Mycorenewal and Ecology

Our mycelium is growing vigorously in the lab. It has been acclimated to metabolizing oil and seems healthy and strong. This is good news of course, but ours is a question of ecological engineering as well as laboratory wizardry. Even though our pet organism is doing well in the Petri dish, this has no bearing whatsoever on how well it does in the field. There is a big difference between life in the Petri dish and the Amazon. So will our oysters become food for insects or out competed by other weedy fungi? We don’t know. However, Pleurotus (oyster) mushrooms happen to be among nature’s most aggressive fungal species, metabolizing everything from wood to coffee grounds to, well, oil. Their enzymes have shown to experimentally breakdown Polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs) and somehow all fungi have to find a way to compete in a hazardous environment when the vast majority of their biomass consists of threadlike appendages only one-cell thick. So how do they do it?

The long answer is an adventure into complexity or in other words, ecology. The short answer is we don’t know. Well, not exactly. Soil is alive. It is chalk full of critters large and to be sure, small. Really small. Bacteria, lots of bacteria, fungi, spiders, mites, beetles, nematodes, plants small mammals and reptiles all vie for carbon and nutrients in every cubic meter of soil. So why would fungi ever be able to build their vast networks under our feet if they are constantly hectored by hungry, exponentially growing bacteria along every centimeter of their hyphae? The answer of course is, we don’t know, not really.

However, we do have some ideas. Symbiosis is quite frequent throughout nature. In fact, it is happening in every cell of every creature on the face of the planet that has a nucleus. It happens to be most common across Kingdoms, that is organisms that are vastly different from one and other in form and, importantly, metabolism. So some scientists theorize the that fungi form symbiotic relationships with specific, friendly bacteria that keep other, unfriendly bacteria at bay. Unfortunately, the Law of the Jungle in the jungle is somewhat erroneous. Tooth and claw have their role to play in every ecosystem, but cooperation and mutualisms are far to common to ignore.

Plant-fungal symbiosis is as ubiquitous as it is ancient. For over 400 million years—since plants first colonized land—some 90% of all plants have formed fungal partnerships inside or around their roots. Plants gain access to difficult to reach water and nutrients sources and protection from disease while the fungi, called mycorrhizae (“root-fungus”) receives sugar manufactured by the plant. It is possible that different species of fungi form mutualistic relationships with bacteria where select species of beneficial bacteria are encouraged to grow in the area surrounding the mycelium, providing protection in exchange for some nutrient currency. An arrangement such as this is not hard to imagine, in fact, it seems we humans have a similar arrangement in via our appendix: recent findings have identified the appendix as a bacterial safe-haven for beneficial bacteria that help keep pathogenic bugs at bay.

While the ecology of symbiosis can help clarify the niche of fungi in the environment, we need a different take on ecology to see why we are confident that our oysters will have a decent chance of thriving in their new home. All living things are capable of bearing offspring at a rate that far outpaces mere replacement. Usually what keeps any one organism from taking over the world with offspring in a few generations are predators, diseases, famine, suitable habitat and natural catastrophe of all scale. We are designing our project to give our acclimated oyster mushrooms a leg up by taking advantage of what is known as an ecological desert created by the petroleum contamination. The areas are toxic by definition because no other organism in any significant numbers likes to munch on oil. Therefore, we would expect a life form specifically trained (not, to be clear, genetically engineered) to enjoy such a meal would have a distinct advantage in such an environment and reproduce prolifically.

Creating an ecological advantage for our mushrooms will require more than just sowing it over a lagoon of oil. While the oil-digesting capabilities of oyster mushrooms may be a part of the new technology of mycoremediation, the specific process of its application to an affected area is what will ultimately allow it to succeed with as little input and maintenance as possible. This is important because the area contaminated in the Ecuadorian Amazon is so vast and heterogeneous that our techniques will likely have to be site-specific. We will be back in Lago Agrio by mid-April to begin our new round of trials. It is our hope that our latest experiment should provide a baseline methodology that will serve as a template for other Amazonian sites blighted by ill-disposed petroleum waste.

