Re: [permaculture] Hurricane bioremediation | Effective Microorgansims Bioremediation In New Orleans | Immune system boost & bio-remediation with mushrooms]
Subject: Re: [permaculture] Hurricane bioremediation | Effective Microorgansims Bioremediation In New Orleans | Immune system boost & bio-remediation with mushrooms]
Date: Sat, 10 Sep 2005 19:19:15 -0400
-------- Original Message --------
Subject: BD Now! Immune system boost & bio-remediation with mushrooms
Date: Sat, 10 Sep 2005 14:40:57 -0700 (PDT)
From: Nancy Geffken <cgefren@yahoo.com>
Reply-To: Biodynamic Food and Farming Discussion <bdnow@envirolink.org>
To: bdnow@envirolink.org
The recent issue of Resurgence magazine had a cookery
article on medicinal mushrooms, extolling their use as
immune system boosters (esp. reishi & shitake) - dried
& powdered in ginger tea simmered 40 minutes-1hour or
added to soups, etc.
This issue has another mushroom article by Paul
Stamets, on-line at http://www.resurgence.org/2005/stamets232.htm which
mentions the immune system benefits but focuses on his
work with a variety of bio-remediation projects using
oyster mushrooms.
from the Stamets article:
As the tarpaulins were lifted from the other
companies' modules, the odour of oil was overwhelming.
Their piles remained starkly devoid of any life. When
the tarpaulin came off ours, the mound was literally
blanketed with oyster mushrooms, some as big as twelve
inches in diameter. Hundreds of pounds of oyster
mushrooms ultimately arose from this diesel pile.
Subsequent laboratory tests found virtually no toxic
oil residue in either the soil or the mushrooms, the
result of enzymes and acids that the fungi release
that break down such molecular complexes. This finding
is especially significant because hydrocarbons are the
basis for many other toxic industrial products,
including most pesticides and herbicides.
But the really exciting part of the story is what
happened next. After the mushrooms matured, flies came
in and laid eggs in them. Maggots appeared, birds flew
in, and other small mammals began to eat the mushrooms
and the maggots. The birds and animals carried in
seeds, and plants started growing. The mushrooms
initiated a process that led to rapid habitat
recovery. The polluted pile of dirt was transformed
into an ecosphere of life. That's what these mushrooms
are: keystone species that precipitate a catalytic,
downstream reaction that invites other life forms.
This is what Nature can do, but she needs a little
help from us.
Oyster mushrooms are one of the prime candidates for
breaking down petroleum-based and hydrocarbon-based
contaminants and pesticides. They are by far the
easiest of any mushrooms to grow, and they'll grow on
almost anything: old chairs, soggy money, or coffee
grounds. (They're also delicious and contain
lovastatin, a cholesterol-lowering agent.)
2005 : Issue 232
Healing : Paul Stamets
Resurgence - connecting you to a world of ecology, art and culture
MUSHROOM MAGIC
Mushroom gills Photograph: Steve Taylor/Science Photo Library
Oyster mushrooms cleaning up oil spills - whatever next?
IT IS MY CONTENTION that mushrooms and fungi are far more crucial to the
planet's ecological health than previously thought. We know that many
mushrooms have powerful healing capabilities for humans, but what I've
learned is that these organisms also appear to serve as primary healing
agents for land and ecosystems. My study of fungi and mushrooms has
demonstrated powerful new ways of rehabilitating degraded and polluted
landscapes and enhancing soil fertility.
In some ways, we know less about the fungal domain today than our
distant ancestors did. Ten thousand years ago we were all forest people,
and there are many indications that our practical knowledge of mushrooms
was far greater then. For example, the famous prehistoric iceman whose
frozen remains were discovered high in the Alps on the border of Italy
and Austria in 1991 had three wood conk mushrooms tethered to his right
side. He probably used them for multiple purposes.
The mushrooms he prized sufficiently to carry with him on a long solo
journey included a fragment of a birch polypore, which has very strong
antibiotic properties. It's likely that he was using it to treat an
infection or stomach disorder. He also carried some Fomes fomentarius,
which can be hollowed out and used to carry fire because it burns only
very slowly. This function would have been a matter of life and death in
that era, allowing people and nomadic groups to travel without losing
their ability to make fire. We've recently discovered that Fomes
fomentarius seems to be effective against E. coli 0157, a potentially
deadly bacterium often found in spoiled food. Although we've
rediscovered this fact only in the past several years, it seems probable
that the iceman's culture knew about Fomes fomentarius's antibacterial
properties 5,300 years ago.
Mushrooms are widely represented in ancient art and sculpture throughout
the world, and many species are still highly sought after as foods and
medicines in a wide range of cultures. Our own culture in the United
States may be the world's least mycophilic (mushroom friendly).
