeing that yet,
or or is the destruction of these mushroom
habitats by curiosity,
you know, curiosity seekers,
already having an impact?
So these cloud forest habitats are being destroyed
at an increasing rate, but it's not the
curiosity seekers that are doing it. It's the
loggers. And so in Mexico, they've already logged
99%
of the cloud forests.
And so the logging,
continues at an increasing rate every year.
In Central And South America, they get rid
of a lot of them
to do,
to have cattle
and farm fields, that sort of thing.
And so
the the impact of people that are curious
and and wanna go collect mushrooms or collect
plants is just about nothing,
compared to the in impact of the loggers.
And, you know, these mushrooms are a very
sustainable resource. They've done studies where they pick
every single mushroom in a study plot
over thirty years, and what they find is
that if you just leave all of the
mushrooms there or you rip all of the
mushrooms out of the ground
or you carefully cut them off with a
knife, there's really no impact
on the number of mushrooms that come back
the next year.
But what does really impact them is cutting
down the trees. So if you cut down
the trees,
then the mushrooms,
will go away, and you'll find just the
same
40 boring mushrooms that you find in every
suburban backyard in these clear cuts.
And after about a hundred years, then,
it they start to come back.
But if you put a parking lot instead
of the forest,
then they don't really ever come back. So
it's really humans that are, you know, destroying
these ecosystems, and they just don't see the
value in these ecosystems.
And that is one of the
cool things
about mushrooms because if you can teach people
to forage mushrooms
for food or for medicine, then they have
a reason to go to the forest, and
they have a reason to preserve these forests.
You know, people that live in the cities
and just don't have any reason to go
to the forest, they're not gonna say anything
if they propose to cut down one of
the forest. But if you got a bunch
of foragers in there that are looking for
food
and psilocybe and and everything else, then they're
gonna complain if somebody proposes to cut down
their local forest. And that's one of the
reasons that it's important to get more people
into nature, get more people into mushroom foraging,
And,
when people start picking mushrooms, they spend a
lot more time in the woods, and they
realize
how cool and how interesting nature is and
how how valuable these places are. Yeah. Support
your nonlocal cloud forest T shirts.
We
we wanna make them more popular so they're
easier to protect.
Yeah. And, you know, the cloud forest habitat
is the most biodiverse, but there's cool mushrooms
in any habitat,
even the deserts outside of Los Angeles, California
have really cool mushrooms in them when it
does rain. So these fungi are just waiting
for the rains, and after the rains that
come up, you get all these crazy puff
balls on sticks and,
all all sorts of things. So there are
cool mushrooms in every habitat
and even ones that seem very desolate like
a dry grassland.
When the rains come, you'll find really cool,
unique mushrooms in the grasslands and in the
chaparral
that you won't find anywhere else and that
you wouldn't see in in a really nice
forest.
We've been talking about,
you know, arrays of mushrooms and how many
more there are to be described and how
many of the old descriptions
are proving inaccurate.
And, you know, I think that most of
this and and most of our realization of
this is due to DNA sequencing technology and
how it's rewriting mushroom history.
A, would you think that that's that is
right, that that's the the key technology at
the core of it? And and also for
for folks who are not,
deep into this aspect, would you explain
what dna sequencing is doing for mycology as
a whole
yeah that's accurate and you know it's not
just mycology it's every branch of life has
been revolutionized by dna sequencing
And, you know, DNA sequencing is really just
reading the DNA.
And so these molecules,
encode a huge amount of data,
and they're so tiny that until recently, we
just didn't have any way to read them.
But starting in the nineteen fifties, people started
to figure out this thing called DNA exists,
and they started to have
different ways of getting insight into,
you know, what it's saying. And it wasn't
until the nineteen seventies that people were actually
able to
read the individual basis just like you'd read
a book.
And it started out being extremely
slow and extremely expensive.
And then in the late nineties,
it started to all of a sudden get
cheap and practical, and all of a sudden,
even people in just like a,
you know, kind of like a a medium
level college laboratory could
start reading the DNA of things.
And since then, you know, every year it
gets cheaper and easier.
And so now you can set up a
DNA sequencing laboratory in your home for under
a thousand dollars
and start sequencing
things. I'm sitting in my laboratory right now
in my house, and I have a little
DNA sequencing table set up over here.
And so I got pipettes and a PCR
machine and a whole bunch of chemicals, and
I can just take any any living thing,
doesn't even have to be a mushroom, and
put it into a tube, grind it up,
put it into a machine. And if I
start the process,
about nine in the morning, I can have
my results by midnight.
And so,
it's really incredible, and it's also enabled people
to make really cool discoveries
on their own. So there are not very
many branches of science where just one person
who is a beginner can make a really
valuable discovery, but mycology
is probably the science where it is easiest
for beginners to make a huge impact.
And
so you can,
you know, you can sequence these things really
easily, and it's actually cheaper and easier to
do it at scale.
So there's a laboratory called MycotaLab
run by Steven Russell,
and he sequences,
oh, probably about 20,000
mushrooms
per year. Yeah. And he has events called
MycoBlitz where anybody in the world can just
send in
unlimited quantities of mushrooms,
and he will sequence them for free.
And so he gets grants and donations
to, to fund it. But if you do
it at scale, the price goes down,
to about 20¢
per DNA sequence. Wow. So,
yeah, you can discover new things very inexpensively.
And a lot of places in North America
have free DNA sequencing.
I think Europe in British,
or Europe near British Columbia. Sure. British Columbia
is is one of the places that has
free DNA sequencing.
And so you can,
anybody that lives in British Columbia or Alberta
or California,
There's a whole map of places where you
can get free DNA sequencing, or anybody can
do it for free during the MycoBlitz. But,
you know, people just doesn't really take any
specialized knowledge at all just to go out
into the woods, take pictures of mushrooms,
dry them out, and drop them in the
mail.
And then, the DNA sequence pops up on
your iNaturalist observation,
and,
people will come along and identify it based
on the DNA sequence.
And so
this is something that we really need people
to do because a DNA sequence by itself
is meaningless. It doesn't have meaning until you
compare it with other DNA sequences.
And so the more that there are, the
more meaning each one has and the more
we understand about the fungi in any given
part of the world.
And so,
you know, it's really important to have people
just collecting and sending stuff in. And even
here in California, we discover new new novel
sequences that no one has ever found before
all the time.
