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Oh, look what we've got here.
It was a chance encounter in the forest with a stunning mushroom,
that was the start of my passion for photographing fungi.
Aren’t they beautiful?
I think I sensed that these small organisms were something very special,
and I began documenting as many mushrooms as I could find.
Aha, I know what this is.
What have you got?
It's an Aseroe rubra.
It's a creative journey shared with my life partner, Catherine.
Together we capture the beauty of mushrooms in photos and in video.
And using time-lapse techniques, we observe
how the mushrooms grow, their life and their death.
Every day we learn something new about these intriguing organisms.
And every day, observing them raises
more and more questions
Like, why do mushrooms come in
such a variety of shapes and sizes and colors?
Why are some so transitory?
He one day and gone the next?
What we do know,
is for mushrooms to show themselves they need water.
So to unearth their secrets
we follow in the path of the rain.
Our mission
is to find out how fungi fit into the world of living things.
There is something magical about the rain.
I can feel the forest drinking it up,
setting the stage for birth and new life.
It's the wet season for this endangered subtropical rainforest.
This is our local forest and very precious to us.
Over the past 200 years,
European settlers have cleared all but 1% of this rainforest.
They called it the big scrub.
Such a dismissive name for this wonderfully biodiverse
and beautiful forest.
But it's not an easy place to be a fungi hunter.
There are aggressive plants like giant stinging trees
covered with tiny hairs that can inflict excruciating pain for months.
And they're a wait-a-while vines,
that hook into the body with barbed snares.
All you can do is stop, wait a while
and carefully disentangle.
There are paralysis ticks,
and of course, bloodsucking leeches.
Look what we got here.
Searching for a spot to attach himself.
But we keep coming back because the fungi in this forest are so magnificent.
And many species are new to science.
For centuries, humans have been researching and naming
the life that surrounds us.
But we soon learned that very little in the world of fungi has been studied.
Fungi are not plants and they're not animals.
They make up a whole kingdom of life.
Millions of species that have been neglected.
Now this one's got some potential.
Looking at it from above, it's just orange.
But wow, look at it underneath.
It's estimated that there could be anywhere between
two million and eleven million species of fungi on this planet.
There's a beautiful young goblet.
But so far, scientists have only described a mere 150,000.
What's that?
That looks like a phallus.
That's partly because the window into the fungal world has traditionally
been mushrooms, which only appear when the conditions are right.
Now, this is a stinkhorn.
It's the sort of mushroom that you're more likely to smell before you see it.
As you can see, the flies love it.
Now, the way this mushroom spreads its spores
is by attracting flies with the smell.
It keeps its spores in this slime.
The flies will eat the slime or paddle in it and get it all over their feet
and then fly away and spread the spores
so the mushrooms will come up somewhere else.
A wonderful mushroom.
Most of the mushrooms we find in this forest
grow on wood when it is very wet and very humid.
But the mushrooms are just the reproductive structures of a fungus.
A bit like apples on a tree.
Mushrooms grow from mycelium, a structure made up of millions of connected threads.
Look at all this beautiful mycelium.
When we eat, we put our food inside us.
But when this fungus eats, it puts itself inside the food.
And as it consumes fallen logs and leaves become soil
full of nutrients for the plants.
These are what we call saprotrophic fungi.
They are both undertakers and regenerators.
We humans have a fear of death and see it as an end.
But I like to think that these fungi teach us that death is just part
of the process of creating new life.
Catherine and I have been restoring the big scrub forest here on our property.
It's become a bit of a sanctuary for wildlife and for fungi.
Oh, look at all these.
There’s really quite a variety of mushrooms here.
There's Dacrymyces spathularia.
You can see it's sort of shaped a bit like a spatula.
And this Auricularia here.
Auricularia delicata.
Oh, and these are Phillipsia subpurpurea.
One of my favorites.
What's this?
Oh, really nice mycelium too.
Saprotrophic fungi are also the perfect actors for our time-lapse videos.
Welcome to the Planet Fungi studio.
Catherine and I call it our fungariam.
But really, it's just a shipping container.
Hopefully that will work.
This is where we capture the surprises
that only speeding up time can reveal.
