Episode 3: The Forest of Surprise

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.

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

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 picked up in a number of different venues in public press. And so it really has done that job as well of getting that word out that Chicago’s cool. The Chicago area is a great place biologically. Our founders, the people that developed Chicago did us a great service by setting aside these incredible natural areas that surround our great city.

Riddell: And that idea that in a place with as many people and as many eyes on the land as an area with eight million people in it, that there could be something new that nobody had ever noticed before.

Mueller: Right. I mean, people have this idea when they think of biodiversity, when they think of new species discovery, it’s always someplace else. It’s in the Amazon, it’s in Madagascar, there’s cool stuff right here.

Riddell: Do you have any way to compare how you might have viewed the world at this point in your life if you hadn’t been immersed in the world of science and scientists?

Mueller: I actually started out life even through my first two years in university as a music ed major.

Riddell: So you had another possibility out there.

Mueller: I had another possibility out there, but I realized that I was better at being a voyeur instead of a practitioner. I still am very keen in going to the music scene and going to jazz concerts and everything and enjoying that part of the world, which is definitely not science-based, where it really is beauty and aesthetics, but there’s still a logical connection that makes it work.

Riddell: That makes sense. Well, certainly a big connection between music and mathematics and perceiving patterns.

Mueller: I think pattern is important, but I also think when I’m giving a presentation or writing a scientific article, I’m always trying to think that it’s a story that we’re telling. So I’m using science to come up with the facts for the story, but I think to make it relevant, you’re a storyteller in the same way that any other kind of a storyteller would be. You have to have, okay, here’s some logical presentation on what’s there, why that works, and try to build up something that’s interesting about it.

Riddell: So really what I’m hearing from you is that this idea of story was present from a very early stage.

Mueller: There is so much we don’t know. One can go in so many different directions. Do we just want to count how many angels can dance on the head of a pin? Or are there things that we can do that has a little bit more relevance? Something that I could tell my mother and she may understand why I’m doing what I’m doing.

Riddell: So Greg, what role does creativity play in science?

Mueller: My first gig out of, after I got my PhD, I was a visiting scientist in Sweden at the University of Uppsala and I was working in a very famous professor’s lab. He was an experimental scientist and he talked about the difference between kind of American scientists and these European scientists because he said, “American scientists, of course we all have stereotypes but they go in and they just kind of try this and they try that and they try this and something eventually works.” And what he liked to do was sit down and really think about it and design this elegant experiment, run that experiment and get the results. And so that creativity of thinking first what the questions are and then how do you address that in elegant, not saying that I’ve been successful at this all the time, but that’s my goal, is try to figure out what’s the right model to use to test this question. How do you go about doing that in a way that works?

And I think that takes a lot of … That’s not science, that’s creativity, that’s, I think, where that comes in. And then you get the data and how do you interpret those data? But even more so is, okay, you have these data, what’s the next question? So I think one of the fun things about science is that you never really get all the answers. Each experiment gives you a new set of questions. And so the most effective, the really great scientists have figured their creativity is there to figure out what that next question is and they’re addressing that. So take the data, take the existing body of knowledge and do something cool with it.

Riddell: Yeah. One of the things that struck me when I worked on the chanterelle project with you was how even when we did the DNA work, there was an artisanal side to it. I mean, human beings were carrying that material around from the centrifuge to the freezer to the heater and human hands were involved in every stage of the DNA, including when we got our results. There was some level of interpretation where parts of the sequence didn’t align. Did you leave them out when you did your computation? Do you leave them in? Can you say a little bit about to what degree science still has a subjective side?

Mueller: First off, in the lab, there’s people that have great lab hands. I don’t know if you have green thumbs and I think they’re pipette thumbs or something for people in the lab. I mean, some people are just great. Everything works. So there is some artistry to make things work in the laboratory. There’s no doubt about that. But then when you get the results, some data you just analyze and here’s the data. But then the subjectivity comes in, what do those data mean? What’s the species? What’s a genius? That becomes totally subjective in some regards. What level of data does you as a scientist feel comfortable making these decisions? And that becomes either the gut or the creative impulse in that. And I think that’s how those decisions made.

Riddell: What I hear through this last little bit of our conversation is that it seems as though at least for a scientist in the natural sciences, you’ve got to bring your whole game. You’ve got to be able to do that kind of creative work to think of the elegant experiment. You have to have a curious mind in order to have come up with a hypothesis in the beginning that you want to test. You have to have the lab hands and be able to do the physical work or work with somebody who can do it for you, with you. And that in addition to knowing the language of math, being able to have the language to be able to tell the story, to be able to explain it to others, to see the way that it relates to other things in the world.

