Show notes
After first considering life as a musician, Greg Mueller’s professional aspirations took a surprising turn when a college class introduced him to mushrooms in the forests of southern Illinois. He switched his interests from composers to decomposers, from Mozart to mushrooms. Thereafter, he became a biologist who specializes in fungi. . “A hundred thousand species of fungi are named and well-described,” Greg says. “But estimates are that there are a million to one point five million fungi species. Which means we know only five to ten percent of what’s out there.” Today, Greg is a practitioner of both mycology and management. He continues his scientific research while also leading the department of science and conservation at the Chicago Botanic Garden. “One of the fun things about science is you never get all the answers. Each experiment gives you a new set of questions.” – Greg Mueller is the Negaunee Foundation Vice President of Science at the Chicago Botanic Garden, is on the faculty of the biology department at Northwestern University, and is a research associate at the Field Museum of Natural History. What to Do If You Love Mushrooms and Want To Know More If you aren’t interested in eating mushrooms, just looking at them, you’ll be fine with buying a mushroom field guide and heading out into the woods on your own. But if you’re planning on eating mushrooms, find your local mushroom club and start going to meetings. You’ll learn best by consulting knowledgable people—and as an added bonus, the gatherings are a lot of fun.To aid your efforts, you might want to acquire a copy of Greg Mueller’s book, Edible Wild Mushrooms either at the Chicago Botanic Garden’s gift shop, the local book store of your choice, or on Amazon. You can learn more about Greg’s work on his website and can contribute to the Chicago Botanic Garden’s scientific and conservation work by calling up the development office at (847) 835-6838. How to Learn More About the Chicago Chanterelle Together with Patrick Leacock from the Field Museum of Natural History, Greg recently discovered a new species of mushroom living in the third largest city in America. Along with Shape of the World host Jill Riddell, who volunteered for the project, they published the findings in 2016. This website on the Chicago chanterelle tells the full story. Photo by Alice Q. Hargrave Transcript of This Conversation Riddell: We live on a planet so thoroughly explored and examined, it seems impossible anything could exist on Earth that humans haven’t already found. 108 billion humans have been born here. That’s a lot of eyes with loads of opportunities to stare deeply or at least to catch a quick glimpse of everything on Earth. Hasn’t it all been mapped and named 10 times over? Every mountain, every creek, every patch of desert? By now, we must have seen and given a name to every single species of plant or animal there is. And maybe we’ve even gotten around all the bacteria.But here’s the thing. By golly, we have not discovered everything. Despite having had 50,000 years to do it, not only don’t we know everything about the other living things on the planet, we don’t even know most of it. If this were a test, we wouldn’t score a C or even a D. Right now, according to biologists, we’ve gotten around to discovering and naming only about 20% of all the species that are here on our planet. Sadly class, a 20? That’s a big fat F. Come on, we can do better than this. A few years ago, I resolved to make a move. Even though I wasn’t and am not now a scientist, I thought maybe I could help improve our grade. Somebody had to. Maybe I could discover and name at least one new species out of the 80% we didn’t know. Couldn’t I at least do that much?Welcome to The Shape of the World. I’m Jill Riddell. When I started on this quest, the first person I talked to was Greg Mueller. Greg is an expert on mushrooms, a mycologist, and he joins us on The Shape of the World to talk about the adventure he and I ended up sharing and to open up about his own philosophy and experiences living the life of a scientist.Mueller: So I’m Greg Mueller. I’m currently chief scientist and Negaunee Foundation Vice President for Science at Chicago Botanic Garden. Been at the garden for about nine years. Before that, I was a curator of fungi at The Field Museum for 23 years and I work with mushrooms.Riddell: Greg, you and I have known one another for a long time. Do you remember when we first met?Mueller: I’m afraid that I don’t. That’s the problem because we have interacted for a long time.Riddell: I think really, in my mind sort of has recently cemented our relationship was that I had been very intrigued by this idea that in this world where we think that things are so scarce and there’s so little left of nature, that in fact, we only know the names and have only ever really discovered 20% of what we share the planet with. And I just couldn’t wrap my mind around what that even meant. And you were one of the first people that I talked to about it. We had a dinner at our house and I remember asking you, “How hard can it be? Could somebody like my husband or me just find a species? Like what would it mean? Are there really still new things being discovered?”Mueller: Yeah. I remember that conversation which was great fun. And we started talking about what