Stephen Axford: How fungi changed my view of the world

my name's stephen axford and i take photographs of fungi this stage i'm standing on is an endangered lowland subtropical rainforest near where i live on the north coast of new south wales in australia over the past 10 years i've taken many photographs of mushrooms in this forest and i've also taken photographs of mushrooms in some of the most remote forests on the planet photographing mushrooms has become a passion that has completely changed my view of the world this is the first mushroom i ever photographed its scientific name is cortinarius archerai why did i photograph it well it was back in 2003 my wife had died five years earlier from breast cancer and then i had a life-threatening illness i'd survive both but when you face death it makes you rethink your life and i was looking to reinvent myself the wild places along the australian coast and the ancient forests became a sanctuary for me i was walking along a coastal track one day when i spotted this purple mushroom i didn't even know there were purple mushrooms and if you'd asked me what a mushroom was i could probably tell you that it wasn't a plant but that's about all i knew i was a computer software engineer and i had never studied botany or zoology or any of the life sciences but after i photographed this mushroom i became intrigued with fungi my view of the forest changed forever instead of looking up i looked down scouring the ground for hidden treasures these are just a few of the mushrooms i discovered in those early days i was very focused on color back then this one is high grossery gramini color a stunning green mushroom that grows in the rain forests of tasmania it is quite small it's only one to three centimeters across the cap i was very excited when i found this specimen as they are very hard to see moss green mushrooms growing in moss green moss i knelt down and took the photograph which i thought was a very special single specimen and when i stood up i realized i'd been kneeling in a whole patch of green mushrooms hiding in green moss this is a russella which can often be the perfect looking mushroom they come in reds yellows purples and greens with bright white gills underneath they're very appealing to many photographers and many are edible some tasty some not so tasty and some not edible at all this is one of my favorite mushrooms it's called mycena interrupter it appears in april and may on fallen wood in many forests in southern australia stunning isn't it all these species are what people generally think of as a mushroom they have a stem they have a cap and they have gills but then i started to see mushrooms that didn't look anything like this and i realized i had a very narrow view of what a mushroom really is like this orange fungus it is a species of romaria they come in a dazzling variety of colours it looks like undersea coral doesn't it which of course attracted me as a photographer this is one of the many shelf fungus i started to see tremetis versicolor these fungi last a long time as they decompose large fallen logs and tree stumps so they tend to be around even when other mushrooms are not this one is cordialities from dosa it's an ascomycete which is commonly called a cup fungus i never knew that fungus could be such a beautiful black incidentally i've been told that cordiarity's group of mushrooms can be extremely poisonous so don't be fooled by its beautiful appearance many people in china know this fungus its name is hericium coraloides which we know as the coral tooth fungus we've seen it in forests in yunnan and the locals told us it's an edible mushroom when i started to discover this huge diversity of fungi it was like someone opened my eyes i realized there was much more to mushrooms than just different colors what started as a photographic journey then became a journey into the science of fungi through the vehicle of photography my first big discovery was that fungi are not plants or animals that they are a whole separate kingdom of life scientists think there may be four to five million species of fungus on the planet but so far we've only documented around 200 000 of them so there's a lot left to learn the photographs i take are generally mushrooms the fruiting body of macro fungi just like apples on a tree some of these fungi are saprobes these are the recyclers of the forest where the body of the fungus the mycelium a massive branching thread like hyphae grows inside dead wood or leaves or in the soil breaking down the dead vegetation without these sap probes all the fallen wood in the forest would just pile up like it did back in the carboniferous era over 300 million years ago when the dead trees were gradually compressed into coal seams the carboniferous era ended when fungi evolved the ability to break down lignin in wood and decompose it recycling all those nutrients back into the soil to feed the trees another type of mushroom that i photograph in the forest are called ectomycorrhizal fungi these live in a mutualistic relationship with trees they provide the trees with water minerals and nutrients from the soil the trees provide carbohydrates to the fungi you might have heard of the wood wide web that's where the mycelium connects all the trees in a forest through a vast network to a certain extent the trees can communicate with each other through the web perhaps warning each other of insect pests or sharing nutrients across the forest scientists are just starting to find out how trees use this network but what we do know is trees connected in the forest by a fungal network survive much better than individual trees do on their own outside the forest another very cool type of fungus i've been documenting in forests are the parasitic fungi some of these are parasitic on trees and will eventually kill the trees some are parasitic on insects these are commonly called cordyceps and we've found heaps of them mainly in asia but particularly in yunnan and china we always get a buzz out of cordyceps because they're so difficult to find you just see the fruiting body coming out of the ground maybe a little orange stem and you go aha there's a quadriceps [Music] this is one of the fun side journeys i've been on as i've explored the kingdom of fungi it's a slime mold now slime mold is fascinating stuff more closely related to malaria and dysentery than it is to other life forms it has colorful names like dogs vomit and wolf's milk but it looks like fungi so it tends to get lumped in with fungi and then they're a lichen it's estimated that six percent of the earth's land surface is covered with lichen isn't that amazing many people think that lichens are plants but in fact they're a mutualistic symbiosis between an algae or cyanobacteria together with two three or even four species of fungus the algae provides carbohydrates to the fungus through photosynthesis and the fungi's role is to provide the structure to the lichen each lichen needs its algae and all of its species of fungi to survive everything about lycone is complex so holidistic to photographing their beauty and leave the science to those who are better qualified the kingdom of fungi is full of cool science like this check out this bird's nest fungus i often find them growing in mulch in my garden so they're saprobes and they grow on wood the interesting thing about these mushrooms is the way they spread their spores you can see that there are little eggs inside the nest each of those is actually a spore packet and the nest is what's called a splash bucket so when it rains a raindrop will hit the splash bucket and