The Amazon Mycorenewal Project is currently looking for additional NGO partners with complementary missions to help support our work here in Ecuador. Interested organizational representatives should contact me at brianapace@gmail.com for more information about our mission and work. Also, Amazon Mycorenewal Project has a new website:

www.amazonmycorenewal.org

and

www.kallambas.org



mycorrhizae photo from: www.helsinki.fi/bioscience/myco/

Building on the Banks of Sour Lake

Our last visit to Lago was colored with the knowledge that Ecuador had just been invaded by Colombia. The Colombian military was pursuing FARC guerillas and decided that they would follow them across the border and bomb them on Ecuadorian soil. Naturally, the Ecuadorian government viewed this incursion as a violation of their national sovereignty and sent troops to the border. The Colombian government claims it is absolved of wrongdoing because it considers the FARC to be a drug-dealing terrorist organization. The Ecuadorian-Colombian border is only about an hours drive from Lago Agrio, so the situation was on everyone’s mind as we set about gathering materials for our new structures and next round of mushroom trials. Interestingly, no one we spoke with considered the FARC to be a terrorist organization at all and repeatedly insisted that it was the Colombian paramilitary organizations that were terrorizing people.

We expected to spend about five days in Lago putting everything together, but in both construction and travel, everything takes longer than you expect. The structures we came to build were to be located on Donald’s land, so we needed to rendezvous with him before we did anything. A taxi brought us out to Donald’s little house out in the jungle and met Lorena, Donald’s wife. Lorena showed us around the land as we surveyed the area for an adequate place to build. They have several hectares of land for growing cacao, with a small mountain they have left intentionally uncultivated as a jungle reserve. The electric company had already cut down all the trees on a swath of land below their wires and so we selected that area to avoid clearing more land. To the left is a photo of the area we chose before we began work.


Donald and Lorena have 1,800 cacao trees on their land. At only three and a half years old, they already produce several hundred pounds of raw cacao annually. The catch is that raw cacao goes for about 70 cents a pound. Back in Portland, I remember quite clearly that bulk raw cacao at natural food stores goes for $15 a pound. Jess and I wanted to help do the harvest because we wanted to learn about the process required to produce chocolate and, being stuck in Lago on a Sunday, we didn’t have anything better to do. We began early that morning, machetes in hand. We set out with Donald, Lorena and their son Jesus to cull the ripe cacao pods from trees overgrown with nettles. It was an all day affair. The Amazonian countryside seems to have two kinds of weather: hot as hell, more humid than the inside of your mouth or raining buckets. Our day in the cacao fields was the first of the two options.





The cacao fruit is mucilaginous, sour-sweet and tangy. The fruit surrounds the cacao bean. We ate the juicy fruit with relish in the heat and spit the seeds into a bucket, happy with the knowledge that one day, the contents of our spittoon would somewhere become fine dessert.

Aside from the ubiquitous stinging nettles, there were also some of our fungal friends out in the fields, proving that chocolate is truly loved by all...






Control is an essential component of any scientific enterprise. The upside of using controls is that you can take them for granted as known quantities and thus focus on other unknown aspects of your system. The downside to increasing control is often reflected in decreasing realism. As we were finishing up our site walk, dark clouds rolled in and the afternoon rapidly morphed into a stormy-twilight. The sheets of rains that flowed helped explain what happened to the mushrooms at our original site. The heavy rains are a given in our location and constructing a roof certainly creates a somewhat unnatural situation. However, our main goal is to get our system humming along as it is supposed to, with healthy oil-digesting fungi. Next we figure out how best to expand our procedure to apply it to broader contamination sites.

A main goal of this round of trials is to match the ideal substrate to the growing conditions in the jungle. We will be using sawdust salvaged from the waste stream of the nearby broomstick factory, inoculated wooden dowels from the same source, locally collected elephant grass and human hair. On our journey to Ecuador, we brought along 40 lbs of human hair left over from the oil spill mycoremediation effort in the San Francisco Bay. TSA loved that. Presently, all that hair has been woven into mats and rolled up into two gigantic dreadlocks in our living room. In a week or so, they will become science. Throughout our design process, we have carefully weighed our substrates in terms of availability, sustainability and, of course, utility.