We see how a tiny lump in the mycelium
inflates with water to form a mushroom.
And we witness mushrooms spin as they grow.
Some mushrooms wave to us.
Others have the power of resurrection.
Many mushrooms grow like humans, babies that expand
into more mature forms of themselves.
While other mushrooms shape shift
into a completely new structure.
What you are watching are thousands of still photos
taken sometimes over a few days, sometimes over months.
One of my favorite forest recyclers is a very rare blue fungus
that I found in these forests 14 years ago.
It was the first fungal discovery
that Catherine and I filmed together.
Now what’s this?
Very peculiar. It could be fruit I suppose.
But it’s blue.
Its mushrooms.
It's just growing on a
what looks like a seed pod from one of the rainforest trees.
And his, just like any other
mushroom is, got a nice stem, but more like a
more like a truffle than conventional fungi.
Because it grows, you can see they’re all
over the place here and they grow very close to the ground.
They’re hidden in behind bits of leaf litter.
The cap never seems to open up on them.
I've never seen anything like this at all.
I don’t know what to make of it really.
Photographing this mushroom in all its weird and wonderful forms
has become an obsession.
And of course, I couldn't resist trying to time-lapse it.
I went on the hunt to find out what this mushroom is called,
but I couldn't find anything remotely like it.
That's when I sent a specimen to the
Royal Botanic Gardens Victoria and mycologist Dr. Tom May,
who like me, was intrigued.
When I saw that blue incredible mushroom,
I just knew it was something really special.
It doesn't come along every day that you see something as spectacular
as that that's so new.
And then it throws up all these questions
Blue, it's such an unusual colour for fungi for a start,
there are very few blue fungi.
And this was enclosed, the lamellae, that's the gills inside,
were all scrunched up and a little stubby stem, stipe at the bottom.
And then it was this amazing blue color.
So a lot of things about it that were really weird
and they were growing on wood.
And that's another really unusual thing about it.
A lot of these truffle like fungi, these enclosed fungi,
they're growing underground.
This was actually sitting up, growing on wood.
When you see a new mushroom or a mushroom that's new to you,
well, maybe it's been collected and described before,
but it might be buried away in some old literature.
Maybe it's never been seen by a mycologist before.
So that's when a lot of the detective work starts.
So I knew in New Caledonia there were a few of these strange fungi.
I thought that it might be in this genus Leratiomyces.
So I had a look at the spores under a microscope.
And they were smooth,
and that fit with the Leratiomyces, so sort of suggesting that.
But that's just the first step
in really putting a whole lot of different bits of the jigsaw together.
So the next step after having a look at the spores under a microscope
is to do DNA sequencing.
The DNA sequences really help to position things in the Tree of Life.
To untangle the family tree of this unusual mushroom
was to take another ten years with many dead ends and strange relatives.
We'll come back to that story later.
It's autumn on the Tasmanian West Coast where misty mountains
and swollen wild rivers herald the start of the fungi season.
It's a bit mad being in the forest at this time of year.
It is often near freezing
and torrential rain can drench us and our equipment at any moment.
But the rewards are worth far more than the ordeals.
This wild and remote forest is at its most splendid after the rain.
Trees dripping in plump lichen.
Their roots wrapped in slippers of lush moss
and mushroom treasures are everywhere.
It is a mycological mecca for fungi lovers
and not just the human kind.
This is something I've never seen before.
It's wombat poo with this beautiful little crop of mushrooms growing on it.
One of the fungiphiles who has followed the rain
to Tasmania this year, is mycologist Dr Camille Truong.
She's unearthing the story of the ectomycorrhizal fungi
that create partnerships with trees in this forest.
Beautiful Psatyloma.
I'm studying the fungi
that associate with Nothofagus forest.
So it's not only documenting the diversity but also understanding
what they really do for the trees.
Here is a mushroom.
A lot of mushrooms.
Yeah, lots of mushrooms.
So if we dig below these mushrooms,
we find the mycelium that is everywhere in the soil.
And from time to time, it's making these mushrooms.
This is a great example of seeing the connection
between the fungus and the roots,
because you have here the mushroom
and you can see that the mycelium is attached
to the roots at these little
which is called the mycorrhizal root tip.