But in places
that people do not collect mushrooms very often
in,
like Northern Canada,
North Dakota, South Dakota, Montana,
Louisiana, you know, places that don't have
a very,
established mycology culture.
You know, there's not very many DNA sequences.
I think we have,
maybe one or two from South Dakota and
zero from North Dakota. So we just have
no idea what fungi are even there.
And so,
yeah, you know, anybody can send these in,
and, also, anybody can start naming these species.
It doesn't take someone with a PhD
or any college degree at all to name
new species of mushrooms. All you have to
do is find the thing,
DNA sequence it, and then do the microscope
work and and write up a paper
and, and publish it. So it's the sort
of thing that anybody can do with with
really no training at all, And we need
a lot more people doing this because without
it, it's gonna take us
many, many thousands of years, just to sequence
or just just to name even the common
mushrooms,
that we see every day.
Wow. I cannot be the only person who
is super inspired by that, Alan.
Understanding,
hearing it laid out like that,
you make it sound so accessible. And my
next question was actually gonna be about,
you know, the bottleneck that I thought there
was with the technology. I was gonna say,
oh, all this interest,
you know, it's too bad it's bottleneck because
the technology is so expensive. But, you know,
the fact that somebody can set up a
basic lab to do this at home for
under $1,000,
it's just the opposite. This is this is
empowering, like, citizen scientists to get involved. And
there sounds like there's so much opportunity. Like,
I'm I'm on fire. I wanna go start
running DNA on mushrooms myself just because it
sounds like such a curious thing to do.
Do are you seeing this happen,
around you? Like, where
mycology
is getting more participants
and it's becoming
more I don't know like
even
it's more accessible by regular folks who are
not you know heavy duty degreed people with
access to university money
Yeah. Absolutely. And, you know, one thing that's
really helped is the Internet and social media
because now people can take a picture of
a mushroom, post it online,
in places like, for example, the mushroom identification
forum,
on Facebook,
or, you know, and really anywhere that people
hang out online, you can post photos of
mushrooms, and people who know what they are
will identify them for you.
But, yeah, it's it's a sort of thing
where
everybody really should be doing it, and they
would be if they knew how cool it
was. And, you know, it's the coolest thing
in the world when you find something and
you get your DNA sequence back, and you
finally figure out exactly what it is.
And if it's rare, if it's new, that
sort of thing. And a lot of times,
you you get a DNA sequence back for
something that no one's ever sequenced before. You're
the first person ever to see where it
actually fits in with the the rest of
life,
And that's the sort of thing that's very
easy to do. I mean, even someone that
doesn't know much about computers could figure out
how to do it in just a few
minutes.
And
so, yeah, it is super exciting.
And
I used to go around teaching people how
to set up their own DNA lab, because
you can just, like, take the DNA lab,
throw it in your car, and then set
it up on a card table, like, at
a Fungus Fair,
or, you know, a mushroom festival.
And so about ten years ago, I started
doing that, and I was teaching DNA sequencing
classes,
all over the world,
but I haven't been doing that as much
recently because it makes less sense for people
to set up their own lab and more
sense for people to collect mushrooms and send
them into a centralized lab. Mhmm. And there's
a couple reasons for that, but one of
them is that this technology called Nanopore came
along.
And with Nanopore sequencing,
you it's a little DNA sequencer about the
size of a USB thumb drive,
and you can sequence
thousands of mushrooms
at once,
this little tiny device. And since the sequencer
is right there, you get your results.
You know, right you watch them come across
the screen.
But the thing is that it's kind of
expensive to run the device. It costs a
few $100 to run it, but each run,
you can sequence thousands of things. So all
of a sudden, the bottleneck is not the
sequencing, but the collections because, you know, nobody
has hundreds of thousands of different collections of
mushrooms laying around that need to be sequenced.
So, typically, what people will do now is
collect
mushrooms and document them in the field and
then just mail them all to a centralized
point, and then that person will run nanopore.
And that makes it a whole lot more
efficient,
And they that's how people are able to
sequence, you know, many thousands of different collections
per year.
Wow. That's fantastic. And and I understand, like,
you know, you can do your basic stuff
at home, but if if everybody's really wanting
the nanopore, well, then let's just let's just
put them all together also everybody bringing their
their DNA
to to these shops that have got this
technology
it helps keep them going too because we
we don't want them to go away because
people are doing a a
a lesser
variety test at home. We really do wanna
get as much as we can, all all
the data points we can.
Yeah. For sure. There's a couple of reasons
that I still sequence at home occasionally.
One of them is that I get results
pretty quick because if you send them out
to a lab, they put it together in
a big batch, and you might get your
results in a couple months. Whereas if you
do it at home, you can get your
results in the same day.
Also, if you send it into one of
these big labs, they're gonna be sequencing the
same gene, and that's def generally good because
it's generally just one gene called the ITS,
the internal transcribe spacer that you can use
to identify about 98% of fungi.
But, occasionally, you'll wanna sequence any gene, and
you can sequence any gene in the whole
genome
for about the same cost.
And so for the people that are doing
this at home, they'll be using a sequencing
technology called Sanger sequencing.
And with Sanger,
you just take the mushroom, grind it up,
put it into a PCR machine for a
couple hours with these two primers, and the
primers that you select
will choose which gene that ends up getting
sequenced.
So you can pick a primer for anything.
You know, you could take a human DNA
and then put a primer in there that
would sequence the gene for cancer or for
eye color or anything else. Or with mushrooms,
you can sequence the ITS gene if you
want, but you can also sequence much more
obscure genes,
you know, really anything. And so if I
want to do a multi gene analysis where
I'm analyzing several genes instead of just one,
instead of just one. I will run PCR
at home and sequence five or six different
genes of the same mushroom,
and then I can get that done with
the Sanger sequencing.
And the way Sanger works is that the
machine is pretty expensive,
but there's a lot of labs that do
it. So people typically
run PCR
at home, and that heats up the DNA
and cools it down
a whole bunch of times until it you
have a very concentrated
little droplet of DNA,
and then just drop it in the mail,
to a Sanger lab, and they typically charge
about $5 per sample.
And so when you're sequencing at home, you're
you're paying about $5
per mushroom that you wanna sequence.
And that that's fine for small runs, but
if you have thousands of mushrooms, it ends
up getting really expensive, and that's where Nanopore,
ends up being the the right way to
do it.