splash the spore packet out of the nest sometimes shooting it by as much as three meters away often there is a fine thread attached to the spool packet when this hits some low vegetation that thread wraps around a twig or a leaf holding the spool packet above the ground when it opens up and releases the spores they have much more chance of spreading widely on the wind it is a very successful means of reproduction i'd heard that there were mushrooms that glow in the dark particularly in the tropics so one rainy moonless night in summer i decided to see if i could find them in my backyard i find a lot of fungi in my backyard i turned my house lights off walked in amongst some trees growing near the creek and turned my torch off i was prepared to wait for several minutes to allow my eyes to adapt to the dark because the only luminous fungi i'd seen before were very faint but as soon as i turned off my torch there they were little points of light amongst the undergrowth i went closer and i found these beautiful little mushrooms glowing a soft luminous green it was quite magical and i spent many happy hours wandering around at night photographing these beautiful mycena chlorophylls sometimes they were so bright i could find my way in the dark forest trails with a stick covered with the mushrooms finding these has opened up some incredible doors to sharing the story of fungi they were the first mushroom that i time lapsed to my surprise my wife supported the idea of filling our spare shower with rotting logs blacking out the windows and turning it into a time-lapse studio but then catherine is a filmmaker the results surpassed our expectations my time lapse became more ambitious and i set up two studios one in a shed and one in a shipping container when the bbc saw the movies i created they fell in love with them they were showcased on planet earth 2 with david attenborough and this sequence was listed by the bbc in their top 10 clips from that series uh [Music] since then time lapses and my cena chlorophos and many other species of forest fungi have been included in 10 other international natural history documentaries tom may a mycologist or fungi scientist at the royal botanic gardens in melbourne has been very supportive of our work he says that the time lapses bring fungi alive like a mammal for the first time ordinary people and scientists can see things they've never seen before [Music] in australia there are only a handful of mycologists and it's challenging for them to be in the forest when the fungi fruits so mycologists became very interested in what my photography and the time lapses could show them about the fungi and my role as a mere fungi photographer shifted to a role as a naturalist and a collaborator with the scientists just like the naturalists of the 1800s i had the equipment the passion for the natural world and the time and opportunity to explore i became interested in not just capturing the beauty of mushrooms but also capturing the form and the structure with the scientific accuracy that complemented the research of the mycologists some of the mushrooms we find are just so different that there is little doubt that we've discovered something new the blue was like that i first found it about 10 years ago quite close to my home in this forest in fact at first i wasn't sure it was a mushroom at all i thought it was maybe a blue sweet wrapper on the ground it was just so blue i sent samples to dr tom may and he identified it as a new species similar to specimens first documented in new caledonia now a decade later the original single species from new caledonia has been split into three species which look similar but not even closely related to each other and this blue mushroom still hasn't been given a name i think it's a fascinating fungus and dr tom may called it the most beautiful mushroom in australia i always try and get a time lapse of it and sometimes i succeed so scientific collaborations like this one was the next significant stage of how fungi changed my view of the world in 2014 i received an email from dr peter mortimer who is a professor at the kunming institute of botany which is part of the chinese academy of sciences peter and the head of department professor xiu jian chu led a team of mycologists who are doing some extremely exciting fungi research peter's dad in south africa had seen my photographs on the internet and suggested that he contact me the outcome of that first email has been four trips to yunnan to photograph and document the fungi of the remote forests it was on these field trips that i realised just how edible fungi can really be in australia we're what's called a fungi phobic society in our shops you can find only about five species of mushroom for sale and they're pretty boring people are generally scared to eat forest fungus we just don't know which ones are poisonous and which ones are edible but in yunnan we discovered that people eat around 900 species of fungus definitely a fungi phillips society i have to confess that at home i don't really like to eat mushrooms but in unam we were introduced to many delicious mushrooms and local villagers shared their knowledge about what was edible and how to cook them so this is the bolitas this this one is edible you eat this is very good it's a kind of typical delicious eatable mushrooms volitious edu lease right so this is their favorite one to find we also discovered that mushrooms in china are a huge business some chanterelles we haven't seen too many of them it was in the forests of china that we started to understand just how interdependent the trees and the animals and the fungi really are my view of the world was changing yet again the forest was starting to make sense it wasn't just a bunch of trees even in a relatively simple forest there are probably hundreds of thousands of life forms all dependent on each other and all contributing to make up what we call a forest from viruses and bacteria through to fungi plants and animals they are all part of the huge intricate web of life and the fungi are a really important part of that ecosystem and yet we know so little about them on the china field trips one in seven species that we document is new to science but even the ones that are known are truly fascinating here are a couple that i found really exciting these are called tomatomyces and i first photographed them in yunnan they have a hard pointed cap which allows them to push through the ground from up to a meter below the surface they live in a mutualistic symbiosis with termites which means that neither species can survive without the other the termites collect grass and wood and take it underground to their nest where they feed it to the fungus they then eat part of the fungus the fungus eventually fruits pushing the mushrooms up above the ground tomatomyces came as a complete surprise to me in australia we have plenty of termites but no tomatomyces yet many species of this fungus are found throughout tropical asia and africa there is one species of this fungus that produces mushrooms up to a meter across many tomato mices are valued as a delicious edible and we often see them in markets across this region we certainly like them this little purple mushroom is called lecaria amethystina and it grows mutualistically with pine trees villages in yunnan prize the mushroom as a pretty edible that looks good in any dish i just love that it's such a beautiful color the most poisonous mushroom in the world is an amanita amanita phalloides more commonly known as the death cap they grow under oak trees all over the world and every year