What are Cordyceps Mushrooms?

Jessica Mitchell: [00:00:00]

Welcome to the Mother Earth News and Friends podcast. At Mother Earth News for 50 years and counting, we’ve been dedicated to conserving the planet’s natural resources while helping you conserve your financial resources. In this podcast, we host conversations with experts in the fields of sustainability, homesteading, natural health, and more to share all about how you can live well wherever you are in a way that values both people and our Mother Earth.

So settle in, and enjoy today’s episode.

[00:00:46] Introducing William Padilla-Brown

Kenny Coogan: Good day, everyone, and we appreciate you for joining us on another exciting Mother Earth News and Friends podcast. I am Kenny Coogan, and joining me today is [00:01:00] mycologist William Padilla- Brown. Today, we are going to discuss a group of fungi called Cordyceps. William Padilla- Brown is a multidisciplinary citizen scientist practicing many things, including the study of mushrooms. Will founded and is the current CEO of Myco Symbiotics, a permaculture research and production business based in central Pennsylvania, focused on innovative, practical, applied biological science. Welcome to the podcast, Will.

William Padilla-Brown: Hey, happy to be here. Thanks for having me.

Kenny Coogan: We are excited to talk to you about cordyceps. And cordyceps are sometimes known as a zombie fungus and have been used in pop culture, like the video game and TV show, “The Last of Us”, and in Mike Carey’s post apocalyptic novel, The Girl with All the Gifts, and its prequel, The Boy on the Bridge.[00:02:00]

So, Will, what exactly is a cordyceps?

[00:02:04] What Are Cordyceps Mushrooms?

William Padilla-Brown: Cordyceps are entomopathogenic fungi. Cordyceps are actually a group of fungi. There’s a, you know, a various amount of them that grow on different insects. So if you break down the word entomopathogenic, “entomo” meaning “of insects.” You know, the study of insects is entomology.

So “pathogenic.” You could think of that like a pathogen or something that is, you know, maybe detrimental to those insects. So cordyceps are a type of fungus that grows on different types of insects. So usually there’s about one different type of cordyceps for every different type of insect or every different type of insect. And yeah, they, they grow through their bodies and usually out of their heads.

Kenny Coogan: So I think there’s around 600 species of cordyceps. Are all of them parasitic?

William Padilla-Brown: Well, all of the cordyceps that we know of grow on insects. So, you know, they’re all going to be, they’re all going to be living off of their insect host.

Kenny Coogan: So you talked a [00:03:00] little bit about them growing out of their heads. Can you talk a little bit more about their parasitic qualities, like how do they reproduce? Why are they growing out of insects’ heads?

William Padilla-Brown: Yeah, so cordyceps reproduce like many other mushrooms do by growing spores out and combining their hyphal threads, or the little cellular filaments that comes out from their spores. And they generally will do this and need to do this on an insect. Usually the spore will land on an insect, the little cellular threads will create an enzyme drill to drill through the insect’s exoskeleton, where the mycelium, or the cellular threads, will start to grow on and around the organs of the insect, creating little energy packets so that they can rest if it’s not the right time to grow.

And they’ll grow all through the insect. And I, you know what, I couldn’t really tell you why they decided that they want to put their [00:04:00] fruit out of the head. But it’s a common trend that they’ll put the fruiting body out of the head or the actual mushroom part out of the head. And as they grow through the body of the insect, they wrap their threads around the limbs, around the muscles or the equivalent of whatever the muscles are for the insect. And they take over its motor functions. So, you know, there’s a lot of people that say that the cordyceps take over the brains of the insect. Um, but it’s like they take over your body. So if you could imagine just like, like you wake up one day and you’re already walking down the hall, and you’re like, why am I walking down the hall? I want to turn around, but you’re like having a hard time turning around. Cause there’s something in you that’s like moving your arms and legs stronger than you are. So that’s kind of what happens with the, with the cordyceps.

So, you know, I could go on and on. There’s like really unique biology to them, but you know, if you have any other questions. Otherwise I’ll just keep ranting.