Right on. Alright. So let's go ahead and
take our second short break, and we'll be
right back. You are listening to Shaping Fire,
and my guest today is mycologist, Alan Rockefeller.
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Welcome back. You are listening to shaping fire.
I am your host, Shangelos, and my guest
today is mycologist, Alan Rockefeller.
So Alan, you know, we've been talking about
the,
value of not only DNA sequencing to understanding
what's in the mushrooms, but also the of
mushrooms and all of the important biochemicals and
and all the good healing that we can
bring out of these mushrooms. But but first,
we have to find them. You know, we
know that these second metabolites in mushrooms provide
important chemistry,
and and we know this at the very
least because single molecule psilocybin studies get really
seem to be so much less effective for
humans. So
what do you think we're going to find
the benefits
Yeah. So
Yeah. So psilocybin mushrooms
have a lot of different
chemicals in them that could be active.
You got about a dozen different tryptamines,
and
those, you know, psilocybin and psilocin are the
most well known, but you have the biocystine,
aruginacin,
and then a whole bunch of other ones
that are there in smaller quantities,
but some of these other ones
also bind to the five HT two receptors,
and so they probably influence
the the effect of of the mushrooms,
in their own way. And whenever you test
different
mushrooms, you'll find different ratios of all of
these chemicals.
So it's not like you find certain chemicals
that are in one mushroom or another, but
for example, psilocybe semilanceata
tends to have really high levels of biocysteine,
sometimes as much biocysteine
as psilocybin, whereas biocysteine is usually just a
trace
trace chemical in psilocybin mushrooms. So every psilocybin
mushroom has
some baeocystine,
but some much more than others. And all
these other alkaloids are the same way. So
with psilocybin, that one is not active on
its own, but when you ingest it,
then your liver knocks off the phosphorus atom
and it becomes silocin, and that does go
through the blood brain barrier. So that one,
that makes it become psychoactive.
And all of these other tryptamines also get
converted in your body into different molecules, and
some of those,
are as or even more psychoactive
than silosin.
Study came out just the other day that
they found that iruginacin
breaks down into four HO TMT,
and that one binds to the five HT
receptors,
quite strongly.
So that could definitely
influence,
the the effect that you get when you
eat a mushroom.
And then,
about seven years ago,
a lab in Germany,
the Hoffmannster lab, they found that
mushrooms contain beta carbolines.
And so those are molecules like harmine and
harmaline,
and those are famous because they are the
active ingredient in the Ayahuasca vine,
that make DMT orally active.
So it's kinda surprising to find these molecules
in mushrooms, and it turns out that Psilocybe
cubensis
has almost none of these molecules, those trace
amounts
in the fruiting body. But in the mycelium,
you have quite a bit more, and then
different species have completely different,
very different levels,
of of these beta carbolines. But what the
beta carbolines do is they,
knock out the MAO enzyme in your body,
which is enzyme
that gets rid of a lot of these
molecules.
So it makes the effects different and longer
lasting,
of a lot of these tryptamines.
And then even more recently,
it's been discovered that
psilocybin mushrooms have terpenes in them.
And so there's a whole bunch of different
terpenes.
Paper came out also from the Hofminster lab
a couple years ago, and they named some
of the terpenes,
after the mushrooms. So you have, like, cubine
is one that they first discovered in in
psilocybe cubensis,
but they have,
about 20 different terpenes
that they've detected,
and those are kind of a mystery as
to what they
do. They probably do influence the quality of
the trip in some way, but I think
people know a bit more about what they
do in cannabis than what they do in
mushrooms. Mhmm. And then if you just take
a mushroom and you run it through an
LCMS,
so LCMS is nickel chromatography
mass spec, and a good LCMS
could cost half $1,000,000,
so they're a bit expensive,
but it's a really cool device because you
can just put a mushroom in there and
see all of the chemicals
that are in there, and sometimes people are
able to get them at a pretty good
price from, like, a cannabis lab that shuts
down or something like that, and, you know,
that kind of equipment is what's used to
figure out what all these molecules are, but
you put any mushroom into an LC
and you will see hundreds of different peaks
on the graph. And some of them are
known molecules, and others are molecules that people
have never really interacted with before, and you
gotta concentrate them and use NMR to figure
out the exact structure of them.
But there's just all sorts of different opportunities
for these molecules
to to influence,
you know, different things in your body.
How sophisticated
is our list of these these secondary
biochemicals?
I can imagine
that that on one hand,
they are not as researched as we want
because there are so many mushrooms that we're
not aware of. So so this list would
have to be, you know,
adolescent as well. But at the same time,
it's also where I'm assuming that the pharmaceutical
companies are looking. And so if there is
money in research for this, it's probably at
these.
And but then there's a third hand, which
is these companies could very well be keep
keeping all this information private. So so what's
the state of the science? Are we are
are we seeing a pre,
comprehensive
list of these chemicals that are in these
mushrooms, or is it is it really early
and maybe even politically motivated?
It's pretty early.
There's all sorts of different molecules,
and the tryptamines
are
pretty well,
characterized and that we we know to look
for them. So even somebody that just has
an HPLC
will have reference standards for the different tryptamines,
and they will be able
to figure out
what, which tryptamines they have. But some of
these other molecules,
you know, people don't really know to look
for them, and,
we also don't understand what the effects are
of these different tryptamines.
Right. And and what their effects are is
kind of at the at the corner of
what we're what, you know, why everybody's looking
in it for for future medicine.
One of the questions that,
always occurs to me is if the mushroom
makes psilocybin
and then we convert it into
psilocin,
and then also psilocin occurs in the mushroom
and in the wild, do we know why
here. We're back to why again. Do we
know why or or, see any reason for
the for the mushroom to also have silosin?
Because, like, I understand that if if if
we,
dephosphate
it when we eat it, that's one thing.
That's something that our our our body is
doing. But to have both the
phosphated and unphosphated
version
in the mushroom, that seems different to me.
It's like it's partially digested for us.
It's a really good question.
And, you know, nobody knows why it's in
there, but people have been trying to figure
that out for a long time. And I
think the person that's done more research
than anybody else in that realm is doctor
Jason Slott, and he's at the University of
Ohio.
Really cool guy, great teacher,
and he has written a bunch of papers
that speculate why these mushrooms might have psilocybin.
