Climate change fruitful for fungi
Pastor Dale Morgan
Climate change fruitful for fungi*
By Richard Black
Environment correspondent, BBC News website
A remarkable father-and-son research project has revealed how rising
temperatures are affecting fungi in southern England.
Fungus enthusiast Edward Gange amassed 52,000 sightings of mushroom and
toadstools during walks around Salisbury over a 50-year period.
Analysis by his son Alan, published in the journal Science, shows some
fungi have started to fruit twice a year.
It is among the first studies to show a biological impact of warming in
autumn.
"My father was a stonemason, and his hobby was mycology," recounted Alan
Gange, an ecology professor at Royal Holloway, University of London.
I'm on top of the world, I can't quite believe it yet
Edward Gange
"For 50 years of his life, he went out and recorded the appearance of
mushrooms and toadstools around Salisbury, and he also got his friends
in the local natural history group to bring back samples they found when
they were out walking.
"When he retired, he bought himself a computer, taught himself (the
database program) Excel, and typed in all these 52,000 records."
Now Mr Gange senior finds his enthusiasm and diligence rewarded as a
named author on a paper in one of the two most eminent scientific
journals in the world.
"I'm on top of the world, I can't quite believe it yet," he told the BBC
News website.
Strange fruit
The records included sightings of 315 species of mushrooms and
toadstools which appear in the autumn, being the seasonal fruiting parts
of fungi that live in the soil, on rotting wood or in tree roots.
One of the changes Professor Gange turned up was that the autumnal
fruiting period has expanded. Some mushrooms and toadstools are emerging
earlier each year, others later, which he thinks are responses to warmer
temperatures and higher rainfall.
More spectacularly, he found that more than one third of the species
recorded have started to fruit twice per year. There was no record of
this before 1976; but since then, 120 species have shown an additional
fruiting in spring.
"I looked up the data on the average temperature for February in
southern England during the 1950s, and it was 3.5C," he said.
"In the current decade it's 5.2C. We used to get cold days and nights in
February which caused fungi to be dormant; these days we get very little
of that."
In recent years a significant number of studies have found changes in
species' behaviour during springtime apparently related to climate
change, with growing seasons starting earlier, and young animals born in
months which would, in previous years, have been too cold.
This is one of the first studies to show a parallel trend in autumn.
After more than 50 years of observing the natural world, Edward Gange is
convinced that the climate is changing - at least within a 30km radius
of Salisbury - though he prefers to attribute the warming to natural
cycles rather than humanity's production of greenhouse gases.
"When I was a lad, it was an absolutely categorical fact that Red
Admirals would not survive the winter," he said.
"This year we saw them on 19 January. That's a heck of a change, and
it's not the only one."