On the day we were ready to begin building, Donald informed us that he wouldn’t be there and asked if we could start the next day. Donald is a friendly ex-Ecuadorian Army Sergeant who works closely with the Frente de Defensa la Amazonia (i.e. Amazon Defense Coalition), a community led organization whose mission is to hold Texaco-Chevron responsible for the vast contamination of their land. Donald helps make the ecological disaster more real for visitors to Lago Agrio by leading them on a Toxic Tour of the many contaminated sites around Lago. Tours include opportunities for visitors to talk to the people who live on these poisoned lands. Instead of building that day, Donald invited us to come along to Frente’s annual retreat and be flies on the wall. Here’s their website:

texacotoxico.org

Frente works closely with afflicted communities, has recently obtained funding from Sting’s wife, Trudi Styler, to install 50 rainwater filtration systems to supply drinking water to families unable to drink the water below their feet. It is no coincidence that Lago Agrio means 'sour lake'... Eventually the communities surrounding Lago Agrio won't have to rely on foriegn philanthropy to obtain clean drinking water and the means to live a normal life once again. There is currently a six billion dollar lawsuit in progress in Ecuadorian courts that could easily fund the kind of cleanup that is required for this area to begin it's recovery. For a great account of this lawsuit and other details about the history of oil contamination in Ecuador, follow the link below:

Jungle Law:Politics & Power.

I'll be updating this blog twice a month. Since my schedule is often dictated by the stage of our work, it may be somewhat irregular, but always twice a month. Thanks to everyone out there checking in!

Hongos Muertos

We flew to Lago Agrio in just over a half-hour. It was raining buckets and the air was hot and heavy as we stepped off the plane. As our taxi trundled down the dirt road that led away from the airport towards our field site we were flanked nearly the entire way by oil-pipelines that snaked their way through the lush tropical landscape. The city we flew over was remarkably built up for being a roughneck oil outpost that was birthed in the sixties. On the ground things looked a little different. Put bluntly, Lago Agrio is a run-down, sketchy place that is in the midst of renovation. Despite the abandoned buildings and crumbling infrastructure, Lago is home to some of the coolest streetlights I have ever seen. The impetus for the building is likely a result of Lago’s proximity to the Amazon and the burgeoning ecotourism trade, a situation that is darkly ironic considering the contamination that squats over this region.

Our journey led us through narrowing tunnels of greenery until we stopped, donned galoshes and squished off the road into the thicket to take samples. Our field site is adjacent to a small, swampy lagoon of crude oil. We came to take soil samples for laboratory analysis to follow the progress of our site. Fire ants plagued our colleague, Ricardo, as we checked the small mountain of sawdust-filled burlap bags for mycelial growth.

The mushrooms died. It happens. As far as we can tell, the mycelium drowned. However, the last time samples were taken, there was a large shade cloth above the site and some happy oysters fruiting. The shade cloth was nowhere to be found and was likely stolen by someone who thought of a more immediate use for it besides sheltering some oil-munching mushrooms. Luckily, this is science. There are no failures, only lessons to be applied to the next experiment. Who could have predicted that water would be a problem in a rainforest?

We drove to another location where our new friend Donald had kindly allowed our team to transform his chicken coop into an ex situ experimental mushrooms site. Donald is an interesting man for another blog entry. Unfortunately, even in a chicken coop, those mushrooms drowned as well. They were being watered, but mushroom cultivation under any circumstances is somewhat of an art. A little care here, a little neglect there. Too much care, in the form of water, seemed to be the culprit here as well. Evolutionarily speaking, fungi are closer related to animals than they are to plants. This is reflected in their basic needs for metabolism: oxygen.

Undeterred, we gathered our samples and took the eight-hour bus ride back to Quito. That’s right, a short flight saves one the narrow roads and switchbacks that climb the 9,000 feet back up to Quito. However, the breathtaking country view and the chance to see Sharon Stone classic “The Quick and the Dead” in Spanish almost makes up for the butt-ache caused by such travel.

Later in the week, we had the unique opportunity of going out into a mountainous rainforest near a place called Nono to collect mushrooms with two local university students and Paul, Ecuador’s only Ecuadorian mushroom taxonomist. Accompanied by Ricardo, a 30-year veteran mushroom cultivator, we were out mushroom hunting with the two most knowledgeable mycologists in Ecuador. Stopping only to drop $2.50 on a 2 liter Coca Cola bottle filled with high-octane sugarcane liquor, we were well equipped to seek out strange new life forms.