Kenny Coogan: No, I like it. So, [00:05:00] when the cordyceps are inside the organism, which always is an insect, they, they, I don’t believe fungi have a brain, but they’re like purposely avoiding the important organs?

William Padilla-Brown: They, they are very intuitive. They may not have, you know, organs or a brain, but they, it doesn’t mean that they’re not consciously aware of their surroundings.

So they, they definitely have a method to their madness, which includes being able to navigate the environment while in an insect host. So one of the reasons why they like take over their body and control their, their movement and motor function is to put themselves in a better position for the mushroom to grow.

So, you know, we find a lot of cordyceps growing on moth pupa here in Pennsylvania. And the cordyceps will wiggle the moth pupa up closer to the surface for their mushroom to grow out. Where, you know, some tropical cordyceps will cause an ant to climb to the top of the tree, so it’ll, it’ll drop its spores on the whole [00:06:00] tree that the rest of the ants are eating the leaves from. So you know, there’s a couple of different…

Kenny Coogan: And then they get infected when they eat the leaves.

William Padilla-Brown: Oh yeah, they’ll get infected when they eat those leaves with the spores on them, yeah. So yeah, there’s like a, there’s definitely a couple ways that they navigate their environment without brains.

And, and there are some cordycep-type mushrooms that, that grow on other mushrooms, like on, on actually truffles, on false truffles. So that’s pretty cool too.

[00:06:26] Cordyceps & Insects: Ants, Spiders, and More!

Kenny Coogan: So this episode is coming out around Halloween time, because we want to talk about like spooky zombie-esque fungi, but I think year round people can enjoy a good cordyceps story.

And I know there’s several hundred species of cordyceps, and you said each of them kind of has their own specific host. Can you give me some timeframes of how long the host is infected with the cordyceps? Is it days, weeks, months?

William Padilla-Brown: It could be months, you know. There, there’s not [00:07:00] enough evidence around this. There’s not enough research around, around this to answer this definitively. But, you know, it could be months that it’s in there waiting for its time. You know, it could be in there for years. It could have been, it could, it’s possible it could have been there its whole life. There’s evidence that it could be in there throughout its life and that it just, you know, opportunistically, it will, will devour the insect. So, there’s still a lot to be researched there, and I couldn’t even answer that question definitively.

Kenny Coogan: When the cordyceps are inside the insect body for a long period of time, can the cordyceps be dormant or is it always manipulating the insect?

William Padilla-Brown: There’s some evidence that shows that the cordyceps may, may be like somewhat useful for the insect before it eats it. There’s, insects didn’t really evolve red blood cells the same way that we did. So there’s some evidence that certain insects will use different yeast like symbionts to move[00:08:00] oxygen through their body.

So it’s thought that maybe some of these cordyceps are acting as like symbiotic thing until something in the environment triggers them to devour the insect. And this is something that I’ve been researching just you know, anecdotally through foraging for cordyceps year by year and seeing how they grow and where they grow in the environment. Makes me feel like they’re making sure that the insects are not like overpopulating the forest, and they’re, I don’t know what the environmental triggers may be but there’s some trigger there that, that I feel like makes them, makes them grow whenever the insects are getting into a large population out of control.

Kenny Coogan: When people are in a park or in the woods, and how do they identify that it, insect is, acting like a zombie because of a cordyceps? Or, or do you only see them after they’ve died?

William Padilla-Brown: They may be exhibiting like, like unnatural [00:09:00] behaviors or uncharacteristic, behaviors that are not characteristic of their regular patterns. But that would take somebody that like knows that insect and how it regularly moves. So like most, most animals, most insects operate around a certain routine or certain patterns, like they’ll move a certain way. So like the insects will just be like, just wonky, like they’ll just be like not moving in their typical pattern.

And I’ve had some friends that have successfully, you know found insects that were still alive that were infected and were on their way to producing cordyceps. It had some, some interesting, you know, witness some interesting happenstance. I can’t say that they fruited the mushrooms, but like, it’s, it’s a lot still to learn by watching.

