Fungus Among Us

Photos and text by Robert Sommer, Distinguished Professor of Psychology Emeritus

Agaricus crocodilinus Shields Library Ganoderma applanatum Mrak Hall Mall Coprinus sp. Walker Hall Coprinus atramentarius Young Hall

When I ask the students in my environmental awareness class if they ever notice mushrooms growing on campus, over 90 percent say no. Then I show them the slides I’ve taken of mushrooms in front of dozens of campus buildings, and they begin to realize how much of the environment they are missing. If people are not primed to see mushrooms, they won’t notice them. However, a mycophile—a mushroom-lover, like me—sees them everywhere during the rainy season.

I have been teaching the environmental awareness class since 1965, and I’ve been photographing mushrooms on the Davis campus for nearly as long, using natural light and no filters. My goal is to collect slides showing mushrooms in front of every major campus building. The photos are a challenge: It’s not easy to frame both the mushroom and the building in the same picture. Often the mushroom grows too near a building or too far away, or a tree stands between them. An added difficulty, of late, is keeping up with all the construction as new buildings on campus sprout like mushrooms.

The best campus locations for fungi are lawns, especially when newly planted and fertilized, and wood chips. The most common lawn mushrooms are members of the Coprinus genus, the Inky Cap and the Shaggy Mane or Lawyer’s Wig, the latter named for its resemblance to the wigs worn by English barristers. Both species auto-digest into a gooey black mass that served as writing ink during Colonial times. Ingesting Inky Caps (C. atramentarius) along with alcohol produces nausea, which explains why this species became the basis of Antabuse, a drug used to treat alcoholism. Wood chips host mostly LBMs (Little Brown Mushrooms), a catch-all term similar in scope to the birder’s LCBB (Little California Brown Bird).

A third location for fungi is on dead and dying trees. I photographed a golden shelf of Chicken-of-the-Woods on a tree in the Everson Hall courtyard. When I returned the following year, the tree had been removed after a large branch had fallen. I have also found oyster mushrooms on campus trees at the same time local markets were selling them for $7 a pound.

Winter break is peak mushroom season on campus. Students are away, so there is less chance that I will collide with other cyclists as I ride around with my eyes focused on lawns and wood chips. There’s also less risk I will be seen by my students, looking weird while prone on the wet grass or sitting on the sidewalk taking pictures.

When passersby ask what I am doing and I reply “Photographing mushrooms,” the next question is inevitably, “What mushrooms?” People don’t see them—literally underfoot.