Yeah, this little whitish tip.
This is actually the point where the fungus
enter in contact with the root.
So the fungus is going
to go foraging for this nutrient inside the soil.
That's why the mycelium extends in the soil
many, many meters away.
And then it brings back all these nutrients from the soil to the tree.
Okay. And it's, it's not for free.
So it's going to exchange the nutrients against sugar.
So if you don’t bring any nutrients, you don't get any sugar.
No, that's it.
And that's why there are many species of fungus associating with this tree.
And so the one that gives them more nutrients,
will receive more sugar.
Every tree can associate with thousands of species of fungi.
Some of them do better in certain time of the year.
Some of them are going to do better,
for example, after disturbance, if you have a drought or even fire.
So by associating with this diversity of mushrooms,
a single tree can cope with different conditions.
So they are very important for what we call forest resilience,
which means how the forest can adapt to changes.
So this forest, they are actually very poor in nutrients,
but thanks to these fungi,
the forest, the tree can grow.
And we think that without this fungi there would not be any forests, actually,
because the trees that they are not able to get their nutrients by themselves.
So if we had none of these little guys we’d have none of these big guys.
No forest without mushrooms.
No mushrooms, no forests. Exactly.
Listening to Camille, it strikes me that studying the fungi of these
precious old growth forests is an opportunity to understand
both the fragility and the resilience of the natural world.
We've known for a long time that plants absorb and store
carbon dioxide from the atmosphere
and that without that cycle we could not breathe.
But what we are learning now
is that they do this much faster. Wow.
When there is mycorrhizal fungi present.
That Cortinarius is purple, isn’t it?
In every handful of soil in this forest
there could be over 100 kilometers of fungal threads
and that biomass also stores vast amounts of carbon.
So when we cut down forests, we not only destroy the trees,
but we also kill off the fungi and short circuit
this ancient life support system.
We are only just starting to realise that forests
and their fungi are incredibly important in the fight against climate change.
A photographic goal of mine is to capture a time-lapse
of one of the most iconic Tasmanian mushrooms.
Ooh, what have we got here?
It's called the pixie's parasol, or Mycena interrupter.
Aren’t they beautiful?
I just love them because the blue,
the way it fades to white at the outer stem.
And underneath you get this pale blue shining through.
This is where the magic happens.
Our assistant in the time-lapse mission is an exceptional human,
Pat Harrison, a retired obstetrician.
It’s all in here, Pat.
She’s donated her garage to set up a temporary studio.
I have to get this in a little bit closer.
How long do you think you might need it on for?
It's going to depend on the temperature, but I guess
three or four or five days somewhere around like that.
That’s better.
We’ve got one that's already grown, but then all the little buds
are going to come up and we'll have a good time-lapse.
At 85 years old, Pat inspires us with her
insatiable curiosity for nature and for fungi.
When I retired from my work in Melbourne, I went to every adult education course
that I could and one was fungi.
We went to a forest and I just couldn't
believe my eyes when I saw all the fungi that was there.
And of course we all fall in love with the Mycena interrupta.
And I thought to myself,
this is where I can spend the rest of my life
out in the fresh air, finding these fabulous fungi.
When I first started fungi hunting, I bought a GPS and I thought, I'm right.
But I didn't realise that GPS didn't show up under the canopy
of the trees and I got lost.
So I spent all night out in the forest in July.
It was raining, thank goodness, because the next few nights
was very, very frosty.
Ever since then I have permission to have my dog
to lead me back to the car.
And I just want to do it for as long as I possibly can
because I enjoy it so much.
No fungi adventure in Tasmania is complete without a pilgrimage
to the enchanted rainforests of the Tarkine.
Here it feels like time has slowed down.
Trees can live for thousands of years.
Logs often take centuries to decompose.
Evolution has nurtured one of the most biodiverse
and unique places on the planet,
and I have met some of my favorite fungal characters in these forests.
There are mushrooms everywhere here.
There at my feet
growing in the trees
and they come in all colours, shapes and sizes.
Like this one, a red Hygrocybe.