Kenny Coogan: Do the cordyceps make insects less fearful of predators? I know you were mentioning they usually like get them to be elevated and they go up higher so the fruiting bodies [00:10:00] spread farther. But, is there other behaviors that the cordyceps make the insects do that’s strange?

William Padilla-Brown: Well, I couldn’t say cordyceps specifically, but there’s another entomopathogenic fungus called Massospora, which we witnessed on the brood X of the cicadas that came out here a couple of years ago. There was a fungus that was growing on the butts of the cicadas, and it was causing them to mate with all different kinds of cicadas. It didn’t matter what sex it was, if it was the same sex or opposite sex. And it would like release spores on, on the, cicada. And it also made it so it wouldn’t go to sleep. So it would just fly around meeting with any cicada that it found until its butt fell off and then it would just like crawl through the forest until it had no energy left. Pretty gnarly. That’s like probably the gnarliest like fungal insect behavior that I’ve seen. Other than just like weird movements, I haven’t seen anything else. But cordyceps, and I don’t think that they would be inclined to put themselves in like a place for predators to eat them, [00:11:00] because I don’t think they’ll be able to spread their spores as easily.

Kenny Coogan: You travel all over, but right now you’re in Pennsylvania and you talked about moths and ants. Can you give us maybe like a list or some behaviors of other insects that cordyceps go into?

William Padilla-Brown: Uh, the Cordyceps militaris that we find grows on moth, pupa, butterfly uh, whole grown butterflies larva, like the, the caterpillars. They can grow on beetles. There’s a whole bunch of other different types of cordyceps that grow on beetles, spiders.

Well, I mean, if we’re gonna be, if I’m gonna be entirely scientific right now, Cordyceps is a refined genus that grows on specific types of insects. Now there’s a lot of entomopathogenic fungi that are of the Hypocreales order that all produce mushrooms that look like cordyceps that grow off of bugs, but they’re of different genus. So we have Elaphocordyceps. We have Metacordyceps, we have Tolypocladium. I mean, I’m wearing, I’m wearing my cordyceps shirt right now. [00:12:00] But there’s just so many different types of, we have Gibellula that grows on spiders. But everybody just calls all of them cordyceps just because of popular culture. But yeah, we have stuff that grows on spiders, grasshoppers, mantis, ants, all kinds of beetles, all kinds of butterflies and moths and millipedes, centipedes. Yeah, I mean like almost every kind of insect there’s a there’s a entomopathogenic mushroom that will grow off of it.

Kenny Coogan: The whole gamut. So if somebody finds the dead insect, is there any defining characteristics of being able to say, oh, this was this succumbed to a cordyceps?

William Padilla-Brown: Well, they will usually have some kind of fruiting body coming off of them. Sometimes they could be really tiny. Sometimes you can find a fly that just is, like, covered in mycelium. Sometimes you’ll find a moth that just has, like, a couple little, like, it’ll be, like, all white, but it’ll have a couple little, like, dots coming, like, or, like, little, like, like, bumps coming off of it. But it’ll usually have some kind of, like, formation coming off [00:13:00] of it. Like, they, they will usually produce, like, a fruiting body that, that has some kind of formation, or they’ll just be covered in white mycelium.

Kenny Coogan: And, like, the opening is… Always out of the head, or it could be any part of the insect?

William Padilla-Brown: Whenever it’s like one or like a like one like cluster of fruiting bodies, it usually comes out of the head. But it’s not, it’s not exclusive to the head. There’s like sometimes it’ll just burst out mushrooms from like every little crevice and crack of the organism.

Kenny Coogan: So listeners know that it can be difficult to recognize wild mushrooms. Can you identify a cordyceps when it’s not coming out of an insect? Are they, like you mentioned, they were on leaves, can you find cordyceps in soil mulch?

