The Scientist - USA (2020-04)

12 THE SCIENTIST | the-scientist.com

Notebook

NEWS AND ANALYSIS

APRIL 2020

Body-Snatching

Fungi

A

fter the Chimney Tops 2 Wildfire

charred 11,000 acres of the Great

Smoky Mountains National

Park along the North Carolina–Tennes-

see state line in November 2016, rangers

closed affected trails to visitors. Mycolo-

gists Andy N. Miller and Karen Hughes

and their teams were an exception. Tot-

ing hard hats and sample collection kits,

these scientists jumped at the opportu-

nity to track down their research sub-

jects: pyrophilous (“fire-loving”) fungi,

which produce mushrooms prolifically

after forest fires and then disappear as

the forest recovers.

The severely burned areas of the

Smokies were almost completely life-

less two months after the blaze, when the

group first ventured into the affected zone.

“The level of destruction was incredible,”

recounts Hughes, a researcher at the Uni-

versity of Tennessee, Knoxville, in an email

to The Scientist. “Everything I touched left

black carbon on my hands. It was incred-

ibly quiet.” Miller, who is based at the Uni-

versity of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, also

noted a surreal lack of activity. “There’s

nothing running around, no birds singing,”

he says. To him, the site smelled “like a

house had burned up.” When the research-

ers returned to their collection sites a few

months later, however, their mushrooms

of interest had risen from the ashes. Miller

noticed that when these fungi surface, they

do so en masse: “They’re less than a mil-

limeter in diameter, but there’s a lot of

them, and once you train your eyes, they’re

just all over the place.”

The researchers were interested in

documenting which species of pyrophi-

lous fungi are present in the Smokies.

They also wanted to test a theory about

where the fungi go during the long peri-

ods between forest fires. Some fire-loving

fungi are known to lie dormant in the

dirt as spores or other heat-tolerant

structures until post-fire soil conditions

trigger growth and reproduction. Other

species exist between burns in a vege-

tative state, aiding decomposition of

SMOKY INDEED: A wildfire swept through the

Great Smoky Mountains National Park in late 2016.

KAREN HUGHES