it takes to discover and that maybe you should try to be part of a species discovery. And I convinced you that the only way to go would be with a mushroom. And …Riddell: You did. Although I have to admit, I wasn’t completely faithful to that idea right from the beginning. People were still finding new species of birds. They were still finding new species of mammals. And that just sounded so glamorous that I got seduced by the idea of finding a new mammal species. And my memory of that conversation was that you said, “Jill, this is the year of the mushroom.”Mueller: Well, I would’ve said that any year, but that’s okay. But the timing was great because we were pretty sure that the yellow chanterelles that we have in the Chicago area. So back up. So chanterelle is this wonderful edible mushroom that has been called cantharellus cibarius was probably not cantharellus cibarius. It probably was a distinct species. It looked different. We could tell it didn’t look like that classical one. So we had this idea of species that they were really broadly distributed and highly variable, kind of like we accepted dogs because we know that, hey, you could have a poodle and a Great Dane and a St. Bernard and they’re all the same species. So well, maybe in fungi, you could have the same …. This doesn’t really look like this one, but it’s still the same general gestalt, and so we’re going to call it the same species.We were just coming out of that and recognizing that, no, maybe that’s not the case. And so as we are looking at the fungi of the Chicago region, we identified various things, including this yellow chanterelle that we said that we don’t think is cantharellus cibarius, but we needed the information to prove that.Riddell: And I remember at that meeting, there was also another alternative. There was a, I think it was a, was it a Laccaria species also that you were eager to name and describe?Mueller: There’s always a Laccaria species. So yeah, we have some Laccaria species. We have an Amanita. We have about probably 8 or 10 species we think might be new. We chose the chanterelle because it’s a great edible, it’s bright yellow, so it’s easy to identify. For me, it smells just straight up of apricots. I don’t know, do you get the apricot smell? Do you just get a fruity-Riddell: I don’t smell it so strongly, but it smells very pleasant.Mueller: Yeah. But it just seemed like it had the panache to do.Riddell: The particular year that we started working on the chanterelle happened to be the driest year that Illinois ever experienced. And there was hardly a mushroom that could ever dare to show itself because they absolutely require rain to pop. And it was the most desolate year. I don’t think there were any chanterelles came up that year, but in the meantime, I had started working at the lab and taking microscopic measurements of the mushrooms, of those specimens that were already in The Field Museum’s collection that you and Patrick had identified and thought might be this other species.Mueller: Because that was part of it. That’s why I from the onset thought that a mushroom would be a good option for you to get the experience because these multiple steps, there are places where people can interject themselves and be part of the process. So you’re a co-author on this paper, and that’s because you were an active participant in capturing the data, and in some groups it’s harder to do. And then so as a group, we were able to move this thing forward.Riddell: One thing that was funny for me was that my big chance at discovery and being part of this team of discovery started with the dead rather than the living. So the first Chicago chanterelle I ever saw was already a dried specimen. And those were the ones that I got to know intimately that first year when there were no live chanterelles coming up. And it was only after I had taken all these measurements and gotten to know the insides of it and these little tiny microscopic details that I got to see the whole organism growing in a Cook County Forest Preserve. It was a funny process.Mueller: Yeah. But it’s also interesting because when I tell people I’ve discovered a new species, a lot of people immediately think, “Oh, this thing just popped up. It evolved right here, mutated and we got a new species.” Most of the new species that are being described are really as we study things that have been named previously, and as we get to know more about them, we recognize that they’re unique. It’s not that the Chicago Chanterelle somehow miraculously popped up in the last 20 year, 30 years that I’ve been in Chicago. It’s been here, it was just hiding under another name.Riddell: One of the things I love about taxonomy is the way that taxonomists are called either a lumper or a splitter. And the lumpers are the ones that think that a lot of different species belong together all under the same general category, and that’s good enough. And the splitters are the ones that want to pull out every little detail that’s a little bit different from each other and give them all separate names and separate identities. And as I’ve gone through life since then, I look at different people and I think if they’re a lumper or a splitter, like the person who’s sort of like the generalization is good enough versus the splitter is somebody who’s really into the