[00:13:47] What Are Cordyceps?: Identification

William Padilla-Brown: The only way that I could identify cordyceps in soil is through molecular biology metagenomic sampling, which we have the capabilities for this in our [00:14:00] lab. It’s not as complex as it might sound. We actually are offering a DNA barcoding course on our website, which is a really great primer for further classes that we’ll be offering down the road on utilizing nanopore sequencing. Which I think should be available regionally so people could do a species discovery and things like this.

But yeah, only through molecular biology would I be able to like, find it in the soil. There’s not much other evidence for me, but it can morph into molds. Like the cordyceps that we find, it can morph into soil molds. And other cordyceps can also morph into other sexual reproduction formations. Like the, like the classic Ophiocordyceps sinensis in, in Tibet, which is the most like anthropologically interacted with cordyceps. This one, it grows on caterpillars and it’ll morph into an endophytic fungus. “Endo” means inside, “phyte” means plant. So fungus that grows inside of a plant. So it’ll morph into an endophytic fungus that lives [00:15:00] inside of the plant that the caterpillar eats. So, like, some part of its life is just living inside of these leaves, waiting for a caterpillar to eat it. And then it morphs into a cordyceps inside of the bug.

[00:15:10] Interest in Cordyceps

Kenny Coogan: And aside from the wow factor, you kind of hinted towards this about the people in Tibet. Why are people interested in cordyceps?

William Padilla-Brown: William Padilla-Brown

Well, people are interested in cordyceps because they’re super weird. Because they’re so strange. And I could only imagine in times before humans were so… distracted with their own, you know, ideas that that they would have been more enthralled with the information presence to them in their environments. And like cordyceps would have always standing, stood out as something very strange in the environment.

And I don’t think that we like just discovered it. I think that it was like discovered in written history more recently. But I think that there’s like, humans have to have seen these things for plenty of times. And then, in like Traditional Chinese Medicine, there [00:16:00] is the utilization of cordyceps mushrooms. It’s, it’s really highly ranked In their medicinal system of, of, of herbs and plant and mushrooms and things like this. The long history of, anthropological use in Asia is backed now by modern science, showing that these mushrooms are producing unique bioactive compounds that have different, you know, effects in our bodies and in the bodies of animals, you know, triggering different functions and things like this.

So, you know, we call them functional mushrooms is, is, is how we, how we go about this here in the USA. As far as like, you know, being in the industry or like being in the mushroom business we have functional mushrooms that you know can support or supplement different functions in our bodies.

So all of these different mushrooms, you know, interact with our bodies in different ways. And cordyceps seems to be very beneficial for, energy and getting oxygen into [00:17:00] the bloodstream. So a lot of people are interested in it for endurance and exercising and working out and being athletic. But also people are interested in it that are like, you know, living at high altitudes or don’t want to drink coffee as much or something like this.

Kenny Coogan: Now, you figured out how to cultivate cordyceps, and you are the first English speaking person in the world to develop literature on it. So can you please share more, and how did you accomplish this?

William Padilla-Brown: Well whenever I was younger, I started a mushroom festival because there wasn’t really anything of that stature in, you know, the Northeast Mid Atlantic area, which is host to, you know, about 40 percent of the U. S. population. So I was like, you know, this is an opportunity here.

So I started a mushroom festival, which is called MycoFest, which we do the first weekend in August every single year. And next year will be the 10th annual. So it’ll be a nice celebration. But on the first year in 2015,[00:18:00] on the last day, my friend Charlie found a cordyceps mushroom in the wild, and he brought it to me and he let me have it. And I took it to my lab and I went about cloning it and I looked all over the internet. I looked all over Facebook, all over the mushroom blogs for information about cultivating it. And I couldn’t really find anything. There was a one, you know, brief article on this website, and there wasn’t very much information. And so I asked people, you know, what’s up with growing cordyceps and everybody’s like, oh, only people in Asia know how to grow it. It’s secret techniques, just like morels, you know, you’re not going to be able to do it. So I just looked online and found a couple translated Chinese research papers and found videos on YouTube from Thailand on on how they were growing cordyceps there. I couldn’t really understand what they’re saying, but I could understand more what they were doing.