And,
you know, it's really hard to come to
a a an exact conclusion, but there's a
lot of observations that we can make.
So the psilocybin
itself is a very stable molecule and doesn't
tend to break down, but then these mushrooms
have enzymes
that dephosphorylate
the psilocybin,
so they just break the phosphorus off. And
then it becomes silosin, and silosin
is much less stable.
And,
those then there's more enzymes that take that
silosin
and polymerize it into these long chains, and
those,
long polymers
have different colors.
So that's where you get your blue staining,
but you can also get pink and browns,
in those silosin polymers.
And so one theory is that the, the
idea is that when you have
the, well, another thing about these is that
if you have psilocin in a mushroom, there's
other enzymes that rephosphorylate
it and turn it back into psilocybin.
So that's why mushrooms are not blue when
they're just sitting there, but then when you
damage them,
these enzymes kick in, and they will,
dephosphorylate
the psilocybin
and then polymerize them. So that changes the
color
of the mushroom. So this whole pathway seems
to be very intentional. There's a whole lot
of enzymes that are working together to create
this whole chemical pathway
and to
kinda change the molecules around. So it's definitely
not random, not an accident, but
why and what they are doing is is
more difficult. But, you know, one reason that
you might wanna turn blue is to absorb
more light and more heat. So, like, if
mushrooms are about to freeze and they start
to get frost, then that will break the
cells and cause the blue staining, which will,
you know, turn blue and absorb
more heat,
from the light and, you know, heat the
mushroom up a little bit. So that is
possible, but it's for the blue color.
Another idea is that these polymers
will piss off insects that are trying to
feed on the mushrooms,
although that doesn't make a whole lot of
sense because mushrooms benefit from getting eaten by
insects and animals because they spread the spores
around a lot more effectively
than the wind.
So there's a whole lot of different theories
here,
but it's it's definitely super interesting. Yeah. It
is super interesting.
And I've heard some people,
suggest that these these,
so let me check my term with you.
Do you like this term secondary
metabolites for referring to these these other biochemicals?
Yeah. I think it's pretty used pretty commonly,
all through all throughout biology. Alright. Good. So
these secondary metabolites,
I've read some suggestion that that perhaps they
and also psilocybin
increase under stress.
Do you think that is true for both
psilocybin and the other novel secondaries? And are
there any insights to be adopted by home
cultivators in this understanding?
I think it's true for cactus that when
cacti get pissed off, they make more mescaline,
and that makes a lot of sense because
a lot of these alkaloids,
kind of, like, defend against predators and and
things like that.
But I don't know that it's really true
for mushrooms. I think if you anger a
mushroom somehow,
maybe let you dry it out or bruise
it or something, they don't really make more
psilocybin
in response to that.
So I I think it's more of a
plant thing, and that makes sense just because,
you know, the mushrooms are not trying to
fend off predators. Mhmm. Mhmm. Predators are mostly
their friends
because they're they're actually helping. Yeah.
So similarly I'd like to get your thoughts
on on the wild versus cultivated
mushroom debate you know we've already established that
the metabolites secondary to psilocybin are important Do
you find that the wild versions of these
mushrooms have more potency
and variety
than,
than cultivated mushrooms that maybe, you know, they're
not engaging with the environment in the same
way?
Typically,
yes, but probably not because they're wild. Mhmm.
It's just that when you cultivate, you're always
growing the same species,
99%
of the time. And so that's, kinda limits
the possibilities there. Whereas in the wild, you
have so many different species,
that you're collecting, so there's a lot more
chance to get different molecules.
But, also, you know, Psilocybe cubensis is not
a particularly potent mushroom.
At least most of most of the strains,
you get about, on an average cube, about
point 6%
alkaloids by weight.
Whereas, you know, some of these other mushrooms,
like the wild ones that people find,
often have one to 2% or even more,
alkaloids, so the wild ones tend to be
stronger, but there's also very weak wild ones.
Some of the painiolus,
are are very weak, and you would have
to eat a whole lot of them to
to really figure out anything
or really feel anything.
But you don't really
notice different effects
from the same species growing indoors or outdoors,
but that's so hard to quantify because even
the exact same batch of mushrooms, if you
were to powder, homogenize it, and take it
on different days, you would notice very different
effects
just because of all of, you know, they're
interacting with your body. They're interacting with all
the chemicals in your brain, and maybe a
whole lot of stuff in your subconscious
has a big effect on what you experience.
So, you know, when you have even the
same batch having such different effects on different
days, that makes it really hard to quantify
what the differences are.
And, you know, what really needs to be
done is people need to try all of
the alkaloids
from fungi
separately
and,
in different combinations.
And, you know, then to to really score
that, you would kinda have to have, like,
a double blind mushroom party where you had
hundreds of people
all getting different,
different kinds of mushrooms.
And then at the end, you can give
them a survey where they score a whole
bunch of things from one to 10, then
you can crunch the numbers and maybe figure
out something,
about the different effects of the different molecules.
But I don't think ever anyone's ever done
this on a large enough scale to make
it statistically
significant.
It sounds like it would be a very
popular study, though. Would be no no problem
getting volunteers.
Yeah. I think it's it's the kind of
thing you could do in in somewhere like
Colorado.
Mhmm. Mhmm.
Alright. So during the break, Alan, you and
I were talking about these these secondary metabolites
and and their value
in medicine to people. And and we started
doing some of the comparisons between the cannabis
plant and and the mushroom medicine.
And you started talking about
the potential for mushroom medicine,
seems like it would be even greater than
cannabis because more people,
you were suggesting, might be able to get
benefit from mushrooms. I don't wanna put the
the words in your mouth, but you clearly
have thought about this a lot. Would you
would you go back into that for everybody?
Because where you're going with it was very
interesting.
Yeah. So everyone's heard of medical cannabis,
and cannabis definitely does help some people.
But
I think most people who use cannabis just
use it for the effects and and don't
really need the medicinal benefit from it.
Whereas with mushrooms,
I think the medicinal effects are very different,
and they tend to treat things that a
whole lot more people have.
And so I think everybody
has
at least some sort of depression or addiction
in their life, and those are two things
that,
that mushrooms really help a lot with. And
it's kinda interesting how it works because
depression is not well understood
by scientists,
but it seems that the psilocybin
turns off part of the brain
that causes depression. So people
might feel some depression, and then they will
take some psilocybin,
and
they don't feel you know, they they feel
all very trippy, and they feel very different
for a few hours, but then they wake
up the next day, and the depression is
just sort of lifted.
