Passionate Mushroom Researcher Spends Decade Unravelling Mystery of 200-year-old Museum Specimen

August 27, 2024 journo

Scientist Tom May has been recognized internationally for his work with fungi – released to the media.

A passionate expert on fungi has spent a decade trying to discover the identity behind a preserved and mislabeled specimen in an Australian collection—all for the sake of science.

Despite being one of the 5 kingdoms of life along with animals, plants, and two kinds of microorganisms, mycology, or the study of fungi, is not only a niche field, but a shrinking one.

At the National Herbarium in Melbourne, Australia works Tom May, the institution’s principal research scientist in mycology.

He’s a man for his place and time, to quote The Big Lebowski, and has worked for decades studying and identifying various fungi for the sake of scientists to come—and none presented a greater challenge than a small sample of wood and fungus contained within a handmade blue envelope dating back over a century.

It was donated to the Herbarium by the Royal Botanic Gardens, Victoria, and inside Dr. May found some small shriveled mushroom samples bearing only an untraceable name.

Dr. May opened that blue packet a decade ago, and unraveling the mystery of the sample within required a masterclass in scientific sleuthing that took him all around Europe.

For all the time he spent sifting through what were probably inventory records, May’s closest encounter with the mushroom contained in the blue packet was a book by a German researcher published in Latin back in 1805.

The little blue packet and tiny specimen that piqued Dr. May’s interest – released to the media.

A team of German scientists wrote the Conspectus fungorum in Lusatiae superioris, in which he documented 1,000 samples of mushrooms and molds found in the border area between Germany and Poland. The blue packet contained the name Tremella saligna, and May believed it was one of around 300,000 specimens obtained by the then-Government Botanist of Victoria in 1883.

Finding out more was “sort of like putting bits together of a jigsaw”, Dr. May told ABC News Down Under.

Today, searching for species by taxonomy is an invaluable resource for scientists studying life on Earth. Regardless of the scientist’s spoken language, they can communicate with other scientists, read inventories and papers, and conduct research all in Latin, since taxonomy uses Latin exclusively.

Plants, birds, and especially fungi often take on numerous colloquial names by local cultures, causing confusion as groups of people in the same country and even the same language will give different nicknames to the same species.

A page from the book published more than 200 years ago. Dr. May’s sample appears as number 7 – released to the media.

Even though it bore a Latin name however, it was no straightforward thing for scientists so long ago to alert all of Europe that, for example, they had found a small tree-growing mushroom in Germany and officially named it.

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For that reason, May had to travel to the USA and Germany to confer with scientists about whether the specimen held in the Herbarium was the same as in the book. In Germany however, he found a handwritten list created by one of the book’s authors: Johannes Baptista von Albertini.

“We were thrilled to see that the handwritten names in Albertini’s list and on the specimens exactly matched,” Dr. May said.

Sure enough, the species had been catalogued even before Albertini’s 1805 publication as Propolis farinosa, which ABC News described as like having the same person listed in the phone book at two different addresses and numbers. Whoever logged it in the National Herbarium back in 1883 had taken the name from Albertini’s publication, one which mycology more broadly, had left behind.

The species has now been described, genetically mapped, and unified internationally as P. farinosa. Dr. May has also been recognized internationally, having just been inducted as a Fellow of the International Mycological Association Fellow for his outstanding contributions to mycology.

There are 150,000 species of described fungi, but there may be as many as 3.5 million out there yet to be discovered. Fungi, which contain both the lifeforms that produce mushrooms and molds, are thought to represent a pharmacological gold mine. Having already provided a little something called “penicillin” to medical science, fungi show strong natural anticancer effects as well.

Mycologists like Dr. May stress that the fungal kingdom is a key area to search for new medicines.

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