Fortunately, however, we have become an increasingly multi-ethnic
society; African, Asian, South American and Eastern and Western European
immigrants, all much more mycophilic than Anglo-Americans, have brought
their mushroom knowledge with them, to the great benefit of us all.
To understand the wondrous properties of many mushroom species, it's
helpful to know some of the basics of how they grow. When we see a
mushroom, we are seeing just the tip of the iceberg, so to speak. That
mushroom is merely the fruiting body of a much more extensive organism,
the mycelium, growing in the ground. Overlapping mosaics of mycelial
mats actually permeate all the landmasses on the planet in the first two
to four inches of soil. Such a mycelium may reside in the ground for
years, and may, after many years, produce mushrooms.
The mushroom's emergence above ground is a major event in the life cycle
of the mycelium, which otherwise grows invisibly in the soil. Like a
fruit, the mushroom's function is reproductive: after mushrooms are
formed, specialised cells on the gills or the pores produce spores that
are jettisoned into space. When these spores are triggered into
germination, they form a new mycelial mat.
Mycelia are remarkable phenomena. We have fossil records of mushrooms
going back over ninety million years, to the earliest onset of the
dinosaurs and vastly predating humans. Clearly they are highly
successful life forms. Mycelia are everywhere, and they grow very
quickly: they can travel from one edge of a room to the other in two to
four weeks. A single cubic inch of soil can contain more than a mile of
overlapping and interpenetrating cell networks, just one cell wide but
extremely pervasive. In fact, mycelial mats constitute the largest
organisms on the planet. The biggest one found to date extends over
2,200 acres. It's 165 football fields long, 3 feet deep, and 2,400 years
old.
Along with bacteria, fungi are the primary recyclers and digesters of
life. We now know that the complexity of the fungal kingdom gives soils
the ability to respond to catastrophes, whether from a tornado, a
hurricane, or somebody chipping wood or building a house. My research
shows that the saprophytic fungi (those that promote decay) in
particular seem to be running after human beings as quickly as they can,
repairing the damage we cause to ecosystems - which appears to be one of
their ecological functions. Until very recently, this capacity of
mycelia for ecological repair had not been sufficiently understood or
appreciated.
Scientists are increasingly realising that species they considered to be
parasitic fungi are not blights on the forest, as was once thought. Such
fungi actually build soil so the landscape can become a pedestal for
greater ecological diversity. Many mushrooms play an absolutely critical
role in maintaining forest biodiversity. For example, mycorrhizal
species such as chanterelles, matsutake and porcini, which are
symbiotic, grow in association with the root zones of higher plants.
With very few exceptions, virtually all deciduous trees and shrubs have
mycorrhizal mushroom hosts that sheathe their roots, increase their
capacity to absorb water, extend their root zones, and protect them from
disease vectors.
The absence of mycelia in soils indicates an imperilled habitat;
conversely, mushrooms in your garden are a sign of a healthy ecosystem.
The mycelium produces enzymes and acids and compounds with antibiotic
properties that break down large organic complexes of molecules into
simpler forms that plants can absorb. Mycelia are the great soil
builders of our planet: they create habitats in which vegetables and
other plants can grow. This characteristic of fungi is also what makes
them so useful in ecological restoration, where the need often is to
break down wastes and toxins.
I FIND FASCINATING structural similarities among mushroom mycelia, the
brain's neural networks, and the internet. Mushroom mycelia seem to form
a sort of planet-wide biological internet that transmits information. If
a twig falls in the forest, to the mycelia it's like a pebble being
thrown into a pond. When trees or plant materials fall and die, mycelial
networks sense it almost instantaneously. This process has been proven
in the laboratory; for instance, if a dead beetle is put into a Petri
dish, mycelial mats growing on the opposite edge of the dish will move
quickly toward that nutritional source, through means we don't
understand. The mats are geographically separated from the food source
by what for them is a great distance - hundreds of thousands of microns
- yet are able to sense it, target it, and stream mycelium to it
rapidly. In Japan, scientists recently showed that a slime mould can
repeatedly navigate a maze in the most efficient manner to capture
nutrient sources with the least amount of cellular production,
suggesting a form of cellular intelligence.
About 465 million years ago, humans shared a common ancestry with fungi.
We share about 30% of our genes with fungi, giving us more in common
genetically with them than with any other kingdom. So perhaps it's not
such a leap to speculate that mycelial networks might display a form of
natural intelligence. It's certainly compelling that human neural
structures, mushroom mycelia, and the model of the internet all share a
very similar decentralised, networked architecture. There is no
point-specific central location on the internet or in a mycelial mass
where you can fatally harm the entire organism.
Whatever one may think about the prospect of fungal intelligence, the
practical uses of mushrooms are indisputable. Dusty, my partner, and I
have been working in three main areas: preserving potentially useful
mushroom species and fungal biodiversity in general, which above all
entails protecting habitats, especially forests; doing research on the
medicinal uses of mushrooms; and devising new technologies that use some
of the remarkable properties of the fungal realm to clean up pollution,
enrich agricultural soils, and create environmentally benign pesticides.