Now this is also a great location to show you my latest obsession,
which is with the a UV light.
These are Ganodermas. As you can see, they’re creamy white underneath,
except if you shine a UV light on them, pinks and blues
in the rainforest, there's quite a few fungi that do fluoresce.
Russulas fluoresce. Entolomas fluoresce.
And of course the Ganodermas fluoresce.
There's been a great deal of interest in biofluorescence since we discovered
that some of our cutest Australian creatures
put on a light show at night.
Does the chemistry that turns this invisible light
into a sparkling array of colours help these organisms hunt?
Or is it an ancient form of camouflage?
Or could it be the opposite a way to recognize
one of your own kind?
It's a mystery still to be unraveled.
But in the meantime, I'm loving the discovery of shining a light
on the UV world of mushrooms.
It's been six days since we pressed
start on a Pixie’s parasol time-lapse.
Hopefully all has gone to plan.
The moment of truth.
Wow, 4,350 frames
and looking really promising.
Next we're going zombie hunting.
Our destination is a valley in the shadow of a mountain
that was once part of an ancient volcano.
This spectacular peak attracts dramatic weather,
inspiring its Bundjalung name Wollumbin,
which means cloud catcher.
Our zombie hunting guide
is Donovan Teal a fungi enthusiast
we met in our network on the internet.
Donovan was posting
very creepy photos.
Thousands of tiny insects
being killed and consumed by equally tiny fungi.
A miniature battleground
on the underside of leaves.
He made many of his discoveries,
clearing weeds like these small camphor laurel trees,
which in this part of the world can be very destructive
as they aggressively compete with native vegetation.
This is a good one.
So you just find them on the underside of the leaves here, do you?
Yes, it's quite protected for them on the underside of the leaf.
So you get a beautiful sort of change in temperature
and look at that.
Some of them are particularly obvious.
I mean, there’s a nice bright yellow on that one.
When you do get a nice bright one like that, they just pop.
Yeah.
It's really, really small on this camera.
But I'll show you in greater detail later or not get a more powerful lens on it.
And, hopefully I’ll get some really beautiful photographs.
Got a great little jumping spider here.
You can see the fungus has completely covered the soft tissue
and left some of the harder bony parts of its face exposed.
How did you know to look under leaves of trees?
What started you doing that?
I love spiders, so I was out looking for all the spiders in the
so many different spiders here right, and I
I found this beautiful spider and I was like, wait a minute,
this things got like 12 legs.
And it was only when I posted it to Facebook to a spider ID group
that someone was like, yeah, that's that's a spider
that's actually been taken over by one of these zombie fungus.
And and then I realized that I, you know, I had to look out for things other than
what I was expecting to see.
These specimens are so small, they're hard to see with the naked eye.
I think this one was my favorite.
It's has all, like, octopus tentacles.
Little bit larger than the other ones, too.
Oh, wow.
There’s spikes everywhere.
Even with a magnifying glass, it is difficult to see exactly
what is happening.
I wonder what it was.
But with high resolution photography and intense magnification,
all is revealed.
This is the stuff of nightmares
or an example of the magnificence of nature.
A fungus infects an insect.
It infiltrates the body,
slowly digesting it from within.
Once the mycelium has taken over the body,
it's time to reproduce.
That's when these fungi become even more bizarre.
Surreal structures start to grow,
releasing billions of spores.
Throughout this process, the insect is secured to the bottom of the leaf,
with hundreds of gossamer, thin fungal threads holding the prey in place.
It reminds me of the scene in the book
Gulliver's Travels with Gulliver, pinned to the ground
by the miniature army of Lilliput.
I love finding these little guys.
It is it is really like like fossicking for gold, right?
Like not from this world.
Now, you might be wondering what is the relevance of this microscopic struggle?
Donovan had the same question
and did something very clever.
He boxed up his specimens
and sent them to my mycologist, Professor Roger Shivas.
Roger specialises in the health of crops,
the organisms that attack them
and potential biological controls.
Donovan is sending us specimens
of entomopathogenic fungi, fungi on insects.
There's been some interest in these fungi
as biological control agents for insect pests.
But what Donovan's finding
essentially native fungi on native insects
and are basically new to science.
