Follow the Rain (2024) Movie Script
1
Oh, look what we've got here.
It was a chance encounter in the forest
with a stunning mushroom,
that was the start of my passion
for photographing fungi.
Arent they beautiful?
I think I sensed that these small
organisms were something very special,
and I began documenting as many mushrooms
as I could find.
Aha, I know what this is.
What have you got?
It's an Aseroe rubra.
It's a creative journey
shared with my life partner, Catherine.
Together we capture the beauty of
mushrooms in photos and in video.
And using time-lapse techniques,
we observe
how the mushrooms grow, their life
and their death.
Every day we learn something new
about these intriguing organisms.
And every day, observing them raises
more and more questions
Like, why do mushrooms come in
such a variety
of shapes and sizes and colors?
Why are some so transitory?
He one day and gone the next?
What we do know,
is for mushrooms to show themselves
they need water.
So to unearth their secrets
we follow in the path of the rain.
Our mission
is to find out how fungi fit
into the world of living things.
There is something magical
about the rain.
I can feel the forest drinking it up,
setting the stage for birth
and new life.
It's the wet season for this endangered
subtropical rainforest.
This is our local forest
and very precious to us.
Over the past 200 years,
European settlers have cleared
all but 1% of this rainforest.
They called it the big scrub.
Such a dismissive name
for this wonderfully biodiverse
and beautiful forest.
But it's not an easy place to be
a fungi hunter.
There are aggressive plants
like giant stinging trees
covered with tiny hairs that can inflict
excruciating pain for months.
And they're a wait-a-while vines,
that hook into
the body with barbed snares.
All you can do is stop, wait a while
and carefully disentangle.
There are paralysis ticks,
and of course, bloodsucking leeches.
Look what we got here.
Searching for a spot to attach himself.
But we keep coming back because the fungi
in this forest are so magnificent.
And many species are new to science.
For centuries, humans
have been researching and naming
the life that surrounds us.
But we soon learned that very little
in the world of fungi has been studied.
Fungi are not plants
and they're not animals.
They make up a whole kingdom of life.
Millions of species
that have been neglected.
Now this one's got some potential.
Looking at it from above,
it's just orange.
But wow, look at it underneath.
It's estimated that there could be
anywhere between
two million and eleven million
species of fungi on this planet.
There's a beautiful young goblet.
But so far, scientists
have only described a mere 150,000.
What's that?
That looks like a phallus.
That's partly because the window
into the fungal world has traditionally
been mushrooms, which only appear
when the conditions are right.
Now, this is a stinkhorn.
It's the sort of mushroom that you're
more likely to smell before you see it.
As you can see, the flies love it.
Now, the way this mushroom spreads
its spores
is by attracting flies with the smell.
It keeps its spores in this slime.
The flies will eat the slime or paddle
in it and get it all over their feet
and then fly away and spread the spores
so the mushrooms will come up
somewhere else.
A wonderful mushroom.
Most of the mushrooms
we find in this forest
grow on wood when it is very wet
and very humid.
But the mushrooms are just the
reproductive structures of a fungus.
A bit like apples on a tree.
Mushrooms grow from mycelium, a structure
made up of millions of connected threads.
Look at all this beautiful mycelium.
When we eat, we put our food inside us.
But when this fungus eats,
it puts itself inside the food.
And as it consumes
fallen logs and leaves become soil
full of nutrients for the plants.
These are what we call
saprotrophic fungi.
They are both
undertakers and regenerators.
We humans have a fear of death
and see it as an end.
But I like to think that these fungi
teach us that death is just part
of the process of creating new life.
Catherine and I have been restoring the
big scrub forest here on our property.
It's become a bit of a sanctuary
for wildlife and for fungi.
Oh, look at all these.
Theres really quite a variety
of mushrooms here.
There's Dacrymyces spathularia.
You can see it's sort of shaped
a bit like a spatula.
And this Auricularia here.
Auricularia delicata.
Oh, and these are
Phillipsia subpurpurea.
One of my favorites.
What's this?
Oh, really nice mycelium too.
Saprotrophic fungi are also the perfect
actors for our time-lapse videos.
Welcome to the
Planet Fungi studio.
Catherine and I call it our fungariam.
But really, it's just
a shipping container.
Hopefully that will work.
This is where
we capture the surprises
that only speeding up
time can reveal.
We see how a tiny lump
in the mycelium
inflates with water
to form a mushroom.
And we witness mushrooms
spin as they grow.
Some mushrooms wave to us.
Others have the power of resurrection.
Many mushrooms
grow like humans, babies that expand
into more mature forms of themselves.
While other mushrooms shape shift
into a completely new structure.
What you are watching
are thousands of still photos
taken sometimes over a few days,
sometimes over months.
One of my favorite forest recyclers
is a very rare blue fungus
that I found in these forests
14 years ago.
It was the first fungal discovery
that Catherine and I filmed together.
Now whats this?
Very peculiar.
It could be fruit I suppose.
But its blue.
Its mushrooms.
It's just growing on a
what looks like a seed pod
from one of the rainforest trees.
And his, just like any other
mushroom is, got a nice stem,
but more like a
more like a truffle
than conventional fungi.
Because it grows,
you can see theyre all
over the place here and they grow
very close to the ground.
Theyre hidden in behind
bits of leaf litter.
The cap never seems
to open up on them.
I've never seen anything
like this at all.
I dont know what to make of it really.
Photographing this mushroom
in all its weird and wonderful forms
has become an obsession.
And of course, I couldn't resist
trying to time-lapse it.
I went on the hunt
to find out what this mushroom is called,
but I couldn't find anything
remotely like it.
That's when I sent a specimen to the
Royal Botanic Gardens Victoria
and mycologist Dr. Tom May,
who like me, was intrigued.
When I saw that blue incredible mushroom,
I just knew
it was something really special.
It doesn't come along every day
that you see something as spectacular
as that that's so new.
And then it throws up all these questions
Blue, it's such an unusual colour for
fungi for a start,
there are very few blue fungi.
And this was enclosed,
the lamellae, that's the gills inside,
were all scrunched up and a little stubby
stem, stipe at the bottom.
And then it was this amazing blue color.
So a lot of things about it
that were really weird
and they were growing on wood.
And that's another really unusual thing
about it.
A lot of these truffle
like fungi, these enclosed fungi,
they're growing underground.
This was actually
sitting up, growing on wood.
When you see a new mushroom
or a mushroom that's new to you,
well, maybe it's been collected
and described before,
but it might be buried away
in some old literature.
Maybe it's never been seen
by a mycologist before.
So that's when a lot of
the detective work starts.
So I knew in New Caledonia there
were a few of these strange fungi.
I thought that it might be
in this genus Leratiomyces.
So I had a look at the spores
under a microscope.
And they were smooth,
and that fit with the Leratiomyces,
so sort of suggesting that.
But that's just the first step
in really putting a whole lot of different
bits of the jigsaw together.
So the next step after having a
look at the spores under a microscope
is to do DNA sequencing.
The DNA sequences really help to position
things in the Tree of Life.
To untangle the family
tree of this unusual mushroom
was to take another ten years
with many dead ends and strange relatives.
We'll come back to that story later.
It's autumn on the Tasmanian West Coast
where misty mountains
and swollen wild rivers herald
the start of the fungi season.
It's a bit mad being in the
forest at this time of year.
It is often near freezing
and torrential rain can drench us
and our equipment at any moment.