And
it's, an effect that usually lasts for months,
sometimes years,
and that's a whole lot better than a
pharmaceutical antidepressant
because with these pharmaceuticals,
they have all sorts of side effects and
you have to take the pill every day.
And if you stop taking it abruptly, you
can have, you know, really bad depression come
back. Whereas, you know, with mushrooms, just taking
them a few times a year will,
often take take care of people's depression in
a much more natural and
much healthier way,
than a lot of those SSRI
medicines.
And certainly without a whole lot less side
effects as well because those SSRIs,
you know, if you can even
convince somebody that they work,
most of them have got pretty pretty life,
dysfunctioning
side effects, which, you know, microdosing is that's
very uncommon.
Yeah. Exactly. And it's sort of the opposite
with mushrooms and that, you know, people take
mushrooms and they feel like they're more into
life. They're more interested in connecting with other
people.
I find sometimes in my own life, I'll
get kind of into a rut where I'm
just sort of wasting my time and not
really making really good use of my time.
And if I take mushrooms,
then I will wake up the next day,
and I will just be
like, the the light seems a little brighter,
and I have more energy, and I'll just
start working on stuff that I I should
have done. And the stuff that I'm working
on, it feels really fun to work on,
and I'll and I'll stay in that mindset
for weeks, months.
And, you know, that's something super valuable. And,
you know, one of the worst things we
can do as humans is to waste our
time and not make very good use of
our time, and the mushrooms really
seem to help that quite a bit.
Here. Here. You know, one of the things
that, I vibe out of the mushroom scene
that I haven't felt in a while is
it feels a lot like some of the
earlier days of cannabis medicine.
You know, as as as cannabis has become,
more normalized and more commoditized,
a lot of the medical people have left
and and a lot of the heart has
left, and it's it's just becoming a lot
more like pushing pushing widgets out.
And and and as we were talking about
earlier, there's still not really a lot of
mushroom in mushroom research and even even necessarily
teaching about mushrooms.
And it seems to be, it seems still
to hold a lot of that heart because
the people who are in it are
are are in it for more heart reasons
than spreadsheet reasons. And, you know, I understand
that,
you know,
I'm a little jaded
and I'll and I'll own that. But, I
think that the the mushroom scene really feels
like it's, still steeped in,
several reasons for that.
One of them is just the pharmacological
effects of the mushrooms themselves. They kind of,
you know, make you more in tune with
nature and with life and your purpose and
all of that. And then the the other
thing is just the capitalism aspect.
You know, it's very hard to make money
doing mushrooms.
So,
even growing psilocybin mushrooms, they're not really that
profitable.
And so the people that are really into
mushrooms
are into it because
they are just really interested in nature and
and mushrooms themselves. They have more pure motives
whereas a lot of people grow weed, for
for the money. Mhmm. Mhmm.
So I've got I've got these next four
questions. They're kinda non sequiturs. They didn't really
fit anywhere else in the show, but they
are things that that I'm either asked all
the time or I you have come up
on other shows and we didn't have answers.
And so so the first one is is,
it's,
we know that psilocybin mushrooms well, no. No.
Wrong one. Sorry. So the enigma mushroom is
what I wanna talk about. The the enigma
mushroom looks like ribbons, right, or even kinda
like the human brain when it's grown.
And it's become really famous recently, but it
doesn't produce spores at all. And so my
question for you is from a biological
standpoint,
like, what kind of mutation is happening here,
and would it ever even
survive in the wild? It kinda feels like
a a lab mutation
that that needs
to be held needs to be held up
to survive with crutches or else it wouldn't.
It would not do well in the wild.
And it turns out in nature, this sort
of mutation is extremely
common. Oh. That's one of the most common
things that happens when you you get a
mutation is that it interferes with the reproduction.
So
with plants, you know, the seeds are not
viable or with mushrooms that might not make
spores or it might make spores that don't
germinate. Mhmm. And in nature, those sorts of
things just die out naturally. But, you know,
in in the laboratory, we can keep stuff
like Enigma going,
and nobody really knows what kind of mutation
it is. That would be a cool one
to do a full genome sequence on and
try to decode the DNA and see if
you can figure out what it is that's
damaged about the genome of that compared to
a regular cube and figure out, you know,
what's going on.
I noticed that these sorts of mushrooms, the
mycelium
looks very different under a microscope. So typically,
Cubensis mycelium, you'll see all the hyphae, and
they'll be very regular,
kind of boxy with septa
at regular intervals.
Whereas with Enigma, if I take some of
that mycelium and throw it under a microscope,
I see the regular mycelium, but then I
also see this much wider, thicker mycelium that
has all sorts of little vacuoles in it
that look like little dots
along the mycelium. Mhmm. And I haven't seen
that in any other mycelium, and I I
look at quite a bit of it. So
that has to be, you know, something
to do with, with what it's doing. But
but what it means, I have no idea.
Right on. Fair enough. Cool. Thank you. So,
next non sequitur.
We've talked about, wood lovers, quite a bit
on shaping fire. And, episode a 113
with Christian Kalen,
we talked about making a wood lover plot
on your own property, which is a lot
of fun.
And,
right at the end of the episode, Christian
mentioned something called Wood Lovers Paradise right as
we were ending the episode, and we had
kinda run out of time. But I've been
looking into it ever since that episode, and
I was curious to know what your thoughts
are on this because there's not a lot
of people talking about this idea that that,
taking a wood lover
mushroom
has the side effects of of temporary paralysis.
And, of course, the discussion is whether or
not this is this is actual paralysis coming
from the the the mushroom or whether or
not it's just somebody being so damn high
that they're not moving.
Would you please let us know what what's
going on inside the mycology world about this?
Are people talking about this? Is this a
thing? Is this just rumor for Instagram?
What are your thoughts?
Oh, yeah. Christian's super cool. I visit him
sometimes when I head through the Pacific Northwest,
but the wood lover's paralysis is really a
mystery,
and I do believe it's a real thing.
And what happens is people take certain mushrooms,
typically ones that grow on wood, but it's
not all of the ones that grow on
wood. It's just a certain clade,
and they will
start to feel
really strange, and then they won't be able
to move. And this paralysis
tends to stay around for a coiled while
after the psilocybin wears off. So I don't
think it's an effect of the psilocybin,
because if it was, it would wear off
after six hours, and he would see it
in cubensis.