So little by little I kind of pieced together a methodology for for cultivating cordyceps. And I wrote a book and released the book in January [00:19:00] 2017 on cultivating cordyceps. And then I I also at some point created a Facebook group called the Cordyceps Cultivation Group, where we started to see more like open sourcing in the cordyceps industry in the cordyceps, I can’t say the industry really hasn’t taken off here in the US. But in the cordyceps uh, scene that coupled with moving down to Weaverville, North Carolina and starting the first commercial cordyceps growing facility in North America back in 2017. That led to me writing the second volume of the book in 2018 and released in 2019. Because there was just so much development from just figuring it out in like my side, in this room. I’m literally in the same room. I figured out how to grow cordyceps in all the way back in, in 2015, 2016.

Yeah, so, I mean, eventually I’m going to have to update it again because, you know, the scales of it all is going to, is going to change, and we’ve learned so much even since Volume 2 released. But [00:20:00] I’m going to give it some time. But, you know, that’s how we got here.

[00:20:03] Growing Cordyceps Mushrooms

Kenny Coogan: Can you give us a synopsis of how you, what is the word, reproduce them? Propagate them? Are there insects involved in the propagation of cordyceps?

William Padilla-Brown: Actually, surprisingly, no. We we grow them on a coconut water based agar, coconut water based liquid culture. And then we grow them on an organic brown rice based nutrient enriched substrate.

And yeah, that’s really how she goes. I mean, I do breeding. Every year we go out and find wild cordyceps here in Pennsylvania and then and really all through the Appalachian range. I mean, we kind of migrate around these events that represent us. And in, in the sense of our values and ethics and things like this.

So we go to a lot of different, you know, agricultural events, permaculture events, mushroom events, and things like this. That has me in a lot of different environments where [00:21:00] cordyceps is growing, which is really nice to be able to find wild mushrooms from so far away to be able to breed with, and, you know, observe the unique genetic traits that express in the progeny and all these different kinds of things. So I like to breed them out and then I’ll also take in specimens from, from my friends that are also breeding, like Ryan Paul Gates over in Michigan, Terrestrial Fungi, or my buddy in Western Pennsylvania with Appalachian Fungi or Appalachian Gold, Jeff Manganaro. And yeah, I’ll take some of their specimens that they breed sometimes and I’ll interbreed them into the things that I’m working with and, you know, see what happens, kind of amplify on the work.

I mean, like, we’re doing right now what people did with tomatoes and corn, you know, 2000 years ago.

Kenny Coogan: When you’re breeding them. Can you hybridize them? And how are you measuring their strains? Are you looking for things that are easy to grow? Are you looking for traits that are related to health? Or, [00:22:00] you’ve mentioned like circulation and maybe like a coffee substitute. So, what are you looking for when you’re breeding them?

William Padilla-Brown: So we’ve identified, you know, the main active constituents in cordyceps, the main active bioactive compounds. And we’re working with a couple of different analytical laboratories, mainly Tryptomics and Flourish Laboratories based out of Colorado and Oregon, respectively. We’ll send them samples and they’ll be able to test for, you know, these bioactive compounds. So right now I’m breeding more towards the compound productions so I can, you know, see with our standardized substrate formula, which one of these that I bred out is producing more of the compounds that we want to see.

But before that, we were breeding mostly for like yield. The, these cordyceps produce, I would use a pint jar as my, as my main measurement tool. So that was just standardized. I would grow them in the pint jar with the same substrate recipe. And if they could produce more than three grams [00:23:00] of dry material per pint jar, then I would consider that worthy of being a commercial variety that I would sell online so that people wouldn’t waste their time growing it.

Cause you know, it could take like 55 days to grow them from the time that you inoculate them onto their material, onto their substrate material for fruiting. So you don’t want people wasting their time. You want them to be able to get a good yield.