But the rewards are worth
far more than the ordeals.
This wild and remote forest
is at its most splendid after the rain.
Trees dripping in plump lichen.
Their roots wrapped in
slippers of lush moss
and mushroom treasures are everywhere.
It is a mycological mecca for fungi lovers
and not just the human kind.
This is something I've never seen before.
It's wombat poo with this beautiful
little crop of mushrooms growing on it.
One of the fungiphiles who has
followed the rain
to Tasmania this year,
is mycologist Dr Camille Truong.
She's unearthing the story of the
ectomycorrhizal fungi
that create partnerships
with trees in this forest.
Beautiful Psatyloma.
I'm studying the fungi
that associate with Nothofagus forest.
So it's not only documenting the diversity
but also understanding
what they really do for the trees.
Here is a mushroom.
A lot of mushrooms.
Yeah, lots of mushrooms.
So if we dig below these mushrooms,
we find the mycelium
that is everywhere in the soil.
And from time to time, it's
making these mushrooms.
This is a great example
of seeing the connection
between the fungus and the roots,
because you have here the mushroom
and you can see that
the mycelium is attached
to the roots at these little
which is called the mycorrhizal root tip.
Yeah, this little whitish tip.
This is actually the point
where the fungus
enter in contact with the root.
So the fungus is going
to go foraging
for this nutrient inside the soil.
That's why the mycelium
extends in the soil
many, many meters away.
And then it brings back all these
nutrients from the soil to the tree.
Okay.
And it's, it's not for free.
So it's going to exchange
the nutrients against sugar.
So if you dont bring any nutrients,
you don't get any sugar.
No, that's it.
And that's why there are many species
of fungus associating with this tree.
And so the one that gives them
more nutrients,
will receive more sugar.
Every tree can associate
with thousands of species of fungi.
Some of them do better in certain
time of the year.
Some of them are going to do better,
for example, after disturbance,
if you have a drought or even fire.
So by associating
with this diversity of mushrooms,
a single tree can cope
with different conditions.
So they are very important
for what we call forest resilience,
which means how the forest
can adapt to changes.
So this forest,
they are actually very poor in nutrients,
but thanks to these fungi,
the forest, the tree can grow.
And we think that without this fungi
there would not be any forests, actually,
because the trees that they are not able
to get their nutrients by themselves.
So if we had none of these little guys
wed have none of these big guys.
No forest without mushrooms.
No mushrooms, no forests.
Exactly.
Listening to Camille, it strikes me
that studying the fungi of these
precious old growth forests is an
opportunity to understand
both the fragility and the resilience
of the natural world.
We've known for a long time
that plants absorb and store
carbon dioxide from the atmosphere
and that without that cycle
we could not breathe.
But what we are learning now
is that they do this much faster.
Wow.
When there is mycorrhizal fungi present.
That Cortinarius is purple, isnt it?
In every handful of soil in this forest
there could be over 100 kilometers
of fungal threads
and that biomass also stores
vast amounts of carbon.
So when we cut down forests,
we not only destroy the trees,
but we also kill off
the fungi and short circuit
this ancient life support system.
We are only just starting
to realise that forests
and their fungi are incredibly important
in the fight against climate change.
A photographic goal of mine
is to capture a time-lapse
of one of the most iconic
Tasmanian mushrooms.
Ooh, what have we got here?
It's called the pixie's parasol,
or Mycena interrupter.
Arent they beautiful?
I just love them because the blue,
the way it fades to white
at the outer stem.
And underneath you get this
pale blue shining through.
This is where the magic happens.
Our assistant in the time-lapse
mission is an exceptional human,
Pat Harrison, a retired obstetrician.
Its all in here, Pat.
Shes donated her garage
to set up a temporary studio.
I have to get this in a little bit closer.
How long do you think
you might need it on for?
It's going to depend on the temperature,
but I guess
three or four or five days
somewhere around like that.
Thats better.
Weve got one that's already grown,
but then all the little buds
are going to come up
and we'll have a good time-lapse.
At 85 years old, Pat inspires us with her
insatiable curiosity
for nature and for fungi.
When I retired from my work in Melbourne,
I went to every adult education course
that I could and one was fungi.
We went to a forest and I just couldn't
believe my eyes when I saw
all the fungi that was there.
And of course we all fall in love
with the Mycena interrupta.
And I thought to myself,
this is where I can spend
the rest of my life
out in the fresh air,
finding these fabulous fungi.
When I first started fungi hunting,
I bought a GPS and I thought, I'm right.
But I didn't realise that GPS
didn't show up under the canopy
of the trees and I got lost.
So I spent all night
out in the forest in July.
It was raining, thank goodness,
because the next few nights
was very, very frosty.
Ever since then I have permission
to have my dog
to lead me back to the car.
And I just want to do it
for as long as I possibly can
because I enjoy it so much.
No fungi adventure in Tasmania
is complete without a pilgrimage
to the enchanted
rainforests of the Tarkine.
Here it feels like time has slowed down.
Trees can live for thousands of years.
Logs often take centuries to decompose.
Evolution has nurtured
one of the most biodiverse
and unique places on the planet,
and I have met some of my favorite
fungal characters in these forests.
There are mushrooms everywhere here.
There at my feet
growing in the trees
and they come in all colours,
shapes and sizes.
Like this one, a red Hygrocybe.
Now this is also a great location
to show you my latest obsession,
which is with the a UV light.
These are Ganodermas. As you can see,
theyre creamy white underneath,
except if you shine a UV
light on them, pinks and blues
in the rainforest, there's quite a few
fungi that do fluoresce.
Russulas fluoresce.
Entolomas fluoresce.
And of course the Ganodermas fluoresce.
There's been a great deal of interest
in biofluorescence since we discovered
that some of our cutest
Australian creatures
put on a light show at night.
Does the chemistry that turns
this invisible light
into a sparkling array of colours
help these organisms hunt?
Or is it an ancient form of camouflage?
Or could it be the opposite
a way to recognize
one of your own kind?
It's a mystery still to be unraveled.
But in the meantime, I'm loving the
discovery of shining a light
on the UV world of mushrooms.
It's been six days since we pressed
start on a Pixies parasol time-lapse.
Hopefully all has gone to plan.
The moment of truth.
Wow, 4,350 frames
and looking really promising.
Next we're going zombie hunting.
Our destination is a valley
in the shadow of a mountain
that was once part of an ancient volcano.
This spectacular peak attracts
dramatic weather,
inspiring its Bundjalung name Wollumbin,
which means cloud catcher.
Our zombie hunting guide
is Donovan Teal a fungi enthusiast
we met in our network on the internet.
Donovan was posting
very creepy photos.
Thousands of tiny insects
being killed and consumed
by equally tiny fungi.
A miniature battleground
on the underside of leaves.
He made many of his discoveries,
clearing weeds like these small
camphor laurel trees,
which in this part of the world
can be very destructive
as they aggressively compete
with native vegetation.
This is a good one.
So you just find them on the
underside of the leaves here, do you?
Yes, it's quite protected for them
on the underside of the leaf.
So you get a beautiful sort of change
in temperature
and look at that.
Some of them are particularly obvious.
I mean, theres a nice bright
yellow on that one.
When you do get a nice bright one
like that, they just pop.
Yeah.
It's really, really small on this camera.
But I'll show you in greater detail later
or not get a more powerful lens on it.
And, hopefully Ill get some
really beautiful photographs.