You know, people eat huge amount of cubensis
all the time, and they never get paralyzed
from it. You know, sometimes they get so
high that they can't move, but once it
wears off,
you know, they're totally fine again. Mhmm. So
the wood lovers paralysis happens
with psilocybe azurescens,
psilocybe cyanescens,
Psilocybe illenii. And there's one in New Zealand,
Psilocybe warara,
which causes it even more reliably than any
of these other species,
and they're all very closely related species.
Do we do we have conjecture on what
the cause is, or is it we know
it happens, but we don't have an explanation
yet?
There's no shortage of conjecture on it. People
that,
have run it through analytical chemistry equipment noticed
that there are some extra peaks on the
graph that they get when they analyze a
wood lover that they don't see,
with something like a Liberty Cap or a
QBENSUS.
But,
really,
you know, if you go on the Internet,
there's no shortage of people that tell you
that they know exactly
why,
what causes with lovers paralysis, but they all
say something different.
So, you know, I found that you can
always tell that somebody doesn't know what they're
talking about because they claim to know
what causes with lover's paralysis.
You know, it might be a tryptamine. It
might be some molecule that we just don't
have any idea,
about,
but it's certainly
very mysterious
and elusive and making it harder to study.
It doesn't happen every time, and sometimes two
people will take a similar dose of the
same mushrooms. One person will get it, and
one person will not. So I'm convinced it's
a real thing,
but whether we'll
actually figure out what's behind it in our
lifetimes,
I am not so sure. Right on. Great
answer. Alright. Next non sequitur. This is one
that I'm asked all the time, and it
is a very common debate in mushrooms and
that it is this. When we are taking
our mushroom supplements,
is it okay and appropriate to take one
that is based just on,
mycelium, or do we really wanna make sure
that we're taking the fruiting body of the
supplement?
Yeah. That's a really good question, and
there's a lot of debates about that.
And it's complicated because it's hard to say
whether the mushroom supplements
really do anything at all,
and they definitely help some people
sometimes.
There's no doubt about that,
but it's less clear which people
should be taking mushroom supplements
and
for which conditions
and how often they should take it and
how much should they take.
So, you know, with any medicine, what really
matters is did you get enough of the
medicinal molecule
into your bloodstream to to have the effect
that you're looking for,
and everyone responds so much differently to all
of these
molecules, and in a mushroom, you're gonna have
hundreds of of different molecules
there, and they're present in different amounts,
with different growing conditions, different strains, and then
different amounts of these molecules are present in
the fruiting body and in the mycelium and
even different molecules in in many cases.
So
a lot of times with these medicinal mushrooms,
we don't really know which molecule it is
that you actually need, and you might say,
like, beta glucans.
And that's a reasonable answer, but there's thousands
of molecules that we call beta glucans.
And then, like, how much of this molecule
do you need, and which conditions does it
cure?
You know? It's it's really hard to say.
So,
in general, you're it's gonna be best to
take both the fruiting body and the mycelium,
and they don't seem to have a lot
a lot of negative side effects. So
more is generally better. Mhmm.
I don't typically notice much effects.
I think, you know, one medicinal mushroom that
definitely works are psilocybin mushrooms. I I notice
a lot of effects from those.
And then
the one that I think probably works is
haricium.
So the lion's mane, that,
has a nerve growth factor in it, and
so
that probably works. But it there's a bunch
of different nerve growth factors in the hericium
mushroom that are present in in different amounts
in different strains, and so some that are
in the mycelium and some in the fruiting
body. So probably best to take some of
both.
And then there's other ones like turkey tail
and Ganoderma and agarachan,
and
those definitely help some people sometimes, but it's
much more nebulous
exactly what they do. You know, in animal
studies, you can see that they're definitely
antiviral,
antibacterial,
and stimulate the immune system and and stuff
like that,
but something that's antiviral
doesn't mean that you can take it if
you have a virus and that you'll be
better, and something that stimulates your immune system
isn't always good for you to take. You
know, these mushrooms typically are healthy, and people
that take them are, you know, generally don't
don't have bad effects of them, but exactly
what they do and who should take them
and how much of each molecule they need
is just almost impossible to know.
And, you know, there's thousands of diseases that
are known, so to even test one mushroom
against thousands of diseases would be thousands of
clinical trials. So you're talking a a trillion
dollars right there. And then to test, you
know, every chemical in each mushroom against every
disease,
that's just like a huge amount of testing.
And then to test every mushroom against every
disease would cost more than all of the
money that's ever been printed in the history
of humanity.
So we kinda have to look to nature
to get clues as to which mushrooms might
be useful for which things,
or look to the the native cultures who
have been using them for thousands of years
and have figured some of this out. But
for the most part, it's not figured out,
and it's definitely not figured out to the
point where anybody can say that mycelium
or fruit body is better,
but definitely can't hurt to take both.
Damn. That's that's the best, most comprehensive answer
that I have gotten. Thank you for that,
Alan.
So I wanna shine some light on on,
what kind of feels like a side quest
of yours for other people. But from talking
to you, I know that it's very much
at the central of what you care about,
and that's your Python programming. You have put
out a whole bunch of,
software tools for,
for mycologists,
and I wanna make sure that we take
a moment and plug those for anybody who's
listening
so they can take advantage of this important
work that you're doing. I'm not even exactly
sure how to ask you the question other
than to say, will you tell us about
the tools that you've released?
Yeah. And so,
yeah, I've been doing I've been programming stuff
since I was, like, five years old, but
I didn't get into it really heavily until
more recently.
You know, all these AI tools make it
so instead of taking a month to code
something, I can do it in in just
a couple minutes.
And
so I've been I've written a bunch of
stuff that I think is useful for people.
And just like whenever I need a program
and there isn't a program to do it,
I'll just write it myself.
And, you know, I encourage other people to
experiment with this too. Even if you don't
know any programming, you can still use these
tools to make really useful programs. But for
someone who does know programming, then these tools
are even even more useful because they just
cut the amount of time that it takes
to do these things. So,
probably the coolest thing that I've written is
a replacement
for Adobe Lightroom.