I'm a taxonomist and that means I identify Donovan's specimens
and it's impossible to identify most of them.
We don't have names for them.
So the old method, traditional method of taxonomy was to collect
something, kill it, dry it, press it, store it and describe it
and what it looked like, which doesn't really tell you what it is,
because things that look the same, for example, everything that flies
is not a bird, it might be an insect, it might be a mammal.
So we need to look at the DNA.
So what our group started to do now
is we've decided to base the taxonomy totally on DNA.
It's the only reliable method.
But more than that, we're preserving and keeping these cultures
as living specimens, which we can make available to science.
There's a seed bank in Europe for plant species.
What we want to do is a fungal bank for fungal species.
So one of the interesting fungi that Donovan found was a small Penicillium
species in this same genus from which the antibiotic Penicillin is produced.
So we’re going to name this fungus that Donovan's found Penicillium tealii
after Donovan, in recognition of all his efforts in discovering it.
Because Donovan is the discoverer of this fungus.
Oh, I got a good one for you. Oh where’s that?
Look at that. We got an ant.
Oh, wow.
You can see the fruiting body coming out of the top.
It's exciting for me because I'm just a citizen scientist
out there having a look, taking photos and sort of passing this stuff
onto the experts and then just feeding off their knowledge.
It's every day something new.
You've opened up a whole new world for me.
I mean, I never realized that this miniature world of Cordyceps existed
underneath leaves in such profusion as well.
Clive from the Bureau with your weekly weather update f
or Sunday the 12th of June.
Cold front in the southwest wind, rain for the far southern, South Australia.
As a winter blast of the ice cold air moves across Australia,
we start hearing forecasts of heavy rain heading for the desert.
To follow this rain means a 2,000 kilometer trek
towards the centre of Australia.
That's like driving from London to Rome.
There are not too many places I've driven where a GPS says
that the road and the river are in the same spot.
But that's because this riverbed is usually dry.
The Flinders Ranges are a place of extreme weather.
Droughts and intense summer
heatwaves are regular events
and then when it does rain it can transform this landscape,
triggering the desert to bloom.
Oh, that's pretty.
When I was a young man, I worked in the mines
and I still have a fascination with the story of rocks.
And the Flinders Ranges are full of rocks.
The ancestors of these crumbling hills were once mountains,
some 5,000 meters higher than today.
And these fossilized ripples are a window into a time
when this baked valley was a shallow sea.
So you may be wondering why a couple of fungi hunters
would come to such a harsh land.
Surely there can be no fungi here.
But the truth is that few desert plants would survive
without their fungal partners.
These are Boletes. Now these mushrooms, don't have gills.
They have little round pores like foam rubber.
The spores are contained within the little pores.
Wow. Look at all this mycelium.
As the land soaks up the recent showers, the underground network of life
seizes the moment for renewal and rebirth.
What have you got there, Steve?
I’ve got a beautiful little puffball.
Right there.
Both the decomposers and the mycorrhizal fungi,
send forth their mushrooms, reproductive bodies
housing billions of spores.
What have we got here?
That couldn't be, could it?
This is the desert shaggy mane.
It is.
Or, Podaxis pistillaris,
a classic desert mushroom,
found all over the world.
There's another one. It’s another two.
And there are a couple of beauties.
The hard wide pod like structure is thought
to protect the spores developing inside.
There’s masses of spores inside.
It dries out in the desert heat, becomes brittle,
and as it peels away, a powdery mass of spores is exposed,
ready to be dispersed
by the nudge of a passing animal or a puff of air.
tapped between the flutes of the gills.
The spores attract moisture, water droplets form
catapulting millions of tiny spores
into the air.
We have only recently understood how these trillions of tiny particles
created by fungi are an essential part
of the global climate story.
Along with dust and pollen and pollution,
they become scaffolding for water droplets to form.
They are nature's cloud seeders, helping to create the rain
so critical to life on our planet and to us.
Today, we’re leaving the majesty of the Flinders Ranges behind
and traveling 10 hours south
to spend the night in a commercial pine forest.
This plantation is rumoured to be the home of a fascinating,
otherworldly mushroom.