Got a great little jumping spider here.
You can see the fungus
has completely covered the soft tissue
and left some of the harder
bony parts of its face exposed.
How did you know
to look under leaves of trees?
What started you doing that?
I love spiders, so I was out
looking for all the spiders in the
so many different spiders
here right, and I
I found this beautiful spider
and I was like, wait a minute,
this things got like 12 legs.
And it was only when I posted it
to Facebook to a spider ID group
that someone was like,
yeah, that's that's a spider
that's actually been taken over
by one of these zombie fungus.
And and then I realized that I, you know,
I had to look out for things other than
what I was expecting to see.
These specimens are so small,
they're hard to see with the naked eye.
I think this one was my favorite.
It's has all, like, octopus tentacles.
Little bit larger
than the other ones, too.
Oh, wow.
Theres spikes everywhere.
Even with a magnifying glass,
it is difficult to see exactly
what is happening.
I wonder what it was.
But with high resolution photography
and intense magnification,
all is revealed.
This is the stuff of nightmares
or an example of the
magnificence of nature.
A fungus infects an insect.
It infiltrates the body,
slowly digesting it from within.
Once the mycelium has taken over the body,
it's time to reproduce.
That's when these fungi
become even more bizarre.
Surreal structures start to grow,
releasing billions of spores.
Throughout this process, the insect
is secured to the bottom of the leaf,
with hundreds of gossamer, thin fungal
threads holding the prey in place.
It reminds me of the scene in the book
Gulliver's Travels with Gulliver,
pinned to the ground
by the miniature army of Lilliput.
I love finding these little guys.
It is it is really like
like fossicking for gold, right?
Like not from this world.
Now, you might be wondering what is the
relevance of this microscopic struggle?
Donovan had the same question
and did something very clever.
He boxed up his specimens
and sent them to my mycologist,
Professor Roger Shivas.
Roger specialises in the health of crops,
the organisms that attack them
and potential biological controls.
Donovan is sending us specimens
of entomopathogenic fungi,
fungi on insects.
There's been some interest
in these fungi
as biological control
agents for insect pests.
But what Donovan's finding
essentially
native fungi on native insects
and are basically new to science.
I'm a taxonomist and that means
I identify Donovan's specimens
and it's impossible
to identify most of them.
We don't have names for them.
So the old method, traditional
method of taxonomy was to collect
something, kill it, dry it,
press it, store it and describe it
and what it looked like,
which doesn't really tell you what it is,
because things that look the same,
for example, everything that flies
is not a bird, it might be an insect,
it might be a mammal.
So we need to look at the DNA.
So what our group started to do now
is we've decided to base the taxonomy
totally on DNA.
It's the only reliable method.
But more than that, we're preserving
and keeping these cultures
as living specimens,
which we can make available to science.
There's a seed bank in Europe
for plant species.
What we want to do
is a fungal bank for fungal species.
So one of the interesting fungi
that Donovan found was a small Penicillium
species in this same genus from which
the antibiotic Penicillin is produced.
So were going to name this fungus
that Donovan's found Penicillium tealii
after Donovan, in recognition
of all his efforts in discovering it.
Because Donovan
is the discoverer of this fungus.
Oh, I got a good one for you.
Oh wheres that?
Look at that. We got an ant.
Oh, wow.
You can see the fruiting body
coming out of the top.
It's exciting for me
because I'm just a citizen scientist
out there having a look, taking photos
and sort of passing this stuff
onto the experts and then just
feeding off their knowledge.
It's every day something new.
You've opened up a whole new world for me.
I mean, I never realized that
this miniature world of Cordyceps existed
underneath leaves in
such profusion as well.
Clive from the Bureau with your weekly
weather update f
or Sunday the 12th of June.
Cold front in the southwest wind, rain
for the far southern, South Australia.
As a winter blast of the ice
cold air moves across Australia,
we start hearing forecasts of heavy
rain heading for the desert.
To follow this rain means
a 2,000 kilometer trek
towards the centre of Australia.
That's like driving from London to Rome.
There are not too many places
I've driven where a GPS says
that the road and the river
are in the same spot.
But that's because this riverbed
is usually dry.
The Flinders Ranges are a place
of extreme weather.
Droughts and intense summer
heatwaves are regular events
and then when it does rain
it can transform this landscape,
triggering the desert to bloom.
Oh, that's pretty.
When I was a young man,
I worked in the mines
and I still have a fascination
with the story of rocks.
And the Flinders Ranges are full of rocks.
The ancestors of these crumbling hills
were once mountains,
some 5,000 meters higher than today.
And these fossilized ripples
are a window into a time
when this baked valley was a shallow sea.
So you may be wondering why
a couple of fungi hunters
would come to such a harsh land.
Surely there can be no fungi here.
But the truth is that few
desert plants would survive
without their fungal partners.
These are Boletes.
Now these mushrooms, don't have gills.
They have little round pores
like foam rubber.
The spores are contained
within the little pores.
Wow. Look at all this mycelium.
As the land soaks up the recent showers,
the underground network of life
seizes the moment for renewal and rebirth.
What have you got there, Steve?
Ive got a beautiful little puffball.
Right there.
Both the decomposers
and the mycorrhizal fungi,
send forth their mushrooms,
reproductive bodies
housing billions of spores.
What have we got here?
That couldn't be, could it?
This is the desert shaggy mane.
It is.
Or, Podaxis pistillaris,
a classic desert mushroom,
found all over the world.
There's another one. Its another two.
And there are a couple of beauties.
The hard wide pod
like structure is thought
to protect the spores
developing inside.
Theres masses of spores inside.
It dries out in the desert heat,
becomes brittle,
and as it peels away, a powdery
mass of spores is exposed,
ready to be dispersed
by the nudge of a passing animal
or a puff of air.
tapped between the flutes of the gills.
The spores attract moisture,
water droplets form
catapulting millions of tiny spores
into the air.
We have only recently understood
how these trillions of tiny particles
created by fungi are an essential part
of the global climate story.
Along with dust and pollen and pollution,
they become scaffolding for
water droplets to form.
They are nature's cloud seeders,
helping to create the rain
so critical to life on our planet
and to us.
Today, were leaving the majesty
of the Flinders Ranges behind
and traveling 10 hours south
to spend the night
in a commercial pine forest.
This plantation is rumoured to be
the home of a fascinating,
otherworldly mushroom.
We're going ghost hunting.
We're surprised to see lots of native
fungi here, but tonight we're really only
interested in one species,
the ghost mushroom,
because it glows in the dark.
There are over a hundred
known species of bioluminescent
fungi in the world.
This is the subtropical species
we find at home,
Mycena chlorophos,
and it has been a charismatic character
in many of our time-lapses.
Bioluminescent mushrooms
produce their own light.
The main compound is Luciferin,
which literally means
the light bearer.
Why do they glow?
Well, the main theory is to attract
insects that get covered in spores
and then scatter them wherever they go.
But in our fungarium,
we've noticed that it's slugs
and snails that love to eat
Mycena chlorophos
and then spread the spores
in their slimy poo.
Tonight in Ghost Mushroom Lane
our challenge is to find and time-lapse
the local bioluminescent
fungus Omphalotus nidiformis.
There's one
and wow, there's another one.
What a beauty.
This is a gorgeous specimen,
but to time-lapse in the field is going
to be tricky.
The moon is nearly full,
which is not ideal conditions,
far too much light, and
we only have one night to do it in.
