Putting the Focus on North Coast Fungi

How often do you notice your local fungi?

While fungi are vitally important to soil health, their value to land managers is often overlooked. As many fungi fruit in cooler, damper months of the year, they exist to most of us only so long as their mushrooms peek above the soil’s surface. Once they have released their spores and ensured future generations, they disappear from view and from our thoughts as rapidly as they appeared. However, there is more to their mysterious appearances than meets the eye!

The Fungi Focus project began when curious Local Land Services staff started taking snapshots of mushrooms and other fruiting bodies they encountered during their work. It soon became apparent how much more there was to discover about these local organisms, even among those who directly rely on the work of fungi. Without them, soils could not continue to support plant and animal life.

Working with this collection of snapshots, a series of stories was put together to highlight some of the important work and curious natural histories of these poorly known organisms. While there are an estimated 50,000 species of fungi across Australia, even a tiny slice of the North Coast biodiversity draws attention to their complexity, their amazing abilities, and the reasons behind their strange shapes and formations.

Despite what we capture on camera or spot out in the paddocks, fungi are more than just mushrooms. To understand them, we need to look deeper, beyond what is visible on the surface. Like icebergs, the majority of the body of the fungus is hidden away - often in the soil, or snaking through wood.

A fungus is really the mycelium rather than the mushroom; a network of hungry threads growing through a substrate in search of nutrition. These threads, made up of smaller filaments called hyphae, excrete enzymes which digest the fungi’s food source, which is one of the key factors to their importance in soil and plant health.

The enzymes of fungi are absolutely essential to the breakdown of organic materials, particularly wood, and in the release of nutrients in a form that plants can use. The fungi that primarily decompose organic matter and are crucial to soil health are called saprotrophs, but this does not nearly encompass all the diverse roles that fungi fulfill. Other vital but invisible workers are mycorhizzal fungi, which develop networks between plants and share resources between them - an incredible phenomenon, not unlike the internet but for trees.

All of this work goes on invisibly and unheralded, which is fascinating and important to understand - but certainly not easy to monitor. Without digging under the surface to discover these hidden mycelium, how do we know which fungi are at work on our land, and if there is a healthy diversity or a sign of problems to come?

Fortunately, as our fungi paparazzi discovered, there is a time when the fungi stretch their legs and become far more obvious to the casual observer: when they are reproducing. When it’s time to make more fungi, often by releasing airborne spores, the fruiting bodies of many species push their way above the surface and become objects of curiosity. The tip of the fungal iceberg, the most readily recognised fruiting bodies are mushrooms. They come in many shapes, colours, sizes and often have incredible stories of their own - from the poisonous to the bioluminescent.

There are many more kinds of fruiting bodies too, not just the familiar mushrooms. From corals to puffballs, cups to jellies, stinkhorns to leathers, these diverse and often bizarre structures special sight. With only a single job to do (the release of spores), they exist for only a day or two, or up to a few weeks. So, just as we have done in our project - catch them while you can.

Green Spored Parasol - Photo Justine Graham