nuance and the intricacies.Mueller: Right.Riddell: I tend to like the splitters. I got to be honest.Mueller: Well, to me, so why this is important? Cantharellus cibarius, the mother name.Riddell: That mother name was the placeholder. And the Chicago Chanterelle was lumped under that until we figured out that it was not Cantharellus cibarius but was its own separate species.Mueller: Cantharellus cibarius was known from every continent except Antarctica. If that’s the case, there is no conservation concern because if you lose it here, it’s in three other continents. Who cares? What we’re finding out now after we finally have changed our paradigm on what is a species is that these species really have discrete distributions, discreet habitats, discrete ecologies, discrete relationships with other organisms, and so all of a sudden then they could be a conservation concern.Riddell: Yeah. So splitting mattered. It really did make a difference that we ended up figuring out that that Chicago Chanterelle was different from all the other chanterelles it had been lumped in with.Mueller: But it also means that, hey, that species is one of these unique pieces of biodiversity that’s playing a role and it has special value.Riddell: So after that summer that was so incredibly dry, the following year we had a ton of rain and that was … Ended up, we ended up collecting some more specimens, but that’s when we ended up doing the DNA work on the mushroom was that following year. But my recollection about when we did the DNA work is that even then it took us a little while to really get a conclusive result. So we were waiting for that moment when you could kind of spike the ball. And even though our first results looked like they were together, we still had to get more information. We still needed to look at different parts of the sequence.Mueller: Correct. We needed to look at different parts of the sequence and we also needed to get comparative data. If I have just the sequence of the Chicago Chanterelle and don’t have anything to compare it with, it’s just the sequence of the Chicago Chanterelle. I can’t tell you it’s unique or not, unless I sample broadly enough other things that are possibly the same to show that it’s different. From my recollection, your surprise was how long it took after we had the data to actually have the final publication ready to submit. And that took …Riddell: Two years. …Mueller: Forever.Riddell: It really took a long time.Mueller: Yeah. It just takes a long time to dot all the Is and cross all the Ts. You submit it to the journal, they then get it reviewed. That may take a while and then the reviewers send back their suggested edits and then you have to do the revisions and you submit it again and then it finally comes out and you hold that in your hand and say yes.Riddell: That really was a big deal. Yes, the few of us who had been working on this together did already know that we had a new species, but when the discovery was published and the world knew about the existence of the Chicago Chanterelle, Cantharellus chicagoensis, that was when we could high five and whoop and holler. So we kind of did that together in the quiet way that mycologists do things, along with friends and families and fellow chanterelle lovers. I hosted a picnic in a forest preserve whose floor was sprinkled with real live growing Chicago chanterelles. This was the spot where Patrick Leacock, the scientist from The Field Museum, the paper’s lead author, had found some of the specimens I measured. Musicians sang and played. It was a proud day.One of the things that’s interesting to me about the pursuit of science is that part of it is reductive. You can’t really study a cell unless you know the parts of the cell. You can’t really study the forest without knowing the components of the forest. And I liked the fact that that was a place where I, as a non-scientist, could contribute a little bit to science by doing some of that basement level work of measuring the spores, taking the microscopic measurements, being trained to do that under the microscope, keeping good records. And frankly, I think a big part of what I did to help contribute to that was just managing time and keeping it on people’s priorities to do because everybody else had these big jobs. I feel like that was one thing that I as a volunteer and somebody who’s managed teams before could bring was just simply keeping people working at it over a long period of time.Mueller: And you did it so well. It was a very nice nag. Yes, and it’s what we needed.Riddell: And we got there and it was published in a beautiful publication called Mycologia in a very nice print edition, and then of course was online as well.Mueller: We had a lot of discussion on exactly what the name was going to be, because we also wanted to see how we were going to then get the word out. Because one of the things I was excited about was not only this conservation importance, but also this story that the Chicago region is home to incredible biodiversity and a lot of it that’s unique to this region and that we’re still discovering it. And so the Chicago Chanterelle has been a wonderful model to do that. So we published it in Mycologia, this scientific journal, but then that gets pic…
Full show notes at the publisher 
Our TOPPODCAST Picks 
Stay Connected