And so I use Photoshop and Lightroom for
my editing, and
I have been
you know, Lightroom has not really been perfect,
for what I wanna do. And, you know,
what I do is just take a camera
out into the woods and try to get
the best picture I can of everything that
I see in nature.
And then when I get back home,
I want to
get all of those photos uploaded to
iNaturalist, mushroom observer, Instagram, LinkedIn,
all all of the other, places that people
upload their photos. And so you can do
it with Lightroom, but it's kind of clunky.
And so
I decided to make my own, and so
I've called this Faststack,
and,
Fast because I wanted to make it so
I can flip through the photos very quickly,
and I do a lot of photo stacking.
So, this one is available for GitHub.
Really everything I write
is I just release it for free under
the MIT license, which is the the freest
license there is, so anybody can use the
software for free. Anybody can edit it. People
can even take my software and sell it.
They don't have to give me money or
anything like that. It's just completely free software.
But FastStack,
I've been working on it for about six
months now, and it has come along. So
it's it's actually really useful.
So kinda does the same thing as Lightroom
and that it shows you your photos.
But one thing that's much better
is that you can drag and drop directly
into a web browser. So I can just
mark a whole bunch of my photos and
drag and drop them into iNaturalist or Mushroom
Observer and upload the photos
there, or I can mark a bunch of
them and drag them into Instagram to make
an Instagram post.
And then, also, it keeps track of how
far I've gone in each directory. So each
folder is a different day's worth of photos.
And when I look at all my folders,
I can it shows me
exactly
how far I've gotten so I can really
easily see, like, how much I've uploaded
in each directory.
Right on. I I believe that you have
another piece of software that you put out
that is, for DNA barcoding too. Right?
Yeah. So DNA barcoding one,
is a website. And so I wrote it
in Python, but instead of just distributing
the Python code, I made a website and
have that run-in the back end, and that
is called dicaria. So it's dicaria.us,
And this one is for building phylogenetic trees.
And
so there's already a couple websites like this,
but they're really clunky and,
kinda hard to use. And so this one,
you can give it an iNaturalist
URL or a MycoMap URL, and it'll build
a phylogenetic tree
out of the DNA sequences,
on that URL. So you can see exactly
how the different things are related, and you
can use it for anything. You can use
it for plants, viruses, bacteria.
I use it for fungi, but it makes
it so you know, it used to be
to make a phylogenetic tree. You had to
edit all these text files and then run
all these command line tools.
And,
it was very time consuming just to edit
the files and then make the tree and
then change something and make it again. And
so now it's very quick. It's very quick
to edit them.
Anybody can do it just on their phone.
You don't have to know anything
about DNA
to make a good tree.
And so,
that one is still in active development, but
it's it's to the point that I I
use it all the time.
And if I just wanna answer a question
like, well,
how many russula are there in California, and
how are they related? I'll just search for
russula on iNaturalist and just pull up the
observations with DNA barcodes and then paste that
URL
into the dikaria website, and it'll download all
those sequences from iNaturalist and calculate how they're
all related and then build a graphical tree
showing exactly how many species we have.
And, you know, it's so much better than
trying to get that information from a field
guide because field guides would be all out
of date. This has all of the the
very up to date, all of the undescribed
species that that are not in any of
the books,
are all in there.
And so,
that works pretty well and just makes it
really easy for people to build phylogenetic
trees. Again, the one thing that people use,
the one thing that people use more than
anything else is probably the iNaturalist,
herbarium label generator.
And so
that one, I have it on
it's up on images.mushroomobserver.org/labels,
but you can find it in the GitHub
as well. But it's a website that you
enter an iNaturalist or a mushroom observer observation
number, and then it goes out to iNaturalist
or mushroom observer,
downloads a whole bunch of data about your
observation, and then prints out a really professional
looking label with a QR code that you
can print out. And so I have thousands
of bags of mushrooms here for study, and
I'll make a label for each one.
And then,
you know, they they look really nice. I
print them on cotton cardstock, so the label
will last for thousands of years in herbarium.
And when I send it in for DNA
sequencing, they don't have to type in the
nine digit number for every one of my
collections. They could just scan it real quick
with the barcode scanner and check them in
really quickly. And so,
that's,
one that a lot of different people
use to organize the herbarium and and make
labels. And then I also have the source
code available so you can,
download that and and write it locally if
you want.
Right on. That sounds like a great useful
tool and especially having the ability to interact
with, the more active live living database instead
of, you know, trying to deal with paper
books or even out outmoded, you know, websites
or forums.
I I also wanna talk about ultraviolet flashlights,
and and why they are useful. I I
finally got one,
just a few months ago, and I picked
up a, you know, a cheapie for $16.
And I'm like, oh, this is really cool.
I definitely need a much nicer one. And
so then I upgraded,
and, I see that that the ones that
I upgraded to you all you have back
on your Linktree as well. So you've got
them back in stock. So I wanted to
plug them
because there really is such a difference between
using a a UV flashlight that's just got
some,
cheap
LEDs in it versus,
using,
a higher end one that has got the
professional,
maybe even patented
filter on the front.
And,
you know, at $3.65
and m, it really makes everything in the
forest pop.
But but since I'm not as hardcore of
a mycologist as you,
I don't really know how to describe to
people, like, the best uses for it as
far as as,
hunting for and researching mushrooms.
So will will you just kinda talk about
the usability
of of these ultraviolet
flashlights? Because I can talk about how fun
they are and how badass they are in
tide pools as well because all of the
all of the everything with a with a
exoskeleton
just pops up. But but I'm not as
experienced
when with mushrooms. So will you pick that
up?
Yeah. So it turns out that in nature,
there's a ton of
fluorescent molecules, and a fluorescent molecule is just
a chemical
where when ultraviolet light hits it, it reemits
a longer wavelength photon,
that's in the visible spectrum. So sorta like
a chemical sensor in that you can shine
it on different things, and some things don't
light up at all, whereas other things just
light up like crazy, and that's due to
the presence of fluorescent chemicals.
And they are really cool for making artwork
and that you can, like, shine it on
things and get these otherworldly colors.
But they're also really good for science and
that you can detect the presence of these
chemicals that normally you just wouldn't be able
to notice that they're there.
And so sometimes I'll be in the woods
and I'll find the mushroom, and I won't
I won't know quite what it is. And
I'll shine the UV light on it, and
I'll be like, oh, yeah. It's one of
those. And I'll just instantly know what it
is based on the the color that it
lights up.