We're going ghost hunting.
We're surprised to see lots of native fungi here, but tonight we're really only
interested in one species, the ghost mushroom,
because it glows in the dark.
There are over a hundred known species of bioluminescent
fungi in the world.
This is the subtropical species we find at home,
Mycena chlorophos, and it has been a charismatic character
in many of our time-lapses.
Bioluminescent mushrooms produce their own light.
The main compound is Luciferin, which literally means
the light bearer.
Why do they glow?
Well, the main theory is to attract insects that get covered in spores
and then scatter them wherever they go.
But in our fungarium, we've noticed that it's slugs
and snails that love to eat Mycena chlorophos
and then spread the spores in their slimy poo.
Tonight in Ghost Mushroom Lane our challenge is to find and time-lapse
the local bioluminescent fungus Omphalotus nidiformis.
There's one
and wow, there's another one.
What a beauty.
This is a gorgeous specimen,
but to time-lapse in the field is going to be tricky.
The moon is nearly full, which is not ideal conditions,
far too much light, and we only have one night to do it in.
The plan is to take a shot every 30 seconds.
So if we hang here for around three hours,
that gives us 15 seconds of time-lapse,
hopefully just enough to give us a sense
its ghostly beauty.
Before we leave South Australia we have one more stop
the Botanic Gardens in Adelaide.
Dr. Teresa Lebel is the senior botanist
and mycologist at the State Herbarium.
Remember that mystery blue mushroom?
Well, for the past ten years, Teresa has been the lead detective
trying to solve the puzzle of it's family tree.
Teresa had been researching similar truffle-like mushrooms.
The first possible relatives were blue, red and green pouch mushrooms.
I first got to see this particular mushroom in the field in New Caledonia.
There was a blue and a blue green and a red version of it,
and I wasn't certain if they were all the same species or
if we were dealing with three completely different things.
I then managed to do some microscopy on them
and it seemed to me that the red one was definitely different.
But the two blue greens, I was still uncertain as to
how different they really were.
And then I did some very preliminary DNA work,
and I didn't believe the results that I got back because they said
they were completely different families, that these two things belong to.
So back to the drawing board.
I wasn't certain that these were the same thing or not.
So I had done trips to New Zealand and I knew there was some fungi
there that had very similar features to the New Caledonian ones.
When I did the microscopy, they turned out to be completely different things
and did not appear to be even remotely related to the New Caledonian ones.
I then went back to the herbarium collections and started digging
through all of the undescribed material that might possibly be one of these fungi.
And then there was one collection from Lord Howe Island,
and it was a single fruit body, not in great condition.
I did the microscopy and it matched the New South Wales one.
The next step was to sequence the DNA of all the suspects.
This time the results were conclusive.
One of Teresa's specimens from New Caledonia, the specimen
from our forests in New South Wales, and the specimen from Lord Howe Island,
are not only the same species, but they are a new species.
It took ten years,
but this mushroom now has a family and its species is
Coprinopsis pulchricaerulea which means beautiful blue.
It even has a nickname
Frosty Blue.
What the DNA doesn't tell us
is how this fungus interacts with other organisms.
How important is it?
And why has it only been found in three places on the planet?
Maybe there are answers on Lord Howe Island.
We can’t resist.
We head east to see if we can find frosty blue on this
remnant of an ocean volcano.
Lord Howe Island is spectacular.
It was World Heritage listed back in 1982
to honour its incredible biodiversity
and to protect rare species of plants and animals
that only exist on this island.
Most of Lord Howe is a nature reserve surrounded by a marine park.
It's probably Australia's last unspoiled island paradise.
And it's one of the safest spots we've been to.
The only place in Australia without snakes, poisonous spiders,
dangerous sharks or crocodiles.
But hunting down a rare mushroom in a forest we don't know,
well, we're prepared to fail.
I don't believe it.
It's the blues.
We came here looking for them,
but I never really expected to find them.
They’re beauties aren’t they?
You can see
two beautiful mushrooms here.
There's more back here.
Oh, there's three of them?
Blue, green.
And another one over here.
This one has been eaten by something.