Mycologist David Hawksworth has described the staggering biodiversity of the fungal kingdom by explaining that while there are 2,000 species of flowering plants in Great Britain, there are about 12,000 known species of fungi, with species still being characterized in that country. Great Britain happens to be the most well documented places on the planet when it comes to the species living there. While there are somewhere around 250,000 species of flowering plants globally, applying this 6:1 ratio of fungi to plants in Britain, Hawksworth estimates that there are probably 1,500,000 species of fungi worldwide. Of that (admittedly rough) figure, a mere 70,000-100,000 species have been discovered. While I am not an aspiring taxonomist, knowing your mushrooms can be rewarding. To enter the forest where we were doing our investigations, we crossed the bordering cow pastures encountering Ecuadorian ‘Hongos de Vaca’, which are hallucinogenic. Here’s a picture:


Back in Quito, we sat down for the next two days and hammered out a new methodological design to address the issues with our original set-up. It includes some heavy excavation and the expansion of the earlier mentioned chicken-coop to accommodate more ex situ boxes than before. To overcome the water issues that will no doubt continue to harass our efforts to give our oil-supping oysters a nice home, we will be constructing a roof over our new other field site and locating it on private land. We will also be traveling back and forth every two weeks to make sure our fungal friends have everything they need. In short, we will be spending a lot of time in Lago during March. Here’s some pictures of home:

Primordia

The inside of our cinderblock house is orange. It was used to sell fish to the neighborhood and smelt (pun intended) as much. I live now at 9,000 feet in Quito, Ecuador now with my partner Jess. Although Jess is fluent, I barely speak Spanish, a fact I am much ashamed of, and I am working to change that by taking classes at four-hour intervals. Luckily, I understand more than I speak and soon I won’t sound like a stuttering seven-year-old. We’ve been here a little under two weeks. Most of our time has been spent making our house livable: buying a bed, poking at our garden, painting, getting hot water in the shower, putting up shelves and towel racks…you know, the stuff you are aching to read a blog about. However, there are more interesting aspects of my move to Ecuador that I have decided to share in this forum.

Tomorrow we fly to Lago Agrio, the epicenter of one of the worst ecological disasters on the planet, the result of a horrendous amount of oil contamination. Between 1964 and 1992, Texaco (now Chevron, in case you weren’t paying attention) spilled enough oil in the Ecuadorian Amazon that everyone likes to argue over exactly how many millions of gallons it was. Rest assured it was more than the Exxon Valdez belched into the Pacific Ocean. A lot more. Birth defects, cancer rates and general malaise are exceedingly high in the communities living near the estimated 600 swimming pool-sized, open, unlined waste pits across an area the size of Rhode Island. We are using oyster mushrooms to slurp up some of the muck and hopefully, eventually, make a tangible and beneficial impact in the communities afflicted by hazardous petroleum waste. The technology is called mycoremediation and was developed by Washington mycologist extraordinaire Paul Stamets. For more info see:

fungi.com/mycotech

The mushrooms we see are the products of a complex, spider web-like network of cells called mycelium that interlink throughout every cubic inch of the soil environment. Anywhere there is soil, it is being held together by these fungal structures, where they play an integral role in the health every terrestrial ecosystem. Oyster mushrooms produce enzymes that sweat outside of their cells that normally are used to digest a component of wood called lignin. These extracellular lignin-peroxidases also posses the capacity to break the long chains of carbon that compose petroleum into smaller carbon compounds that the oysters are able to metabolize. That is, eat.

Great, so we’ll just come on in and get them ‘shrooms a-growin’ and be done with it, right? Well…sort of. Ours is a project where a lot of real people in the real world are involved. First of all, our science has to be unimpeachable. We have to know how much and how best to apply mycoremediation techniques in one of the most biodiverse environments on the planet. We have to educate ourselves by visiting the contaminated sites and cooperating with the people living there. As we do this, I’ll be updating this blog as much as possible with pictures and first-hand accounts of our progress. For those thirsting for more details about our project than are to be found here, please visit our (somewhat interim) project page here:

Cloud Forest Institute

As soon as this summer, we will be hosting university students interested in studying abroad and service learning. They will gain a unique opportunity to learn about Latin American political ecology and get hands-on experience applying mycoremediation techniques in a field and laboratory setting. For those interested in this exciting educational adventure, please email: Alida@cloudforest.org