WE LIVE IN THE Pacific Northwest in the US, an ideal place to work on
biodiversity. Our home and laboratories are located at the base of the
Olympic Peninsula of Washington State, south of Seattle, and we go into
the rain forest frequently to find new mushroom species and ancestral
strains of fungi with interesting properties. The forest is in a sense
our church, and we're passionate about protecting it.
Because mushrooms can be cloned just from their spores, the
'wildcrafting' we do requires only a minuscule amount of physical
material. (Cloning a mushroom is a natural process that does not involve
genetic modification but simply takes tissue that will regrow in its
natural expression.) We can walk into a grove of old-growth forest where
there may be hundreds of mushrooms of one species, and our impact on the
environment is minimal because we can select just one specimen, even
just a small portion of one specimen. This procedure stands in direct
contrast to the wild harvesting of mushrooms for profit, where people
descend on chanterelle patches and harvest everything in sight.
We have four laboratories where our culture collection now houses
several hundred species that are specific to our interests. After
cloning specimens in the laboratory, we capture the phenotype - its
genetic expression - and grow its mycelium, preserving the identical
genetic individual. This way the strain is conserved, we hope forever,
even if the habitat from which it came is tragically destroyed. The
mycelium can be expanded into tons of mycomass. We grow about 250
strains in our culture library and have commercialised about twenty-five
species.
In the area of medicine, mounting research is confirming the enormous
potential for new curative compounds waiting to be found in the fungal
realm, including entirely new classes of medicines. In light of the fact
that penicillin comes from a mould, it's surprising that the
pharmaceutical industry has not paid more attention to this field. What
I want to focus on here, however, is the capacity of fungi to heal
polluted sites and ecosystems, and how they can be used for insect
control. Fungi can be great allies for rehabilitating environments and
recreating sustainable biotic communities.
We've begun several such projects. One involves helping habitat recovery
where people are cutting trees. We're demonstrating a technique of
putting spore mass into chainsaw oil, so that when trees are cut, the
oil - which mushroom mycelia love - will inoculate the stumps and
accelerate the processes of decomposition and restoration. When the
stumps are inoculated, the mycelium propagates rapidly. Its
water-transporting properties increase resident moisture and attract all
sorts of other micro-organisms, so that when the stumps and the trees
are cut, they become an oasis of life instead of just drying out.
Another of our remediation projects using fungal technologies took place
after a diesel fuel spill near Bellingham, Washington. We entered a
state-sponsored pilot project with other bioremediation companies that
were using standard bacterial and enzymatic processes to try to
decontaminate the soil, which was saturated with oil and mounded up in
piles about three feet high, forty feet long, and six to eight feet
wide. Each company was given a soil module to work on. We inoculated
ours with the mycelium of oyster mushrooms, and, like the other
companies, we then covered it with a tarpaulin and came back about six
weeks later.
As the tarpaulins were lifted from the other companies' modules, the
odour of oil was overwhelming. Their piles remained starkly devoid of
any life. When the tarpaulin came off ours, the mound was literally
blanketed with oyster mushrooms, some as big as twelve inches in
diameter. Hundreds of pounds of oyster mushrooms ultimately arose from
this diesel pile. Subsequent laboratory tests found virtually no toxic
oil residue in either the soil or the mushrooms, the result of enzymes
and acids that the fungi release that break down such molecular
complexes. This finding is especially significant because hydrocarbons
are the basis for many other toxic industrial products, including most
pesticides and herbicides.
But the really exciting part of the story is what happened next. After
the mushrooms matured, flies came in and laid eggs in them. Maggots
appeared, birds flew in, and other small mammals began to eat the
mushrooms and the maggots. The birds and animals carried in seeds, and
plants started growing. The mushrooms initiated a process that led to
rapid habitat recovery. The polluted pile of dirt was transformed into
an ecosphere of life. That's what these mushrooms are: keystone species
that precipitate a catalytic, downstream reaction that invites other
life forms. This is what Nature can do, but she needs a little help from us.
Oyster mushrooms are one of the prime candidates for breaking down
petroleum-based and hydrocarbon-based contaminants and pesticides. They
are by far the easiest of any mushrooms to grow, and they'll grow on
almost anything: old chairs, soggy money, or coffee grounds. (They're
also delicious and contain lovastatin, a cholesterol-lowering agent.)
