SCOTT SIMON, HOST:
Death cap mushrooms were in the headlines this week after an Australian woman received a life sentence for fatally poisoning some of her family members with the toxic fungus. But recent research has revealed new and, frankly, intriguing information about the mushrooms. Anne Pringle is a mycologist at the University of Wisconsin in Madison. Thank you so much for being with us.
ANNE PRINGLE: My pleasure.
SIMON: You work with colleagues from Yale, Portugal, Germany. And I gather, in your research, you have discovered there are some toxins that maybe you'd missed before that they're creating.
PRINGLE: That's right. So the death cap is famous because it kills people. People can eat it because they mistake the mushroom for something that is edible. And so we've known for a very, very long time that the death cap is poisonous. But what exactly the full range of the poisons is in the species hasn't been known. So we used DNA sequence data, and we discovered that there are a lot more toxins in the death cap than anyone had previously suspected.
SIMON: Death caps are spreading?
PRINGLE: Yeah. When we think about conservation biology, we often think about the plants that we care about, or especially the animals that we care about. But most biodiversity on Earth isn't plant or animal. It belongs to other kingdoms, some of which we haven't even really defined very well. And the death cap - when I first started working with it, I'm not sure I cared too much that it was poisonous. It's intriguing because it's from one place, and it's spreading in another place. And invasive mushrooms are just something we don't know a lot about.
SIMON: It's spreading in California?
PRINGLE: Yeah. It's spreading particularly in California. Other places as well, but really a hot spot for where the death caps are is in Northern California, around the San Francisco Bay Area.
SIMON: Why? Do we know?
PRINGLE: Well, it must be something about having compatible trees that it can associate with, and it must be something about the requirements that it needs as an organism to grow. There's lots of ideas about why invasive species are invasive. That literature is really focused on plants and animals. Some of the same things might be true, but some of the same things might not be true. That's one of the reasons that toxins actually - ultimately, I find them so fascinating, is that the toxins may be somehow a key to how the death cap is spreading and is so abundant now in California. It's, in general, much more abundant in California than it is in its native habitats.
SIMON: And I have to ask - recognizing this is a family show and we have to be careful, how do death cap mushrooms reproduce?
PRINGLE: Well, the traditional, I suppose, way that a mushroom reproduces is that two bodies fuse. After those two bodies fuse, they grow for a while, for some amount of time, and then a mushroom is made out of that fused body. But in California, the death caps seem to be able to make mushrooms without fusing. In other words, an individual body can just make mushrooms by itself.
SIMON: I understand your fascination now. What do we learn about the biodiversity of our world by taking a look at death caps?
PRINGLE: I think the profound lesson that I walk away with is how much is changing that we aren't noticing. I often feel like my job is to bear witness to the changes that are happening in the world. And I do that through this really painstaking, careful study of one species, but it's just one species. And the same dynamics that we're watching with the death cap are likely playing out with a lot of other mushrooms, but there isn't anyone around who happens to be lucky enough to have the time and space to watch it happen.
SIMON: Anne Pringle, mycologist at the University of Wisconsin at Madison. Thanks so much for being with us.
PRINGLE: Thank you.
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