people die from eating this mushroom for instance this amanita we documented in myanmar we think is part of the amanita phaloides group it may be the source of a number of recent mushroom deaths the mycologists we were working with and village leaders were keen to document it to warn people against eating it but this is a very similar amanita mushroom that people in nepal say is edible there isn't a lot of difference between them is there just to fill you in on what happens if you eat an ammoniter for loyalties it is actually reported to taste quite good but i really can't verify that the first symptom is that you feel a bit sick the next day after three or four days you are so sick that you know you need to see a doctor but by then it is often too late amanda phalloides contains a poison that destroys our liver so slowly over several weeks we die this is a mushroom that's very well worth avoiding so there's no doubt that photography can play an important role in educating people about these mushrooms and other poisonous mushrooms too as is its role in educating people about the fungi they can eat the china collaboration has led to similar collaborations in nepal myanmar and india working with organisations focused on conservation and helping local people manage their forests in a sustainable manner often as roads are put in forests are cut down much to the detriment of the local people the edible forest fungi that could be used for food or trade often vanishes with the forests so the photographs have been used to produce a number of field guides for villages in these countries but for me the most exciting part has been to document all of the fungi in these remote areas and learning a tiny bit of how each one interacts with the forest and the fungi in the eastern himalayas has been absolutely superb [Music] in the last year our role as fungi educators has taken on an even wider vision on these international fungi adventures we are often introducing our collaborators to fungi for the very first time we watch with joy as they become excited about this world that they had never noticed before every time we see them become almost as passionate and obsessed as we are and we want to see if we can make this happen on an international scale so in india in 2018 we filmed our whole fungi safari here's a little taste of what we did this is a scene where we document for the very first time a luminous fungi in magalia a fungus specieside time lapse that never ceases to wow is mycena chlorophylls it's a very bright luminous fungus that i find in my local forests wherever we go we always ask if there is a local variety usually the answer is no so do you have any mushrooms here that glow in the dark yes you do yeah so do you find many of them yes of course what do you call these mushrooms this is called bright mushroom because it will give out the light in the night time can we go down and find some sure i'll contact you that's brilliant [Music] wow look at these [Music] they're nothing like the fungus we get at home the stems glow yeah but the caps don't glow whereas at home the caps glow and the stems only grow glow a little bit ah so it's same same but different species yes you really can't see these with the light on them but we'll we'll get them up in the dark and i can photograph them with long exposure and then you'll really see them in their full glory there are currently around 80 species of luminous fungus recorded on the planet but only a handful of them glow as brightly as this one this is the first time malinong's luminous fungus has ever been documented and when its dna was analyzed we discovered it's a new species [Music] now i'm going to take you back to my home in australia in 2019 we experienced one of the worst bushfire seasons we had ever seen 17 million hectares of land was burnt over 5 million in my state of new south wales alone it was very frightening and destructive and particularly scary when it started burning the rain forest near where we live days after the fire had been through we started hearing reports from firefighters that mushrooms were appearing in the ash so we drove up to the blackened landscape to see what we could find we were amazed there were lots of fungi and they were species that we had never seen before this one is what's called a stone maker fungus it started to appear a day or two after the fire while the ground was still hot and smoking it lives in the earth for many years and forms a hard mycelium lump underground which resembles a stone hence the name it only fruits when there's fire which in this particular forest may happen only once in a hundred years then we saw masses of tiny cup fungi covering the ground we managed to identify them as anthrocobia mueller we started to wonder about its role in protecting the forest soil as fire tends to make the soil very fragile and easily washed or blown away but this fungus appeared to be binding the surface soil together and locking in any moisture for me these fungi raised so many questions where does this fungi live when there's no fire it has no deep mycelial reserve that i could see i'd read that there was a similar fungus in north america which lived as a microscopic fungus in the cellulose structure of mosses perhaps this did something similar and only became a macro fungus when the fire had sterilized the soil of all competing organisms we even found mushrooms in gaps underneath charcoal where there had once been fallen logs on the forest floor this would have been where the fire was its very hottest how could this happen how could spores make their way into the soil that had been completely sterilized by the fire the variety of fire loving fungi was astounding and then when we went back a month later there were different fungi coming up we published a few videos and the response surprised us many of the locals told us they were uplifted by this positive information in amongst all the news of destruction they were heartened to hear just how resilient the forest could be thanks in this case to its fungi life is such a wonderful thing and we know so little about almost all of it as i told you at the start i used to work as a computer software engineer on very large computer systems and systems that we think of as being very complex but a computer system is designed by humans and get enough of us together and we can explain everything about them but even the smallest system in the natural world is more complex than the largest computer system and then when you consider that there are trillions or even quadrillions of organisms on the planet we start to get a sense of just how complex life on earth really is i started on this journey knowing a little bit about photography but very little about the natural world learning about the complexity of fungi and through it the complexity of life i realize now that life on this planet is more interconnected than i ever could have imagined we are just one organism in that story and yet we have the means to destroy it all including ourselves because we cannot survive in our own with all the extraordinary tools we have created humans have a wonderful opportunity to learn and conserve one of the scientists we collaborated with in india said you can't conserve a forest ecosystem if you don't know what's there and i feel we have been handed this wonderful opportunity to help document a very small part of this complexity and share it with you from one photograph of a very small purple mushroom on the ground i've been taken on a journey that reveals the very big picture of life on this planet thank you [Music] you

