Worcester News

Wet Summer Turns Mass. Into 'Mushroomchusetts'

Are Mushrooms In Your Backyard Dangerous?

SHREWSBURY (WBZ) ― Walking through woods near Flint Pond might make you think that part of Shrewsbury should be called "Shroomsbury."

You would see part of the bumper crop of wild mushrooms sprouting throughout Massachusetts because of this extraordinarily rainy summer. That brings hazards as well as benefits.

"Oh here's one," says WBZ's Ron Sanders as he searches through brush at the base of an oak tree.

"No good. No good," says Andrzej Stasiowski of Worcester, who has hunted edible mushrooms since he arrived 20 years ago from Poland where he also hunted them.

"You're 100 percent sure these are safe?" Sanders asked while looking at a shopping bag full of variously shaped mushrooms.

"I'm 100 percent sure this is true mushroom. It's true mushroom, not poison," says Andrzej.

A spokesman for the Regional Poison Control Center based at Children's Hospital Boston says it's receiving four to five calls a day about possible mushroom poisoning, instead of the usual four to five a week. The center has received 54 such calls since June 1. Most are precautionary calls from parents whose children have eaten a piece of a mushroom. No deaths or serious illnesses have resulted.

Carmen Salas of Worcester makes sure her young niece and nephew don't eat any of the mushrooms with which they play in her backyard. She says she loves mushrooms but would never eat any from the yard because she doesn't know how to tell one from another.

"You shouldn't eat mushrooms that you're not absolutely certain are edible," says biology Associate Professor David Hibbett, a mycologist at Clark University in Worcester. He says this is the best summer he has ever seen for mushrooms, only some of which are poisonous.

"Most mushrooms are really harmless and they're actually beneficial for the ecosystem," says Prof. Hibbett. "This year, we are seeing lots of mushrooms, but that does not mean that there are any more fungi than usual."

A very few cause plant diseases or are poisonous, but most are beneficial recyclers of nutrients. Pulling a mushroom will not kill the fungus, because most of the organism lives underground -- or in wood, leaf litter, mulch etc -- as an invisible (to the naked eye) network of microscopic filaments, called a mycelium.

"The mycelial nature of fungi makes them very hard to detect and study in nature -- most of the time we have no idea where the fungi are, how big they are, how long they live, and so on," Hibbett said. "It is only when the fungi produce a mushroom that we get a sense of where the fungi are. Mushrooms are ephemeral, but the mycelium can be very long-live."

"For example, this year, chanterelles (an expensive and delicious kind of wild mushroom) came up in my backyard in Upton, Mass," Hibbett continued. "I am positive that this is the first time this has happened during the eight years that I have lived in my house; I would have noticed because one, I am a mycologist, and two, I like to collect and eat chanterelles. The question is, were the chanterelles there all along, living as a mycelium in the soil, and waiting for the right conditions (moisture) to make mushrooms? Or did they just arrive as spores and establish a mycelium this year? Mushrooms are very mysterious organisms, and that is one reason why I like to study them."

Often it's hard to tell the dangerous mushrooms from the ones that are safe.

 Take a look at some pictures of mushrooms and compare them to the ones you find in your backyard.

 Learn more about the different types of mushroom toxins

(© MMVIII, CBS Broadcasting Inc. All Rights Reserved.)

---