And so I do a whole bunch of
ultraviolet photography,
and, you know, it's really easy to get
a good photo good ultraviolet photo from a
cell phone or or, you know, from a
professional
camera
setup.
And what you see really depends a lot
on where you are. Like, if you're out
in the desert, everything out in the desert
has a lot of ultraviolet protection, so none
of the plants
light up at all. And instead, you'll see
certain minerals lighting up,
and,
a lot of insects. The scorpions light up
like crazy.
Whereas if you go deep in the forest,
then those plants don't need the ultraviolet protection,
so you see a whole lot more fluorescence,
a lot more lights up. You get completely
different colors off of the different plants and
lichens. Some of the flowers
look spectacular because they have fluorescent pollen. And
then if you go into the Amazon Rainforest,
shining it around is almost like fireworks. Almost
everything lights up, and you get every color
in the rainbow.
Just,
everything is covered in in something that that's
fluorescent there.
Oh, man. The rainforest. That sounds really, really
cool to get all of that. I like
your description of fireworks.
While I have not been to the rainforest
with it I mean, I except for, I
guess, I live in a rainforest, but but
I haven't been over to the hoe with
it yet. But here on the island, I've
taken it into the forests.
And, it's amazing when when mushrooms suddenly are
glowing from, you know, ten, twelve feet away.
It's almost like you you shine the light
and then it, like, waves to you. It's
like, oh, I'm over here, you know, because
they really they really stand out. And what
we real what really stands out here also
are all of our ferns. The bottom side
of ferns are all red. So if you
see all these red plants, which is really
extraordinary.
So, so, yeah, I recommend it to folks,
like, just if you like
nature, full stop. Right? And and if you
also wanna go into mushrooms or tide pools
or it's also good to have it, but
I recommend everyone gets one. And the the
the the Conroy ones that you sell on
your LinkedIn
are fabulous
because, again, they've got that specialty filter. They're
not just made with cheap LEDs.
Yeah. So the reason going to get a
a UV light, you know, the most important
thing is the wavelength. So if you go
to a party, they will have these purple
ultraviolet lights, and that's 395
nanometers.
And those are very cheap, but if you
take them out into the woods, they're pretty
disappointing. Yeah.
The other wavelength that's common is 365,
and a three sixty five light looks a
whole lot more blue. It looks a whole
lot less purple, and it's further outside of
what your eye can see. So when you're
looking at something, you're really only seeing the
fluorescence instead of seeing the light from your
light. So you definitely wanna get a three
sixty five light and not a three ninety
five light, and then also just like a
really bright one.
So there's a lot of really good ones
on Amazon,
or I sell,
really nice ones that are branded with my
company, Mycena.
It doesn't really matter where you get it,
but just a a really bright three sixty
five nanometer light is just makes it really
cool to be in the woods at night.
Excellent. Thank you. So, Alan, let's finish off
with this.
You know,
so many people are looking to reconnect with
themselves and with the Earth and with nature.
And, you know, some people are doing it
because they're bored with their life, other people
because of the life stresses. There's just a
lot of good reasons to go into nature.
When you are talking with somebody and you're
warmly encouraging them to lean into mushrooms,
I'd like to hear what you say to
people. Let's let's end this with a, like,
a, like, a call to arms for mushrooms
to to to get out and do some
foraging. What what do you tell people to
kinda, like, encourage them to, you know, get
out from behind their computer and and and
get out there and and look at mushrooms?
Yeah. I think there's something in our DNA
that makes us really enjoy being in nature.
And, you know, it's partly because we evolved
in nature and partly just because everything in
nature gets more and more interesting the closer
you look at it and the better you
know it. And it's sort of like a
never ending fractal
where the closer you look,
you know, the more detail you see, and
that never really ends even with microscopes and
and even beyond. There's
just so much to see out there, and
it's also just really good for your mental
health to get outside and and spend a
lot of time in nature. And that's one
of the reasons I quit my job, like,
fifteen years ago and decided to be a
mycologist full time is because I just wanted
to spend
more time outside in in cool places.
So the main thing that I think people
should do is use the iNaturalist
app. So iNaturalist
is an app, and it's a website. And
the point of iNaturalist
is to bring people closer to nature, and
it does a really good job of that.
So the idea is that you can take
a picture of anything in nature and add
it to iNaturalist,
and then it will try to automatically identify
it using computer vision. And so if you
have a really good photo of a mushroom,
it'll be correct, you know, 95%
of the time. But the really cool thing
about it is that it makes a permanent
record.
And so these records
are publicly accessible, and people will come along
and identify
your mushrooms for you.
Or,
anytime I see a plant and I don't
know what the plant is, I'll put it
on iNaturalist, and people will come along.
And, you know, the botanist will tell me
exactly what plant I have. So with mushrooms,
it's really important to get one photo that
has the underside
and the top of the mushroom in the
same photo. With plants, you want
one photo that has the leaf and the
flower in the same photo.
But, you know, any anything is really cool
to add to that. And if people have
a bunch of stuff on their iNaturalist, they
can message me their username, and I'll flip
through their mushrooms and try to put names
on stuff.
Right on. Cool. Thank you, Alan. So so
in and thank you, Alan, for spending your
time with us here on shaping fire today.
I know that you are a very busy
cat traveling around, and your time is very
valuable.
And, we all appreciate that you peeled off
some time for us today to, you know,
share your stories and your insights and and
actually probably just get most of us really
jazzed about mushrooms.
So thank you very much.
Thanks for having me on. Excellent. So friends,
if you want to,
follow along with Alan Rockefeller, I highly recommend
that you follow his Instagram. It is one
of my favorites, and that's at Alan, a
l a n, underscore
Rockefeller, r o c k e f e
l l e r. Allen underscore Rockefeller on
IG.
From his LinkedIn on his Instagram, you can
find everything else you want. You can find
the ultraviolet flashlight we were talking about and
his DNA barcode coding at home stuff, links
to his YouTube videos, which are also great,
as well as his iNaturalist profile
and links to his website at mycenall
mycena.llc
where,
you can book an upcoming trip to Costa
Rica,
with him and others to do some, mushrooming.
So,
that is all at allen underscore rockefeller on
his IG. So thank you for being with
us. This has been shaping fire episode one
twenty eight. You can find more episodes of
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