The plan is to take a shot
every 30 seconds.
So if we hang here for
around three hours,
that gives us 15 seconds of time-lapse,
hopefully just enough to give us a sense
its ghostly beauty.
Before we leave South Australia
we have one more stop
the Botanic Gardens in Adelaide.
Dr. Teresa Lebel is the senior botanist
and mycologist at the State Herbarium.
Remember that mystery blue mushroom?
Well, for the past ten years,
Teresa has been the lead detective
trying to solve
the puzzle of it's family tree.
Teresa had been researching similar
truffle-like mushrooms.
The first possible relatives were blue,
red and green pouch mushrooms.
I first got to see this particular
mushroom in the field in New Caledonia.
There was a blue and a blue green
and a red version of it,
and I wasn't certain
if they were all the same species or
if we were dealing
with three completely different things.
I then managed
to do some microscopy on them
and it seemed to me
that the red one was definitely different.
But the two blue greens,
I was still uncertain as to
how different they really were.
And then I did some very preliminary
DNA work,
and I didn't believe the results
that I got back because they said
they were completely different families,
that these two things belong to.
So back to the drawing board.
I wasn't certain that
these were the same thing or not.
So I had done trips to New Zealand
and I knew there was some fungi
there that had very similar features
to the New Caledonian ones.
When I did the microscopy, they turned out
to be completely different things
and did not appear to be even remotely
related to the New Caledonian ones.
I then went back to the herbarium
collections and started digging
through all of the undescribed material
that might possibly be one of these fungi.
And then there was one collection
from Lord Howe Island,
and it was a single fruit body,
not in great condition.
I did the microscopy and it
matched the New South Wales one.
The next step was to sequence
the DNA of all the suspects.
This time the results were conclusive.
One of Teresa's specimens
from New Caledonia, the specimen
from our forests in New South Wales,
and the specimen from Lord Howe Island,
are not only the same species, but
they are a new species.
It took ten years,
but this mushroom now has a family
and its species is
Coprinopsis pulchricaerulea
which means beautiful blue.
It even has a nickname
Frosty Blue.
What the DNA doesn't tell us
is how this fungus interacts
with other organisms.
How important is it?
And why has it only been found
in three places on the planet?
Maybe there are answers on
Lord Howe Island.
We cant resist.
We head east to see if we can find
frosty blue on this
remnant of an ocean volcano.
Lord Howe Island is spectacular.
It was World Heritage listed back in 1982
to honour its incredible biodiversity
and to protect rare species of plants
and animals
that only exist on this island.
Most of Lord Howe is a nature reserve
surrounded by a marine park.
It's probably Australia's last
unspoiled island paradise.
And it's one of the safest spots
we've been to.
The only place in Australia without
snakes, poisonous spiders,
dangerous sharks or crocodiles.
But hunting down a rare mushroom
in a forest we don't know,
well, we're prepared to fail.
I don't believe it.
It's the blues.
We came here looking for them,
but I never really expected to find them.
Theyre beauties arent they?
You can see
two beautiful mushrooms here.
There's more back here.
Oh, there's three of them?
Blue, green.
And another one over here.
This one has been eaten by something.
Perhaps a bird, but hard to tell. It could
have been a slug or a snail, in fact.
It's very unusual
to find six of these blues together
and such beautiful specimens as well.
When we share our frosty blue discovery
with some of the locals,
they tell us we have to speak to
Lord Howe's resident naturalist.
Ian Hutton is a botanist
who has been exploring and documenting
the Island's natural history
since he was a young man.
Well, I was working for the weather bureau
and I took a science degree in biology,
and I thought before I leave the weather
bureau, I thought maybe I should go
to one of their really nice,
exotic postings just for two years.
And Lord Howe Island came up
and I thought, Well, that's it.
I'll do two years at Lord Howe Island,
then I'll go and work in some
botanic gardens around Australia.
So, I came in 1980 and well
I'm still here after 42 years.
After about a year, I got really
interested in the nature of the island.
And of course while I'm out in the forest
Im looking at everything there
and there would be these fungi.
And the two that stand out here
that are quite bright
and you can't miss
them are the pink one we have,
and also this blue one.
Hang on.
Did Ian just say two mushrooms?
A pink one and the blue.
The two that stand out here
that are quite bright
and you can't miss them,
are the pink one we have,
and also this blue one.
He did say there was a pink mushroom
and he offers to show it to us.
Now, here's this pink one
I saw the other day
just under this bit of palm frond here.
Theyre some really nice specimens.
It's really, really bright, isnt it?
Theyre beautiful.
Other than the striking neon pink colour,
this mushroom looks identical
to the blue one.
Great specimens.
Yeah. Theyre beautiful arent they?
The pink one is very common
in this lowland forest,
and I tend to think
it likes the sandy soil.
And you tend to find the pink one
growing on dead palm fronds or
dead banyan and other timber
that's been on the ground for a while.
And yeah, after some rain,
it just pops up everywhere.
Beautiful little things.
And it has only ever been
recorded on Lord Howe Island.
We seem to have stumbled upon
a mushroom that is even more rare,
and we think a very close relative
to Frosty Blue.
With the permission of the Lord
Howe Island Board,
we photograph and collect specimens
to send to Dr. Teresa Lebel in Adelaide
for her to compare the DNA.
Hide self-view.
Okay, I've gotten some results back
and a nice little
twist to the story yet again.
And what is that?
The DNA is actually saying
it's exactly the same species.
So the colour might be just incidental.
Yeah, the pink colour
or the blue colour is a very,
very small change in the DNA sequence
for it to change colour.
So the Lord Howe Island pink mushroom
is also a Coprinopsis pulchricaerulea,
variety pink.
Why the colour change?
Well, it could be the soil type
or it could be to attract
different animals to spread the spores.
But at this stage, we're just guessing.
We have such a low,
or little understanding
of what so many of these fungi are doing
in the environment between the plants,
the insects, the fungi.
So much more to understand
and so many more things
to investigate
and so few mycologists to do it.
So we really, really need the help,
particularly of the citizen scientists
and the people in their local patch
going out and observing and
and finding some of these unique things.
People often ask us why we are so obsessed
with documenting the world of fungi.
Oh wow.
That came up quickly.
What's not to love?
The thrill
that comes with a beautiful find.
Or, observing the unexpected.
Losing ourselves for hours
in the minutiae of life,
its good for the soul.
But I think our biggest motivator
is that it gives us hope.
We've realised these exquisite,
delicate mushrooms are a window
into a neglected and essential piece
in the vast jigsaw of life.
We are in awe of these organisms
that make plants resilient,
sequester carbon,
provide food for animals,
break down rocks, create soil,
even make rain.
Wow. What an amazing display of Hypholoma.
I've got to get a photograph of them.
In discovering where they fit
in the jigsaw, we learn that three huge
kingdoms of life plants, animals and fungi
are interconnected.
And often it's the fungi
that holds it all together.
We humans are just one organism
in this epic story,
and yet we have the means and the power
to destroy it all.
And at the moment we're doing
a pretty good job of that.
The places we take you as
we follow the rain
are just tiny remnants of wilderness.
Every year more and more of these
living museums are bulldozed
and torn apart.
Yet we cannot survive on this planet
without them.
Just imagine if we can conserve
the biodiversity of fungi,
we may be able to conserve all of this,
the biodiversity
that is critical to life as we know it
and to our own survival.