So that’s what we originally bred for, but we’re getting more niche now into breeding specifically for higher bioactive compounds, because we’re mostly into the extract game at this point. You know, we make extracts from, from the cordyceps mushrooms to put into the different products that we sell. So having more of those bioactive compounds is good because then we can standardize our products around, having a certain amount of these different compounds and in serving size.

[00:23:49] What Are Cordyceps Good For?

Kenny Coogan: Alright, so you mentioned kind of a long list of health benefits. And I did want to ask you how people would eat them. And you just mentioned extract. So what type of products are [00:24:00] you mixing the cordyceps extracts with?

William Padilla-Brown: Well right now we have a cordyceps cacao, like we use ceremonial grade cacao blend with honey. So that’s just really easy for people to interact with and like melt into a drink, a hot beverage, or just spread onto food uh, fruit, We also have them in tincture form. But we take our concentrated extract and then bring that back into a fluid form with a gram of concentrated extract per fluid ounce stabilized with ethanol.

As far as our cordyceps stuff goes, I mean, really that’s like our drivers. People really interact with our tincture. People really interact with our cacao, but that’s not the limitations of it. I mean, it can really be put into all sorts of different things. We have a honey. We’re working on expanding into our electuary line. But right now, our honey only has the Chanterelle extract in it.

We can make these extracts where they’re water soluble or they’re oil soluble. And you can really put them into whatever you want. So that’s, that’s what we [00:25:00] want to get it to for people. We’re trying to make it as easy for people to put it into things that’s familiar for them. But if you’re just going to be interacting with like actual cordyceps mushrooms, which we also sell and many of my students also sell, you can just take a gram of cordyceps per day and just put it into, you know, some hot water and brew it as you would a tea. And just, you know, even put it in a tea bag to add some, you know, other flavors that, you know, you like, or you think will go well with it, you know, put some lemon, put some honey. I’ve seen people put them into soup. That works out really well, they’ll go well into a bone broth. Yeah, so I mean, there’s a lot of ways you can play with it.

Kenny Coogan: And you mentioned a couple organizations or growers. Can anyone find cordyceps on a grocery store shelf currently?

William Padilla-Brown: It depends on where you’re living. If you’re in the, the Northern California or Bay Area, you can interact with Far West Fungi and they generally will have, you know, fresh cordyceps or dry cordyceps available. I don’t really know [00:26:00] what other places you can go to find like dry cordyceps on a shelf. We’ve been working through interacting with different grocery stores and things like this, but not as many of them are inclined to go for the cordyceps just yet.

The U. S. cordyceps market is very interesting. Most of the cordyceps mushrooms are produced in China. I mean, China produces 80 percent of the world’s mushrooms right now. And their prices are just astronomically lower than ours. And for anybody to be able to offer cordyceps at a similar price range as the cordyceps that comes in from China, they would have to be able to be at a very, very large scale with mostly automation, automation on their farm. Because, you know, the, the staff would, would cause the cordyceps price to go up for the amount of people that it would, you would require to process that many cordyceps. So it would have to be mostly automated farm.

It is a little bit cost prohibitive at this point in time. So, like, I think that’s why most people [00:27:00] are making, like, products and things like this with it. But little by little the different mushroom farmers around the U. S., a lot of my students will be, you know, growing these cordyceps and making them more available to more people.

Kenny Coogan: When somebody eats a cordyceps, are there any side effects? Do they become calm? Do they become energized?

William Padilla-Brown: When, when people eat cordyceps mushrooms you definitely will get some energy, definitely put some pep in your step. So yeah, a lot of people are like using cordyceps and then just going to the gym, going on a run, or starting out their day. Just like I said, you know, without coffee, and just getting into the groove of things. So people that are on cordyceps will definitely feel like, you know, a little bit more awake for sure.

Kenny Coogan: If someone finds a insect that has a mushroom sticking out of their head, can they put that in a soup or tea and ingest it?