Perhaps a bird, but hard to tell. It could have been a slug or a snail, in fact.
It's very unusual to find six of these blues together
and such beautiful specimens as well.
When we share our frosty blue discovery with some of the locals,
they tell us we have to speak to Lord Howe's resident naturalist.
Ian Hutton is a botanist who has been exploring and documenting
the Island's natural history since he was a young man.
Well, I was working for the weather bureau and I took a science degree in biology,
and I thought before I leave the weather bureau, I thought maybe I should go
to one of their really nice, exotic postings just for two years.
And Lord Howe Island came up and I thought, Well, that's it.
I'll do two years at Lord Howe Island, then I'll go and work in some
botanic gardens around Australia.
So, I came in 1980 and well I'm still here after 42 years.
After about a year, I got really interested in the nature of the island.
And of course while I'm out in the forest
I’m looking at everything there and there would be these fungi.
And the two that stand out here that are quite bright
and you can't miss them are the pink one we have,
and also this blue one.
Hang on.
Did Ian just say two mushrooms?
A pink one and the blue.
The two that stand out here that are quite bright
and you can't miss them,
are the pink one we have, and also this blue one.
He did say there was a pink mushroom and he offers to show it to us.
Now, here's this pink one I saw the other day
just under this bit of palm frond here.
They’re some really nice specimens.
It's really, really bright, isn’t it?
They’re beautiful.
Other than the striking neon pink colour,
this mushroom looks identical to the blue one.
Great specimens. Yeah. They’re beautiful aren’t they?
The pink one is very common in this lowland forest,
and I tend to think it likes the sandy soil.
And you tend to find the pink one growing on dead palm fronds or
dead banyan and other timber that's been on the ground for a while.
And yeah, after some rain, it just pops up everywhere.
Beautiful little things.
And it has only ever been recorded on Lord Howe Island.
We seem to have stumbled upon a mushroom that is even more rare,
and we think a very close relative to Frosty Blue.
With the permission of the Lord Howe Island Board,
we photograph and collect specimens
to send to Dr. Teresa Lebel in Adelaide for her to compare the DNA.
Hide self-view.
Okay, I've gotten some results back
and a nice little twist to the story yet again.
And what is that?
The DNA is actually saying it's exactly the same species.
So the colour might be just incidental.
Yeah, the pink colour or the blue colour is a very,
very small change in the DNA sequence for it to change colour.
So the Lord Howe Island pink mushroom
is also a Coprinopsis pulchricaerulea,
variety pink.
Why the colour change?
Well, it could be the soil type
or it could be to attract different animals to spread the spores.
But at this stage, we're just guessing.
We have such a low, or little understanding
of what so many of these fungi are doing
in the environment between the plants, the insects, the fungi.
So much more to understand and so many more things
to investigate and so few mycologists to do it.
So we really, really need the help,
particularly of the citizen scientists and the people in their local patch
going out and observing and and finding some of these unique things.
People often ask us why we are so obsessed
with documenting the world of fungi.
Oh wow. That came up quickly.
What's not to love?
The thrill that comes with a beautiful find.
Or, observing the unexpected.
Losing ourselves for hours in the minutiae of life,
it’s good for the soul.
But I think our biggest motivator is that it gives us hope.
We've realised these exquisite, delicate mushrooms are a window
into a neglected and essential piece in the vast jigsaw of life.
We are in awe of these organisms that make plants resilient,
sequester carbon, provide food for animals,
break down rocks, create soil, even make rain.
Wow. What an amazing display of Hypholoma.
I've got to get a photograph of them.
In discovering where they fit in the jigsaw, we learn that three huge
kingdoms of life plants, animals and fungi
are interconnected.
And often it's the fungi that holds it all together.
We humans are just one organism in this epic story,
and yet we have the means and the power to destroy it all.
And at the moment we're doing a pretty good job of that.
The places we take you as we follow the rain
are just tiny remnants of wilderness.
Every year more and more of these
living museums are bulldozed and torn apart.
Yet we cannot survive on this planet without them.
Just imagine if we can conserve the biodiversity of fungi,
we may be able to conserve all of this, the biodiversity
that is critical to life as we know it and to our own survival.