Oh, look what we've got here.
It was a chance encounter in the forest
with a stunning mushroom,
that was the start of my passion
for photographing fungi.
Arent they beautiful?
I think I sensed that these small
organisms were something very special,
and I began documenting as many mushrooms
as I could find.
Aha, I know what this is.
What have you got?
It's an Aseroe rubra.
It's a creative journey
shared with my life partner, Catherine.
Together we capture the beauty of
mushrooms in photos and in video.
And using time-lapse techniques,
we observe
how the mushrooms grow, their life
and their death.
Every day we learn something new
about these intriguing organisms.
And every day, observing them raises
more and more questions
Like, why do mushrooms come in
such a variety
of shapes and sizes and colors?
Why are some so transitory?
He one day and gone the next?
What we do know,
is for mushrooms to show themselves
they need water.
So to unearth their secrets
we follow in the path of the rain.
Our mission
is to find out how fungi fit
into the world of living things.
There is something magical
about the rain.
I can feel the forest drinking it up,
setting the stage for birth
and new life.
It's the wet season for this endangered
subtropical rainforest.
This is our local forest
and very precious to us.
Over the past 200 years,
European settlers have cleared
all but 1% of this rainforest.
They called it the big scrub.
Such a dismissive name
for this wonderfully biodiverse
and beautiful forest.
But it's not an easy place to be
a fungi hunter.
There are aggressive plants
like giant stinging trees
covered with tiny hairs that can inflict
excruciating pain for months.
And they're a wait-a-while vines,
that hook into
the body with barbed snares.
All you can do is stop, wait a while
and carefully disentangle.
There are paralysis ticks,
and of course, bloodsucking leeches.
Look what we got here.
Searching for a spot to attach himself.
But we keep coming back because the fungi
in this forest are so magnificent.
And many species are new to science.
For centuries, humans
have been researching and naming
the life that surrounds us.
But we soon learned that very little
in the world of fungi has been studied.
Fungi are not plants
and they're not animals.
They make up a whole kingdom of life.
Millions of species
that have been neglected.
Now this one's got some potential.
Looking at it from above,
it's just orange.
But wow, look at it underneath.
It's estimated that there could be
anywhere between
two million and eleven million
species of fungi on this planet.
There's a beautiful young goblet.
But so far, scientists
have only described a mere 150,000.
What's that?
That looks like a phallus.
That's partly because the window
into the fungal world has traditionally
been mushrooms, which only appear
when the conditions are right.
Now, this is a stinkhorn.
It's the sort of mushroom that you're
more likely to smell before you see it.
As you can see, the flies love it.
Now, the way this mushroom spreads
its spores
is by attracting flies with the smell.
It keeps its spores in this slime.
The flies will eat the slime or paddle
in it and get it all over their feet
and then fly away and spread the spores
so the mushrooms will come up
somewhere else.
A wonderful mushroom.
Most of the mushrooms
we find in this forest
grow on wood when it is very wet
and very humid.
But the mushrooms are just the
reproductive structures of a fungus.
A bit like apples on a tree.
Mushrooms grow from mycelium, a structure
made up of millions of connected threads.
Look at all this beautiful mycelium.
When we eat, we put our food inside us.
But when this fungus eats,
it puts itself inside the food.
And as it consumes
fallen logs and leaves become soil
full of nutrients for the plants.
These are what we call
saprotrophic fungi.
They are both
undertakers and regenerators.
We humans have a fear of death
and see it as an end.
But I like to think that these fungi
teach us that death is just part
of the process of creating new life.
Catherine and I have been restoring the
big scrub forest here on our property.
It's become a bit of a sanctuary
for wildlife and for fungi.
Oh, look at all these.
Theres really quite a variety
of mushrooms here.
There's Dacrymyces spathularia.
You can see it's sort of shaped
a bit like a spatula.
And this Auricularia here.
Auricularia delicata.
Oh, and these are
Phillipsia subpurpurea.
One of my favorites.
What's this?
Oh, really nice mycelium too.
Saprotrophic fungi are also the perfect
actors for our time-lapse videos.
Welcome to the
Planet Fungi studio.
Catherine and I call it our fungariam.
But really, it's just
a shipping container.
Hopefully that will work.
This is where
we capture the surprises
that only speeding up
time can reveal.
We see how a tiny lump
in the mycelium
inflates with water
to form a mushroom.
And we witness mushrooms
spin as they grow.
Some mushrooms wave to us.
Others have the power of resurrection.
Many mushrooms
grow like humans, babies that expand
into more mature forms of themselves.
While other mushrooms shape shift
into a completely new structure.
What you are watching
are thousands of still photos
taken sometimes over a few days,
sometimes over months.
One of my favorite forest recyclers
is a very rare blue fungus
that I found in these forests
14 years ago.
It was the first fungal discovery
that Catherine and I filmed together.
Now whats this?
Very peculiar.
It could be fruit I suppose.
But its blue.
Its mushrooms.
It's just growing on a
what looks like a seed pod
from one of the rainforest trees.
And his, just like any other
mushroom is, got a nice stem,
but more like a
more like a truffle
than conventional fungi.
Because it grows,
you can see theyre all
over the place here and they grow
very close to the ground.
Theyre hidden in behind
bits of leaf litter.
The cap never seems
to open up on them.
I've never seen anything
like this at all.
I dont know what to make of it really.
Photographing this mushroom
in all its weird and wonderful forms
has become an obsession.
And of course, I couldn't resist
trying to time-lapse it.
I went on the hunt
to find out what this mushroom is called,
but I couldn't find anything
remotely like it.
That's when I sent a specimen to the
Royal Botanic Gardens Victoria
and mycologist Dr. Tom May,
who like me, was intrigued.
When I saw that blue incredible mushroom,
I just knew
it was something really special.
It doesn't come along every day
that you see something as spectacular
as that that's so new.
And then it throws up all these questions
Blue, it's such an unusual colour for
fungi for a start,
there are very few blue fungi.
And this was enclosed,
the lamellae, that's the gills inside,
were all scrunched up and a little stubby
stem, stipe at the bottom.
And then it was this amazing blue color.
So a lot of things about it
that were really weird
and they were growing on wood.
And that's another really unusual thing
about it.
A lot of these truffle
like fungi, these enclosed fungi,
they're growing underground.
This was actually
sitting up, growing on wood.
When you see a new mushroom
or a mushroom that's new to you,
well, maybe it's been collected
and described before,
but it might be buried away
in some old literature.
Maybe it's never been seen
by a mycologist before.
So that's when a lot of
the detective work starts.
So I knew in New Caledonia there
were a few of these strange fungi.
I thought that it might be
in this genus Leratiomyces.
So I had a look at the spores
under a microscope.
And they were smooth,
and that fit with the Leratiomyces,
so sort of suggesting that.
But that's just the first step
in really putting a whole lot of different
bits of the jigsaw together.
So the next step after having a
look at the spores under a microscope
is to do DNA sequencing.
The DNA sequences really help to position
things in the Tree of Life.
To untangle the family
tree of this unusual mushroom
was to take another ten years
with many dead ends and strange relatives.
We'll come back to that story later.
It's autumn on the Tasmanian West Coast
where misty mountains
and swollen wild rivers herald
the start of the fungi season.
It's a bit mad being in the
forest at this time of year.
It is often near freezing
and torrential rain can drench us
and our equipment at any moment.
