Green Wood Cup Photo: Robbie Deans / CC BY-NC 4.0
Fungus fans descended on Opononi in Northland last week for the annual Fungal Foray, which has taken place in a different part of the country every year for over 30 years.
The president of the Fungal Network of NZ – mycologist Dr David Orlovich – is unsurprisingly rather passionate about the role of fungi.
"They help plants grow, they kill plants, they recycle nutrients, they cause diseases, they make food for us. You name it, fungi are involved in it."
Once fungi were thought to be plants, but we now know their closest relatives are animals, Orlovich says.
"You would be right in saying that a mushroom is more closely related to you and me than they are to other vegetables that you buy in the shops."
In New Zealand, there are around 20,000 species, but currently, only about 8,000 have names.
This year's foray – the furthest north so far – uncovered at least two species that had only ever been collected once before.
"It just shows you, if you start looking in a new place, you're gonna find stuff."
Yet a forage for fungi needn't cover a lot of ground, he says.
"We don't get very far. We'll drive to a track and go 'Right, we're going to meet back here in an hour' and then an hour later we've gone about 50 metres. We're bent over with our bums in the air trying to look for little mushrooms under logs and what have you, that's kind of what we look like in the field. We'll often have a little basket or a fishing box or a shopping bag to put them into."
When out foraging, the secret is to slow down.
"Stop and sit down in one spot and suddenly you'll start to notice things ... Once you do, then you can't stop seeing things, it's pretty exciting."
For fungi identification, he recommends the Nature Watch app.