William Padilla-Brown: Not all cordyceps are confirmed to be safe for human consumption. So I can’t say [00:28:00] that like they’re toxic, but like we just don’t know. There’s not enough research around all of them. Definitely hit the contact on MycoSymbiotics.Com if you find a cordyceps mushroom or something that you think is a cordyceps and you don’t know and you know, send us a photo and .We’ll check it out.

You know, if you have something interesting you could always send it to us for DNA barcoding. We can tell you what it is. And then we could do further research from there, you know, figure out if it’s something that’s going to be economically viable or something that is, you know, able to be consumed.

Kenny Coogan: How many species of cordyceps are you working with or, or that are claimed to be edible slash good for you?

William Padilla-Brown: We only are working with like two right now. We have Cordyceps militaris and Blackwellomyces cardinalis. There’s just, you know, nuance to all of it. They’re cultivating over like 30 or 40 different species of cordyceps in China. So there’s a lot more to be explored. But you know, all that takes research and, you know, funding and all that kind of stuff. So for now [00:29:00] we’re playing with two. But I have, I have also cultivated. Tolypocladium ophioglossoides. This is known as the golden thread cordyceps. It grows on Elaphomyces truffles. People call them false truffles just because they’re not like good for humans to eat, but they’re still truffles. But they parasitize truffles and they’re good for prostate health. So I, I got those to cultivate, to grow in rice substrate.

And we also have Ophiocordyceps ravanelli in our collection. But I haven’t cultivated that much. We sent some off to my friend Reishi while she was still at Bastyr University, and she confirmed it for having adenosine but not cordycepin, which is the main bioactive compound that people are interested in for cordyceps. That doesn’t mean that it doesn’t have some other, you know, main bioactive compound that we just haven’t researched yet. So there’s just like a lot still, you know, on the table to be looked at. There’s so much to be researched in the world of [00:30:00] mushrooms.

[00:30:00] Foraging for Cordyceps Mushrooms

Kenny Coogan: All right. Well, I, I imagine you’re hoping that we’ve inspired our listeners to think at least about cordyceps and maybe start utilizing them. And we asked our social media followers to comment on upcoming podcasts. And Angela Harris says, “a national park recently got destroyed having people taking all the cordyceps and destroying natural moth and habitat.” So before we end our podcast, Will, can you talk about responsible mushroom foraging and harvesting, and maybe also the legality of it?

William Padilla-Brown: I would be very interested to, you know, have evidence of this claim or to see about which national forest has been, you know, destroyed in this claim. Maybe in a different country or something? I’m not sure, really. You know, I know there are some foragers that are following, like or some [00:31:00] collectors that are following, like rainforest destruction in South America, you know, pulling cordyceps and other interesting things out of the ground in different places.

But in the U. S., I don’t really know anywhere where people are picking cordyceps in an abundance of any sort. Or disrupting a habitat in any significant way. There’s a couple of different things and like, in like a lot of the Northeast there there’s required foraging licenses and, and and wild mushroom permits to sell wild mushrooms. Or to do business with wild mushrooms besides just like picking them for your own personal consumption. So our business has a much, we have a licensed forager and we have a mushroom, a wild mushroom permit. So we’re all good to, you know, interact with and sell mushrooms in Pennsylvania. We also have a business license and insurance. So that’s usually what the USDA requires or the FDA. We’re regulated by the FDA because we produce supplements. But you still are required to have [00:32:00] the the wild mushroom license and then the wild mushroom permit through the USDA, even though we’re regulated by the FDA.

