New York City can be a place of almost incomprehensible abundance. Its eight million residents speak 700 languages. It has 29,000 restaurants and bars.
The city’s dizzying profusion extends to the natural realm: 2,143 species of mushrooms and related life-forms have been documented on the popular citizen-science app iNaturalist — more than in any other major city on earth. This is perhaps less a testament to the city’s considerable biodiversity than to the inexhaustible enthusiasm of the New York Mycological Society.
Most of the things people think of as mushrooms do not start showing up until June. But the society’s band of dedicated amateurs leads mushroom expeditions almost every weekend year-round. On a recent walk in Inwood Hill Park in Upper Manhattan, when the grass was still brown and the trees were bare, the ground underfoot teemed with life.
A toddler picked up a stick scabbed with tawny scales. “He found something,” his mother said as she handed the stick to Ethan Crenson.
“Neato!” exclaimed Mr. Crenson, the society’s president. “That’s a basidiomycete crust!”
Mr. Crenson flipped the stick over and pointed out a row of gnarled gray-black objects that looked like diseased toenails and identified them as hairy oysterling, “the first gilled mushrooms of the day.”
New York City is home to carnivorous mushrooms that use little lassos to rope little worms; mushrooms that make their own antifreeze to thrive in winter; countless species found only on animal droppings; and at least 10 species of hallucinogen. Species names hint at otherworldly marvels: sulfur disco, bleeding fairy helmet, dung cannon, glutinous earth tongue, American dyeball, dingy twiglet, devil’s dipstick, freckled dapperling, scurfy deceiver.
From late fall to late spring, the offerings tend toward the humble, with lots of what Mr. Crenson fondly calls “black dots on sticks.” But the variety remains astonishing: By the end of the Inwood walk, on the last Sunday in February, the participants had found 83 species of fungi, lichens and slime, including one never documented east of the Rocky Mountains.
“Once you start noticing things,” said Maren Fossi, who led the walk, “you just keep noticing things.”
The society has observed over 1,200 species on its walks since 2009. It continues to add species to its list at a rate of about 100 per year, an accomplishment made more challenging by the fact that the society limits itself to 15 parks and two cemeteries and follows the same path on each walk. It does this to record how the city’s fungus-scape is changing over time, said Sigrid Jakob, a past president of the club.
Several society members have developed specialties. There is a lichenologist and a slime mold enthusiast. Ms. Jakob, a marketing strategist by day, is the resident expert in life that sprouts from animal feces, lovingly chronicled on her Instagram account @dung_fungi.
She collects droppings from herbivores (relatively odorless, unlike carnivore poop), puts them in restaurant takeout containers, waters them daily and sees what grows. “Once you grab a bunch of dung and bring it home, it’s a never-ending show,” she said.
One winter’s day in 2023, on a cricket pitch in Van Cortlandt Park in the Bronx, she gathered some dung from a Canada goose. About three weeks later, Ms. Jakob recalled, “There was something growing on it that did not look like anything in the literature.”
There were small growths “like Easter eggs” underneath a blanket of black fibers, she said. Ms. Jakob sent samples to a mycologist, who agreed that she had discovered a new species and helped her publish a paper describing it.
Mr. Crenson, a graphic designer, had a similar experience. In 2021, at Green-Wood Cemetery in Brooklyn, he discovered a fungus that “looked a bit like chocolate chips sticking up out of a cookie,” he said. A mycologist later named it after him: Nemania ethancrensonii.
The society has collected 237 types of fungus that it has not been able to identify, many dozens of which are most likely new species, Ms. Jakob said. There are an estimated five million species of fungus on the planet and only about 150,000 have been named.
The mother of the toddler who found the crust fungus, Sarah Almodovar, is like most of the society’s 800 members: simply an urban nature lover glad for an excuse to walk in the woods.
“It’s been so good for our family because it’s given us so many things to learn about,” she said.
A little farther along on the walk, past some bioluminescent mushrooms (visible in a dark bathroom after about 15 minutes, Mr. Crenson promised), a society member named Andrew Cannon proffered a handful of brown grass streaked with black powder. “Check out this gorgeous rust!” he said.
Rusts are fungi that primarily feed on live plants rather than on decaying dead ones. Many of them are harmful to agriculture. Mr. Cannon came to love them because they have up to five visually distinct spore cycles, and because many require two completely different hosts, like a grass and a tree, to reproduce. They have been found miles up in the atmosphere and are known to cross the Atlantic Ocean.
“I have a rust growing on this grass right outside my apartment in Manhattan that I can watch the spores slowly turn into the next one,” Mr. Cannon said.
Even the least impressive-looking finds were cause for celebration. Wilton Rao, the club’s lichen specialist, pointed out an olive-drab blotch on a tree trunk: common greenshield lichen. Like many lichens, it is highly sensitive to pollution. Decades ago, Mr. Rao said, it was not found in New York. Now, he said, it’s “absolutely everywhere.”
The day’s showstopper was a dense constellation of black blobs that looked like papaya seeds, or caviar on a cracker. Everyone got out their hand lenses, which the society distributes on every walk. Magnified, each bead of caviar revealed itself to be an iridescent, pockmarked sphere, with sparkles of purple and blue, growing at the end of a skinny stalk. People oohed and aahed.
Mr. Crenson took a chunk home to Brooklyn, where he identified it as a slime mold, Lamproderma nigrescens, previously documented on iNaturalist in this country only in California and Oregon. He brought the specimen to a club show-and-tell at Ms. Jakob’s apartment the following week.
People clustered around the four microscopes set up on the dining room table. Elan Trybuch was annoyed because he had missed the Inwood Hill walk. “They found my white whale!” he said.
Mr. Trybuch is the curator of the society’s “Slime Molds of NYC” gallery on iNaturalist. (The most observed species in the city: dog vomit slime mold.) He explained that Lamprodermas usually grow under monthslong snowpack, and he had been planning a trip to the Adirondacks to look for some. Instead his compatriots had found it a 10-minute walk from the A train.
He still has plenty to keep him busy. He is surveying the biome on trees in a park in Red Hook, his neighborhood in Brooklyn, testing a theory that the acid in dog urine is depressing slime diversity near the base of the trunks.
Mr. Crenson, the society’s president, wonders if this will be the year the group bags a zombie ant fungus — the real-life inspiration for the HBO show “The Last of Us.” The fungus commandeers an ant’s brain, forces it to climb a tree to the optimal height for dispersing its spores, and kills it. It is creeping up the Eastern Seaboard, and the iNaturalist map shows a cluster of sightings in the Philadelphia suburbs.
“They should be around here,” Mr. Crenson said, “but we haven’t found them yet.”
Andy Newman writes about New Yorkers facing difficult situations, including homelessness, poverty and mental illness. He has been a journalist for more than three decades.
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