Channel: Planet Fungi

Views: 1,660,812

Rating: 4.9615579 out of 5

Keywords: Mushrooms, fungi, Stephen Aford, Planet Fungi, mycology, macro photography, nature, science

Id: KYunPJQWZ1o

Length: 32min 16sec (1936 seconds)

Published: Fri Sep 04 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/charismatic_carcass]

Cool! Apparently stonemakers are so rare you’re asked to contact a local expert if you come in contact with one

[u/DavyCojones]

The blue one on the thumbnail is not a Stonemaker fungus but a not yet named fungus that the video interviewee Stephen Axford found in his local forest. He talks about the Stonemaker fungus around the 28:00 mark (but watch the entire thing!).

[u/Alan_Smithee_]

Morel mushrooms, which are delicious, also appear after fires.

[u/ConstantlySlippery]

It’s interesting... we (my family) do some wilderness camping and I’ve found myself taking pictures of assorted mushrooms in the wild when we stumble on them as they can be really striking.

This guy inspires me to do more of that. Just this past fall I found a mushroom as big as a dinner plate that popped up in my back yard like nothing I have ever seen. There is no end to their variety and ability to surprise.

[u/hsvandreas]

Really interesting video, thanks for sharing OP

[u/LostCube]

Looks like a woolly neptune to me

[u/ValenBeano89]

Excellent! Thanks for sharing

[u/Dirty_Hertz]

Fungi fetish!

The video was only 32 minutes long - I could watch 32 hours of this. Super well produced and so interesting!

Thank you for sharing.

[u/imahillbilly]

I’m glad I ran across this this morning. Seeing something so beautiful and being educated on it a bit will change my day I think. Thank you for sharing this film.