Who can eat what and why?

By Rosemary Conroy on Friday, October 10, 2003.

listen:

This was a great year for mushrooms, so why don't we run out and pick them? Probably because you know better. Rosemary Conroy explores what makes our digestive system different from wild animals that eat any mushroom they wish.

Something Wild: Mushrooms Magic?
Air date: October 10, 2003

Welcome to this week’s edition of Something Wild.

I’m Rosemary Conroy for the Society for the Protection of New Hampshire Forests.

By all accounts, this has been a stellar year for mushrooms. Many mycologists proclaimed that this past August was best in 20 years for the proliferation of these unusual but important organisms.

This makes those who relish a tasty Bolete or choice chanterelle quite happy. And they’re not the only ones: Rodents, deer, moose, bears, and porcupines all munch on mushrooms, although the most avid consumers tend to be insects, slugs, and land snails.

But interestingly, predatory species like foxes or bobcats completely avoid feasting on fungus. For them, like us, many mushrooms can cause a variety of upsets — from the merely digestive to the utterly fatal.

This seems unfair. Why can a chipmunk happily nibble on an Amanita muscaria, a poisonous species commonly found in New Hampshire, but not us?

It turns out the answer is stomach enzymes. If you can easily digest a pile of acorns, well then, a mushroom won’t matter much. Having four stomachs, like moose and deer do, apparently can help, as well.

Well, it’s a good thing that most wild animals don’t have to worry about telling the safe mushrooms from the unsafe, because it isn’t easy. A plethora of look-alike species make it quite difficult to identify a Russula that will make you rub your tummy in delight from one that will make you clutch your gut in agony. You really need an expert to guide you.

While no one knows for sure why some mushrooms evolved to be toxic, the fact remains that many safe mushrooms mimic unsafe ones — and vice versa.

There’s a good reason for the old adage, “There are old mushroom hunters and bold mushroom hunters, but there are no old, bold, mushroom hunters.”

Something Wild is a join production of the Audubon Society of New Hampshire, NHPR, and the Society for the Protection of New Hampshire Forests.

For Something Wild, I’m Rosemary Con