But the rewards are worth
far more than the ordeals.
This wild and remote forest
is at its most splendid after the rain.
Trees dripping in plump lichen.
Their roots wrapped in
slippers of lush moss
and mushroom treasures are everywhere.
It is a mycological mecca for fungi lovers
and not just the human kind.
This is something I've never seen before.
It's wombat poo with this beautiful
little crop of mushrooms growing on it.
One of the fungiphiles who has
followed the rain
to Tasmania this year,
is mycologist Dr Camille Truong.
She's unearthing the story of the
ectomycorrhizal fungi
that create partnerships
with trees in this forest.
Beautiful Psatyloma.
I'm studying the fungi
that associate with Nothofagus forest.
So it's not only documenting the diversity
but also understanding
what they really do for the trees.
Here is a mushroom.
A lot of mushrooms.
Yeah, lots of mushrooms.
So if we dig below these mushrooms,
we find the mycelium
that is everywhere in the soil.
And from time to time, it's
making these mushrooms.
This is a great example
of seeing the connection
between the fungus and the roots,
because you have here the mushroom
and you can see that
the mycelium is attached
to the roots at these little
which is called the mycorrhizal root tip.
Yeah, this little whitish tip.
This is actually the point
where the fungus
enter in contact with the root.
So the fungus is going
to go foraging
for this nutrient inside the soil.
That's why the mycelium
extends in the soil
many, many meters away.
And then it brings back all these
nutrients from the soil to the tree.
Okay.
And it's, it's not for free.
So it's going to exchange
the nutrients against sugar.
So if you dont bring any nutrients,
you don't get any sugar.
No, that's it.
And that's why there are many species
of fungus associating with this tree.
And so the one that gives them
more nutrients,
will receive more sugar.
Every tree can associate
with thousands of species of fungi.
Some of them do better in certain
time of the year.
Some of them are going to do better,
for example, after disturbance,
if you have a drought or even fire.
So by associating
with this diversity of mushrooms,
a single tree can cope
with different conditions.
So they are very important
for what we call forest resilience,
which means how the forest
can adapt to changes.
So this forest,
they are actually very poor in nutrients,
but thanks to these fungi,
the forest, the tree can grow.
And we think that without this fungi
there would not be any forests, actually,
because the trees that they are not able
to get their nutrients by themselves.
So if we had none of these little guys
wed have none of these big guys.
No forest without mushrooms.
No mushrooms, no forests.
Exactly.
Listening to Camille, it strikes me
that studying the fungi of these
precious old growth forests is an
opportunity to understand
both the fragility and the resilience
of the natural world.
We've known for a long time
that plants absorb and store
carbon dioxide from the atmosphere
and that without that cycle
we could not breathe.
But what we are learning now
is that they do this much faster.
Wow.
When there is mycorrhizal fungi present.
That Cortinarius is purple, isnt it?
In every handful of soil in this forest
there could be over 100 kilometers
of fungal threads
and that biomass also stores
vast amounts of carbon.
So when we cut down forests,
we not only destroy the trees,
but we also kill off
the fungi and short circuit
this ancient life support system.
We are only just starting
to realise that forests
and their fungi are incredibly important
in the fight against climate change.
A photographic goal of mine
is to capture a time-lapse
of one of the most iconic
Tasmanian mushrooms.
Ooh, what have we got here?
It's called the pixie's parasol,
or Mycena interrupter.
Arent they beautiful?
I just love them because the blue,
the way it fades to white
at the outer stem.
And underneath you get this
pale blue shining through.
This is where the magic happens.
Our assistant in the time-lapse
mission is an exceptional human,
Pat Harrison, a retired obstetrician.
Its all in here, Pat.
Shes donated her garage
to set up a temporary studio.
I have to get this in a little bit closer.
How long do you think
you might need it on for?
It's going to depend on the temperature,
but I guess
three or four or five days
somewhere around like that.
Thats better.
Weve got one that's already grown,
but then all the little buds
are going to come up
and we'll have a good time-lapse.
At 85 years old, Pat inspires us with her
insatiable curiosity
for nature and for fungi.
When I retired from my work in Melbourne,
I went to every adult education course
that I could and one was fungi.
We went to a forest and I just couldn't
believe my eyes when I saw
all the fungi that was there.
And of course we all fall in love
with the Mycena interrupta.
And I thought to myself,
this is where I can spend
the rest of my life
out in the fresh air,
finding these fabulous fungi.
When I first started fungi hunting,
I bought a GPS and I thought, I'm right.
But I didn't realise that GPS
didn't show up under the canopy
of the trees and I got lost.
So I spent all night
out in the forest in July.
It was raining, thank goodness,
because the next few nights
was very, very frosty.
Ever since then I have permission
to have my dog
to lead me back to the car.
And I just want to do it
for as long as I possibly can
because I enjoy it so much.
No fungi adventure in Tasmania
is complete without a pilgrimage
to the enchanted
rainforests of the Tarkine.
Here it feels like time has slowed down.
Trees can live for thousands of years.
Logs often take centuries to decompose.
Evolution has nurtured
one of the most biodiverse
and unique places on the planet,
and I have met some of my favorite
fungal characters in these forests.
There are mushrooms everywhere here.
There at my feet
growing in the trees
and they come in all colours,
shapes and sizes.
Like this one, a red Hygrocybe.
Now this is also a great location
to show you my latest obsession,
which is with the a UV light.
These are Ganodermas. As you can see,
theyre creamy white underneath,
except if you shine a UV
light on them, pinks and blues
in the rainforest, there's quite a few
fungi that do fluoresce.
Russulas fluoresce.
Entolomas fluoresce.
And of course the Ganodermas fluoresce.
There's been a great deal of interest
in biofluorescence since we discovered
that some of our cutest
Australian creatures
put on a light show at night.
Does the chemistry that turns
this invisible light
into a sparkling array of colours
help these organisms hunt?
Or is it an ancient form of camouflage?
Or could it be the opposite
a way to recognize
one of your own kind?
It's a mystery still to be unraveled.
But in the meantime, I'm loving the
discovery of shining a light
on the UV world of mushrooms.
It's been six days since we pressed
start on a Pixies parasol time-lapse.
Hopefully all has gone to plan.
The moment of truth.
Wow, 4,350 frames
and looking really promising.
Next we're going zombie hunting.
Our destination is a valley
in the shadow of a mountain
that was once part of an ancient volcano.
This spectacular peak attracts
dramatic weather,
inspiring its Bundjalung name Wollumbin,
which means cloud catcher.
Our zombie hunting guide
is Donovan Teal a fungi enthusiast
we met in our network on the internet.
Donovan was posting
very creepy photos.
Thousands of tiny insects
being killed and consumed
by equally tiny fungi.
A miniature battleground
on the underside of leaves.
He made many of his discoveries,
clearing weeds like these small
camphor laurel trees,
which in this part of the world
can be very destructive
as they aggressively compete
with native vegetation.
This is a good one.
So you just find them on the
underside of the leaves here, do you?
Yes, it's quite protected for them
on the underside of the leaf.
So you get a beautiful sort of change
in temperature
and look at that.
Some of them are particularly obvious.
I mean, theres a nice bright
yellow on that one.
When you do get a nice bright one
like that, they just pop.
Yeah.
It's really, really small on this camera.
But I'll show you in greater detail later
or not get a more powerful lens on it.
And, hopefully Ill get some
really beautiful photographs.