Those things are needed to like sell wild stuff. Like, if you want to like do it legitimately in stores and stuff like that. Because like, there’s a lot of people that just live different lives. I’ll just leave it at that. So as far as like ethics and all this kind of stuff, you know, when we do pick cordyceps, we tend to put them into like, bead boxes or little, like fishing containers so that their spores don’t intermingle with the other ones. But that’s because, like, we’re foraging them for breeding purposes. Other people may be foraging them just to consume them. If so, it’s recommended that you you know, allow them to release some of their spores as you’re walking around through the forest, which I’ll do. You know, there’s a couple specimens that I’ll take as I’m walking through the forest, and I’ll just walk [00:33:00] around with them in my hand for a little bit before I put them away so that they’re releasing their spores around, you know, further than they would have. I don’t really see us being able to like damage the cords population from coming back or anything like this. I don’t think we could pick enough or find enough cordyceps to do this if we tried. Like, I don’t really think so. You’d have to like comb the forest, they’re like elusive. They’re so tiny. And even if you did pick all of them, they’ll release their spores, their anamorphs are in the soil, so they’re gonna come back.

And then, you know, I’m a proponent of like disturbance ecology with consciousness. I’m not like a big, like leave no trace kind of guy because that’s like not natural. Everything leaves a trace. Like my, my mentors taught me how to track animals in the forest. Like everything leaves a trace. And like bigger animals leave a bigger trace, and their disturbance in the environment leads to unique ecologies developing around them, you know. Bear scratches the tree; [00:34:00] mushroom grows in the in the scratch, you know; hummingbird pokes the tree; mushroom grows in the hole; elephant, digs up an area, fills up with water; becomes a new wetland. Like there’s just all these different disturbance ecologies that comes around because like certain animals, you know, leave a trace. So I, when I pick my cordyceps, I tend to like, you know, put a little moss or put the dirt back over the hole that I put, that I dug up. And I let the spores go. But other than that, it’s like it’s very subtle. I don’t know anybody commercially picking at scale in the US.

Kenny Coogan: Well, thank you so much, Will, for speaking with us. Our conversation on cordyceps has been not only spooky, but educational and fast.

William Padilla-Brown: Yeah. Yeah. Let’s grow. I mean, thanks for having me. It’s an honor.

[00:34:49] Podcast Credits

Jessica Mitchell: Thanks for joining us for this episode of Mother Earth News and Friends. To listen to more podcasts and get connected on our social media, visit our website, www.MotherEarthNews.com/Podcast [00:35:00]. You can also email us at Podcast@OgdenPubs.com with any questions or suggestions.

Our podcast production team includes Jessica Mitchell, Kenny Coogan, John Moore, Carla Tilghman, and Alyssa Warner.

Music for this episode is “Travel Light” by Jason Shaw.

The Mother Earth News and Friends podcast is a production of Ogden Publications.

Until next time, don’t forget to love your Mother.

Meet William Padilla-Brown

William Padilla-Brown is a Multidisciplinary Citizen Scientist practicing social science, mycology, phycology, molecular biology, and additive manufacturing. William founded and is the current CEO of MycoSymbiotics, a permaculture research and production business based in Central Pennsylvania focused on innovative practical applied biological science. William holds Permaculture Design Certificates acquired through Susquehanna Permaculture and NGOZI, and a Certificate from the Bigelow Laboratory for Ocean Sciences for completing their Algal Culturing Techniques Course. William published the first books written in the English language on Cordyceps cultivation. William regularly teaches k-12 classes around the United States, for universities including Cornell’s Small Farms Program, private clubs, and events, as well as offers private consultations. William and his work have been featured on Fantastic Fungi, VICE, Buzzfeed, The Verge, Outside Magazine, Civil Eats, Public Goods, The Book “One Earth”, and much more.

Learn More About Cordyceps Mushrooms

Learn more about William Padilla-Brown’s work on the MycoSymbiotics website.

Our Podcast Team:

Jessica Anderson, Kenny Coogan, John Moore, Carla Tilghman, and Alyssa Warner
Music: “Travel Light” by Jason Shaw

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The Mother Earth News and Friends podcasts are a production of Ogden Publications.

Ogden Publications strives to inspire “can-do communities,” which may have different locations, backgrounds, beliefs, and ideals. The viewpoints and lifestyles expressed within Ogden Publications articles are not necessarily shared by the editorial staff or policies but represent the authors’ unique experiences.