Mueller: I think that’s right. When I was a graduate student, the key thing was that you had this solo authored paper and all this … I don’t know anybody who publishes papers on their own now. There’s really very little. It’s all collaborative work and you’re looking at finding the right partnership. So part of the creativity, whoever that lab head of the group is, how do you manage these people? That’s unfortunately not science, that’s psychology and whatever, but it’s part of that process.

Riddell: Social science.

Mueller: Social science, yes.

Riddell: That myth of the soul practitioner shouting eureka is just totally phony.

Mueller: It’s not there anymore.

Riddell: Hasn’t it always been scientists in collaboration or at least in conversation with one another?

Mueller: Yes. There was always conversation and of course all work is always built on the standing on the shoulders of what came before. But I think there were a lot of people that pretty much worked alone, kind of kept their data to themselves because they wanted to have the breakthrough and that they were working on this and didn’t necessarily collaborate, not to the degree that we do now. So I was just on a call this afternoon for this proposal we have. We have somebody in Columbia, somebody in Denver scattered across that we’re all trying to work together and partially because we have the technology now to do that. We have Skype, we have ways to communicate that … Well, Darwin wrote letters constantly and was in conversation with people all over Europe and North America and whatever else. Just took a lot longer.

Riddell: From the fact that Greg Mueller was putting together an international proposal, you might discern that he isn’t just another mycologist. He is an amazing, even a famous mycologist, someone whom every other mycologist in the country knows the name of. And on top of that, at the Chicago Botanic Garden, Greg is the Vice President in charge of all of the garden’s science and conservation work, which is considerable. So Greg, what are the differences between thinking like a scientist and thinking like a leader of an organization? And do you find yourself code switching in the way that you talk to people or even in the way you think when you’re in a science mode versus when you’re in an administrator mode?

Mueller: I guess I start out the same … I mean, I hopefully start off the same way you’re trying to gather information. I think the big difference is what you do with the information. So if I’m in my science mode, I’m going to let the information drive my next steps. And hopefully, even though I started out with a hypothesis, I’m going to be able to moderate on that, change that, and go with the flow and allow that to happen. And the chips where they fall is where they fall, and then I can pick up and go the next step. When you’re working as an administrator, working with people, you can’t always do that. Hopefully, because there’s repercussions, you have to take into account how do people feel? What are the precedents that you’re going to set? There’s different consequences on how you use that information and the decisions you make than as a scientist.

Riddell: Sometimes leaders are expected to make decisions on the fly and to make a definitive action right away when there’s a crisis. Does being a scientist and having a tendency to wait until the data is in effect your decision making?

Mueller: At times, as when it took us two years to publish this one paper, I rarely have two years to make a decision as an administrator. And so yeah, you can’t wait for all … You try to capture as much data as you can and then think about it as rationally as one can, but oftentimes you’re just going to have to go with it. It can be uncomfortable sometimes making those decisions because you know that you’re making this where you may have a different decision if you had all the data, but you just can’t get it.

Riddell: So Greg, at this stage, do you feel more comfortable in the lab or do you feel more comfortable out in the forest?

Mueller: I will pick the forest any day of the week, any month of the year. Ah, yeah. No, I love the forest. I will admit, because of my administrative duties and whatever else, I don’t get in the lab too often. That’s what graduate students are for, or volunteers. But my escape from being an administrator is putting boots on, putting my favorite mushroom basket on my arm, and going out on the search for the wild mushroom.

Riddell: Thank you, Greg. Thank you so much for coming in.

Mueller: Oh, it was a pleasure. As always, it’s fun talking to you, whether it’s over a beer or across the microphone.

Riddell: I hope this conversation with Greg Mueller inspires you to design your own elegant experiment, to throw off an old way of looking at things and to discover something new, and make sure you free up an afternoon to step outside and go find something wild. Next week, the strange things that come alive in the night.

Speaker 3: The sun starts to set kind of all at once. The hawk must just show up on the scene. Some of them are hilarious because they’ll fly around with their tongue unfurled.

Riddell: Until then, enjoy your one wild and precious life. The Shape of the World is about nature and people and the world we share. It’s a production of The Office of Modern Composition, a business that creates compositions and fosters composers. If you have a story to tell, the Office of Modern Composition can help. They can go all DIY and teach you how to write and produce the story yourself, or they’ll do the whole thing for you. Either way, you will end up with a permanent archival piece that presents your ideas and experiences. The Shape of the World is produced in the vital, vigorous, and beautiful metropolis of Chicago in the Prairie State of Illinois. You can find The Shape of the World on Facebook and Instagram and on the website shapeoftheworldshow.com. There, you’ll find images of the Chicago Chanterelle and a drawing of Greg by the artist, Rose Curley, and much more. Shape of the world’s producer is Isabel Vasquez. The theme music is composed and performed by Brad Wood. Thank you to today’s guest, Greg Mueller, and to the Chicago Botanic Garden.