Got a great little jumping spider here.
You can see the fungus
has completely covered the soft tissue
and left some of the harder
bony parts of its face exposed.
How did you know
to look under leaves of trees?
What started you doing that?
I love spiders, so I was out
looking for all the spiders in the
so many different spiders
here right, and I
I found this beautiful spider
and I was like, wait a minute,
this things got like 12 legs.
And it was only when I posted it
to Facebook to a spider ID group
that someone was like,
yeah, that's that's a spider
that's actually been taken over
by one of these zombie fungus.
And and then I realized that I, you know,
I had to look out for things other than
what I was expecting to see.
These specimens are so small,
they're hard to see with the naked eye.
I think this one was my favorite.
It's has all, like, octopus tentacles.
Little bit larger
than the other ones, too.
Oh, wow.
Theres spikes everywhere.
Even with a magnifying glass,
it is difficult to see exactly
what is happening.
I wonder what it was.
But with high resolution photography
and intense magnification,
all is revealed.
This is the stuff of nightmares
or an example of the
magnificence of nature.
A fungus infects an insect.
It infiltrates the body,
slowly digesting it from within.
Once the mycelium has taken over the body,
it's time to reproduce.
That's when these fungi
become even more bizarre.
Surreal structures start to grow,
releasing billions of spores.
Throughout this process, the insect
is secured to the bottom of the leaf,
with hundreds of gossamer, thin fungal
threads holding the prey in place.
It reminds me of the scene in the book
Gulliver's Travels with Gulliver,
pinned to the ground
by the miniature army of Lilliput.
I love finding these little guys.
It is it is really like
like fossicking for gold, right?
Like not from this world.
Now, you might be wondering what is the
relevance of this microscopic struggle?
Donovan had the same question
and did something very clever.
He boxed up his specimens
and sent them to my mycologist,
Professor Roger Shivas.
Roger specialises in the health of crops,
the organisms that attack them
and potential biological controls.
Donovan is sending us specimens
of entomopathogenic fungi,
fungi on insects.
There's been some interest
in these fungi
as biological control
agents for insect pests.
But what Donovan's finding
essentially
native fungi on native insects
and are basically new to science.
I'm a taxonomist and that means
I identify Donovan's specimens
and it's impossible
to identify most of them.
We don't have names for them.
So the old method, traditional
method of taxonomy was to collect
something, kill it, dry it,
press it, store it and describe it
and what it looked like,
which doesn't really tell you what it is,
because things that look the same,
for example, everything that flies
is not a bird, it might be an insect,
it might be a mammal.
So we need to look at the DNA.
So what our group started to do now
is we've decided to base the taxonomy
totally on DNA.
It's the only reliable method.
But more than that, we're preserving
and keeping these cultures
as living specimens,
which we can make available to science.
There's a seed bank in Europe
for plant species.
What we want to do
is a fungal bank for fungal species.
So one of the interesting fungi
that Donovan found was a small Penicillium
species in this same genus from which
the antibiotic Penicillin is produced.
So were going to name this fungus
that Donovan's found Penicillium tealii
after Donovan, in recognition
of all his efforts in discovering it.
Because Donovan
is the discoverer of this fungus.
Oh, I got a good one for you.
Oh wheres that?
Look at that. We got an ant.
Oh, wow.
You can see the fruiting body
coming out of the top.
It's exciting for me
because I'm just a citizen scientist
out there having a look, taking photos
and sort of passing this stuff
onto the experts and then just
feeding off their knowledge.
It's every day something new.
You've opened up a whole new world for me.
I mean, I never realized that
this miniature world of Cordyceps existed
underneath leaves in
such profusion as well.
Clive from the Bureau with your weekly
weather update f
or Sunday the 12th of June.
Cold front in the southwest wind, rain
for the far southern, South Australia.
As a winter blast of the ice
cold air moves across Australia,
we start hearing forecasts of heavy
rain heading for the desert.
To follow this rain means
a 2,000 kilometer trek
towards the centre of Australia.
That's like driving from London to Rome.
There are not too many places
I've driven where a GPS says
that the road and the river
are in the same spot.
But that's because this riverbed
is usually dry.
The Flinders Ranges are a place
of extreme weather.
Droughts and intense summer
heatwaves are regular events
and then when it does rain
it can transform this landscape,
triggering the desert to bloom.
Oh, that's pretty.
When I was a young man,
I worked in the mines
and I still have a fascination
with the story of rocks.
And the Flinders Ranges are full of rocks.
The ancestors of these crumbling hills
were once mountains,
some 5,000 meters higher than today.
And these fossilized ripples
are a window into a time
when this baked valley was a shallow sea.
So you may be wondering why
a couple of fungi hunters
would come to such a harsh land.
Surely there can be no fungi here.
But the truth is that few
desert plants would survive
without their fungal partners.
These are Boletes.
Now these mushrooms, don't have gills.
They have little round pores
like foam rubber.
The spores are contained
within the little pores.
Wow. Look at all this mycelium.
As the land soaks up the recent showers,
the underground network of life
seizes the moment for renewal and rebirth.
What have you got there, Steve?
Ive got a beautiful little puffball.
Right there.
Both the decomposers
and the mycorrhizal fungi,
send forth their mushrooms,
reproductive bodies
housing billions of spores.
What have we got here?
That couldn't be, could it?
This is the desert shaggy mane.
It is.
Or, Podaxis pistillaris,
a classic desert mushroom,
found all over the world.
There's another one. Its another two.
And there are a couple of beauties.
The hard wide pod
like structure is thought
to protect the spores
developing inside.
Theres masses of spores inside.
It dries out in the desert heat,
becomes brittle,
and as it peels away, a powdery
mass of spores is exposed,
ready to be dispersed
by the nudge of a passing animal
or a puff of air.
tapped between the flutes of the gills.
The spores attract moisture,
water droplets form
catapulting millions of tiny spores
into the air.
We have only recently understood
how these trillions of tiny particles
created by fungi are an essential part
of the global climate story.
Along with dust and pollen and pollution,
they become scaffolding for
water droplets to form.
They are nature's cloud seeders,
helping to create the rain
so critical to life on our planet
and to us.
Today, were leaving the majesty
of the Flinders Ranges behind
and traveling 10 hours south
to spend the night
in a commercial pine forest.
This plantation is rumoured to be
the home of a fascinating,
otherworldly mushroom.
We're going ghost hunting.
We're surprised to see lots of native
fungi here, but tonight we're really only
interested in one species,
the ghost mushroom,
because it glows in the dark.
There are over a hundred
known species of bioluminescent
fungi in the world.
This is the subtropical species
we find at home,
Mycena chlorophos,
and it has been a charismatic character
in many of our time-lapses.
Bioluminescent mushrooms
produce their own light.
The main compound is Luciferin,
which literally means
the light bearer.
Why do they glow?
Well, the main theory is to attract
insects that get covered in spores
and then scatter them wherever they go.
But in our fungarium,
we've noticed that it's slugs
and snails that love to eat
Mycena chlorophos
and then spread the spores
in their slimy poo.
Tonight in Ghost Mushroom Lane
our challenge is to find and time-lapse
the local bioluminescent
fungus Omphalotus nidiformis.
There's one
and wow, there's another one.
What a beauty.
This is a gorgeous specimen,
but to time-lapse in the field is going
to be tricky.
The moon is nearly full,
which is not ideal conditions,
far too much light, and
we only have one night to do it in.
