Working with mycophobes

[urbpan]

I work with caged animals on a wildlife sanctuary. The exhibit cages (mostly birds of prey) are outside, in the lovely Northeast mixed deciduous forest (recently made into a lovely postage stamp sheet). Being outside as they are, filled with dead wood "furniture" and with floors of dirt, they occasionally grow mushrooms. I like mushrooms, just because they're beautiful, and normal parts of the ecosystem, and I value them in the exhibits as free naturalistic decoration.

I found out yesterday, that my two coworkers routinely remove mushrooms when they find them in the cages. One agreed with me about their value as scenery, and said that she only removed them from non-exhibit cages (like the one's growing in the gravel-floored screech owl cage above). Her reason for removing them is that she is allergic to molds and she figured more spores (of any kind) means more misery for her. This has logic to it (flawed) at least. [the flaw: molds and mushrooms are both fungi, but they are very different organisms. The analogy I keep thinking of is that it's like being allergic to shellfish, and therefore avoiding all meat entirely--for that matter, being allergic to strawberries and not eating any fruit at all. Perhaps vyomamistake the mushrooms for the white mice we feed them and be poisoned. This is so dumbfounding to me, that I was left with no response. Supposing that an animal with good vision somehow mistook a mushroom for a mouse, and attacked it, wouldn't the non-mouselike texture prevent it from proceeding? Supposing it bit into the mushroom, wouldn't the non-mouselike taste prevent it from consuming it? Can the irrational fear of mushrooms be conquered in our time? Can we at least get over it at a WILDLIFE SANCTUARY?

Comments

[cottonmanifesto.livejournal.com]

That would be a small fraction of the population, but such people do exist.

Wouldn't those people have to stay inside?!? Plastic bubble and all that. Spores are EVERYWHERE. Literally.

[vyoma.livejournal.com]

No more than people who allergic to mold spores have to stay inside or in a plastic bubble. Mold spores are everywhere, too... but in the open air, far from their source, they're generally in too low concentration for the major immune system reaction necessary for a noteable allergic attack. In fact, molds generally have wider distribution that mushrooms, because mushroom-producing fungi usually produce spores under more specific conditions and tend to be more seasonal in mushroom (and thus spore) production than molds.

[urbpan.livejournal.com]

This was kind of what I was thinking of.

Plus, molds aren't basidiomycetes, right? So mushroom-producing fungi and molds are in different...Phyla? Divisions? As different, taxonomically speaking, as shrimp and chicken.

But I suppose what's important (to the allergy sufferer) is how similar the protein of the spores are to one another...

[vyoma.livejournal.com]

"Mold" isn't a taxa, and not all molds are in a single taxa. There's more difference between shrimp (Phylum: Arthropoda, Sub-Phylum: Crustacea, Class: Malacostraca) and chickens (Phylum: Chordata, Sub-Phylum: Vertebrata, Class: Aves) than there is between mushrooms and molds; in fact, the division between the Basidiomycota (into which mushrooms fall) and Zygomycota (into which many, but not all molds fall; some also end up in Ascomycota) is a bit arbitrarym, and neither are truly monophyletic taxa. The difference between the two is largely based on clustering habits of their hyphae. The Linnaean taxonomic scheme works well for plants and animals, but unicellular organisms and fungi are still a bit up in the air as to proper classification, and a lot of the work on fungi in particular is now based more on DNA-level relationships than on macrocharacteristics.

Offhand, I couldn't say how different the proteins are, especially key proteins that might trigger and allergic reaction.

No doubt your coworkers were over-reacting, though. It's doubtful that an allergy-sufferer would be able to get close enough to the mushrooms in an exhibit for them to have any effect upon them, and even an allergy-sufferer who went into the cage would have to work pretty hard at getting a big enough dose of the spores to have a reaction!

[urbpan.livejournal.com]

This is good stuff to know. Thanks for that.

You will undoubtedly be horrified to learn that I'm going to teach a workshop on mushrooms to our teacher/naturalist staff, in September. As long as I know more than they do going in, right?

[vyoma.livejournal.com]

Nah, I'm not horrified at all. This kind of technical stuff is far beyond what these folks need to know. If I might recommend a good source for material if you ahven't found it on your own, check out MushroomExpert.com (http://www.mushroomexpert.com) and have a poke around at Tom Volk's website (http://http://botit.botany.wisc.edu/toms_fungi/), too.

[cottonmanifesto.livejournal.com]

I think some mold allergy sufferers would rather stay inside but they take claritin and go out and about in the world anyway. Mold allergy makes urbpan sad when he stays at his dad's house.

I agree that spores from your average mushroom infestation would probably not be enough to hurt anyone except the severly immunosuppressed. Maybe they'd sneeze if they put their nose in an exploded puffball. That makes picking the mushrooms seem even dumber.