For several years I've been working with Battelle Laboratories to test
some of my strains for bioremediation. We've discovered that at least
one strain was able to break down highly toxic materials, including VX,
the notorious nerve-gas agent. VX contains a recalcitrant molecule
that's very difficult to degrade and is the core constituent of other
chemical warfare agents, which poses a huge problem because the US
government has them in storage in great quantities. The only other
method of disposal currently used is incineration, which of course
disperses it into the air and could be quite dangerous. A laboratory
experiment we conducted for the Department of Defense, reported in the
British military-affairs magazine Jane's Defence Weekly, showed that by
using mushrooms we were able to break down the VX in an unprecedented
manner, and its transformation into a harmless substance occurred very
quickly. Since this mushroom is native to old-growth forest, I see a
strong argument for saving our primeval forests as a matter of national
defence.
Benign insect control is another area of key interest. The mushroom
Termitomyces is well known to native peoples in Africa as a delicious
edible fungus cultivated by termites. They live in its mycelium, where
they produce a beautiful honeycomb-like structure from which mushrooms
later pop out. The termites are absolutely dependent on these fungi and
have developed a close collaboration with them: an interspecies
symbiosis. Insects and mushrooms share a close and ancient relationship,
which we can adapt for human ends.
How we began experimenting with insect-targeting species is a funny
story. Despite putting great care and resources into creating our
state-of-the-art laboratories, Dusty and I haven't much attended to our
house, which was being seriously damaged by carpenter ants. It was
already in really bad shape, and after the Olympia earthquake in 2001,
the roof tilted another two or three inches. A friend of mine said, "If
all the carpenter ants stopped holding hands in your house, it would
fall down!"
I had to do something, but I didn't want to use toxic pesticides,
especially in my home. Instead I started researching whether there might
be fungi that are non-toxic to humans and other mammals but would target
specific insects such as carpenter ants. I learned that big
corporations, including Monsanto and Dow, had spent millions to develop
biological controls using fungi spores to kill termites and other insect
pests. Their thinking was that fungi use spores to infect insects, which
then become launching pads for dispersing more spores. But the corporate
entomologists and mycologists had used a different paradigm and missed
something that we found.
The problem with the conventional spore-delivery systems these
corporations devised is that insects aren't stupid. Millennia of
evolution have taught them to avoid danger when they sense it.
Commercially designed bait traps house lethal spores that would kill
insects coming into contact with them. But the insects sense this peril,
and instead of going into the bait traps, they head in the other direction.
I felt that the key was to find the precise fungal species that has
evolved as a parasite to a specific insect (and therefore has developed
chemical compounds that attract that insect), and, crucially, to entice
the insects into eating its mycellium in its pre-sporulating phase. So I
focused on selecting strains that delay sporulation. My goal was to grow
mycelium rather than spores. Experimenting in my house, I put out a dish
with about fifty kernels of rice that contained mycelium prior to
sporulation, which I wanted to occur later as a delayed reaction. The
ants took away all the kernels of rice, and one week later we had no
more carpenter ants in the house. Our house was thereafter free of
carpenter ants because the mouldy carcasses repelled future invasions.
It turns out that prior to sporulation some fungi develop attractant
properties specific to an insect species they have evolved to
parasitise. The fungi entice the insects to ingest and carry them away,
thus spreading the infection. The insects are beguiled into coming
closer, whereupon they gorge themselves with mycelium and take some back
into the nest, breaking it up to feed their queen and brood. Thus the
workers effectively spread mycelium throughout the nest, which it then
colonises. When sporulation does occur, the entire insect colony is
wiped out.
If these techniques pan out, we might be able to replace many pesticides
with totally benign myco-insecticides. But let me be clear about my own
philosophy as a biologist and ecologist. The point is not to wage a war
of annihilation against whole insect species. I seek to restore balance
and equilibrium; it's absolutely crucial to protect the insect genome,
which is essential to the web of life. The point of such a
myco-technology is that it be highly targeted and localised. Insects,
fungi, and microbes have coevolved successfully over great periods of
time without wiping each other out, and all have much to teach us. The
more we study these relationships, the more likely we are to find other
highly practical applications.
We're trying to apply our approaches to a variety of other uses. For
example, logging roads cause siltation in salmon beds, posing a major
threat to salmon. We're working on a strategy of putting wood chips
infused with myco-pesticidal species of fungi onto logging roads. As the
fungi grow, they provide myco-filtration, catching the silt before it
gets to streams and helping accelerate regeneration of the landscape.
And eventually the logging roads would become perimeter barriers
preventing insect plagues, such as beetle blights, from sweeping across
the forest.
By partnering with fungi and harnessing their extraordinary powers, we
are entering a new frontier of knowledge. I believe that the future of
our planet and our health will increasingly depend on our working
synergistically with other organisms. Fungi can provide us with a
powerful array of tools for living in harmony within our ecosystems. o
Re: [permaculture] Hurricane bioremediation | Effective Microorgansims Bioremediation In New Orleans | Immune system boost & bio-remediation with mushrooms],
Lawrence F. London, Jr., 09/10/2005