The plan is to take a shot
every 30 seconds.
So if we hang here for
around three hours,
that gives us 15 seconds of time-lapse,
hopefully just enough to give us a sense
its ghostly beauty.
Before we leave South Australia
we have one more stop
the Botanic Gardens in Adelaide.
Dr. Teresa Lebel is the senior botanist
and mycologist at the State Herbarium.
Remember that mystery blue mushroom?
Well, for the past ten years,
Teresa has been the lead detective
trying to solve
the puzzle of it's family tree.
Teresa had been researching similar
truffle-like mushrooms.
The first possible relatives were blue,
red and green pouch mushrooms.
I first got to see this particular
mushroom in the field in New Caledonia.
There was a blue and a blue green
and a red version of it,
and I wasn't certain
if they were all the same species or
if we were dealing
with three completely different things.
I then managed
to do some microscopy on them
and it seemed to me
that the red one was definitely different.
But the two blue greens,
I was still uncertain as to
how different they really were.
And then I did some very preliminary
DNA work,
and I didn't believe the results
that I got back because they said
they were completely different families,
that these two things belong to.
So back to the drawing board.
I wasn't certain that
these were the same thing or not.
So I had done trips to New Zealand
and I knew there was some fungi
there that had very similar features
to the New Caledonian ones.
When I did the microscopy, they turned out
to be completely different things
and did not appear to be even remotely
related to the New Caledonian ones.
I then went back to the herbarium
collections and started digging
through all of the undescribed material
that might possibly be one of these fungi.
And then there was one collection
from Lord Howe Island,
and it was a single fruit body,
not in great condition.
I did the microscopy and it
matched the New South Wales one.
The next step was to sequence
the DNA of all the suspects.
This time the results were conclusive.
One of Teresa's specimens
from New Caledonia, the specimen
from our forests in New South Wales,
and the specimen from Lord Howe Island,
are not only the same species, but
they are a new species.
It took ten years,
but this mushroom now has a family
and its species is
Coprinopsis pulchricaerulea
which means beautiful blue.
It even has a nickname
Frosty Blue.
What the DNA doesn't tell us
is how this fungus interacts
with other organisms.
How important is it?
And why has it only been found
in three places on the planet?
Maybe there are answers on
Lord Howe Island.
We cant resist.
We head east to see if we can find
frosty blue on this
remnant of an ocean volcano.
Lord Howe Island is spectacular.
It was World Heritage listed back in 1982
to honour its incredible biodiversity
and to protect rare species of plants
and animals
that only exist on this island.
Most of Lord Howe is a nature reserve
surrounded by a marine park.
It's probably Australia's last
unspoiled island paradise.
And it's one of the safest spots
we've been to.
The only place in Australia without
snakes, poisonous spiders,
dangerous sharks or crocodiles.
But hunting down a rare mushroom
in a forest we don't know,
well, we're prepared to fail.
I don't believe it.
It's the blues.
We came here looking for them,
but I never really expected to find them.
Theyre beauties arent they?
You can see
two beautiful mushrooms here.
There's more back here.
Oh, there's three of them?
Blue, green.
And another one over here.
This one has been eaten by something.
Perhaps a bird, but hard to tell. It could
have been a slug or a snail, in fact.
It's very unusual
to find six of these blues together
and such beautiful specimens as well.
When we share our frosty blue discovery
with some of the locals,
they tell us we have to speak to
Lord Howe's resident naturalist.
Ian Hutton is a botanist
who has been exploring and documenting
the Island's natural history
since he was a young man.
Well, I was working for the weather bureau
and I took a science degree in biology,
and I thought before I leave the weather
bureau, I thought maybe I should go
to one of their really nice,
exotic postings just for two years.
And Lord Howe Island came up
and I thought, Well, that's it.
I'll do two years at Lord Howe Island,
then I'll go and work in some
botanic gardens around Australia.
So, I came in 1980 and well
I'm still here after 42 years.
After about a year, I got really
interested in the nature of the island.
And of course while I'm out in the forest
Im looking at everything there
and there would be these fungi.
And the two that stand out here
that are quite bright
and you can't miss
them are the pink one we have,
and also this blue one.
Hang on.
Did Ian just say two mushrooms?
A pink one and the blue.
The two that stand out here
that are quite bright
and you can't miss them,
are the pink one we have,
and also this blue one.
He did say there was a pink mushroom
and he offers to show it to us.
Now, here's this pink one
I saw the other day
just under this bit of palm frond here.
Theyre some really nice specimens.
It's really, really bright, isnt it?
Theyre beautiful.
Other than the striking neon pink colour,
this mushroom looks identical
to the blue one.
Great specimens.
Yeah. Theyre beautiful arent they?
The pink one is very common
in this lowland forest,
and I tend to think
it likes the sandy soil.
And you tend to find the pink one
growing on dead palm fronds or
dead banyan and other timber
that's been on the ground for a while.
And yeah, after some rain,
it just pops up everywhere.
Beautiful little things.
And it has only ever been
recorded on Lord Howe Island.
We seem to have stumbled upon
a mushroom that is even more rare,
and we think a very close relative
to Frosty Blue.
With the permission of the Lord
Howe Island Board,
we photograph and collect specimens
to send to Dr. Teresa Lebel in Adelaide
for her to compare the DNA.
Hide self-view.
Okay, I've gotten some results back
and a nice little
twist to the story yet again.
And what is that?
The DNA is actually saying
it's exactly the same species.
So the colour might be just incidental.
Yeah, the pink colour
or the blue colour is a very,
very small change in the DNA sequence
for it to change colour.
So the Lord Howe Island pink mushroom
is also a Coprinopsis pulchricaerulea,
variety pink.
Why the colour change?
Well, it could be the soil type
or it could be to attract
different animals to spread the spores.
But at this stage, we're just guessing.
We have such a low,
or little understanding
of what so many of these fungi are doing
in the environment between the plants,
the insects, the fungi.
So much more to understand
and so many more things
to investigate
and so few mycologists to do it.
So we really, really need the help,
particularly of the citizen scientists
and the people in their local patch
going out and observing and
and finding some of these unique things.
People often ask us why we are so obsessed
with documenting the world of fungi.
Oh wow.
That came up quickly.
What's not to love?
The thrill
that comes with a beautiful find.
Or, observing the unexpected.
Losing ourselves for hours
in the minutiae of life,
its good for the soul.
But I think our biggest motivator
is that it gives us hope.
We've realised these exquisite,
delicate mushrooms are a window
into a neglected and essential piece
in the vast jigsaw of life.
We are in awe of these organisms
that make plants resilient,
sequester carbon,
provide food for animals,
break down rocks, create soil,
even make rain.
Wow. What an amazing display of Hypholoma.
I've got to get a photograph of them.
In discovering where they fit
in the jigsaw, we learn that three huge
kingdoms of life plants, animals and fungi
are interconnected.
And often it's the fungi
that holds it all together.
We humans are just one organism
in this epic story,
and yet we have the means and the power
to destroy it all.
And at the moment we're doing
a pretty good job of that.
The places we take you as
we follow the rain
are just tiny remnants of wilderness.
Every year more and more of these
living museums are bulldozed
and torn apart.
Yet we cannot survive on this planet
without them.
Just imagine if we can conserve
the biodiversity of fungi,
we may be able to conserve all of this,
the biodiversity
that is critical to life as we know it
and to our own survival.