MEET THE HUNTERS:\nIn a small office on the fourth floor of IU's Jordan Hall, mycologist Michael Tansey is starting his annual ritual. The fungi expert pulls out a wooden model of a tan and brown mushroom -- a figurine covered with deep pits and thin ridges at the top with a skinny stalk at the bottom. His eyes move over it slowly, fixing the image in his mind.\nHe's ready.\nIn Greenwood, Ind., nearly 50 miles from where Tansey sits, Jim Shackelford is searching for a folder. It contains notes from a naturalist class he and his wife Sharon Conner took, and he wants to review the mushrooms. Armed with the essential information, he just needs to pick a time to head outside. \nHe's ready.\nSoutheast of Shackleford's home, Connie Shipp is marking off choice parts of her acre-wide backyard near the Flatrock River. She won't let a lawnmower near her selections all month -- errant weeds are a small price to pay for the treasures that might pop up. Now, she just has to wait.\nShe's ready.\nThe hunt is on.\nApril marks the start of morel mushroom hunting season in Indiana -- a state so morel-obsessed that it hosts a Mushroom Festival in Mansfield, Ind., the last weekend of April each year at which crowds buying, selling and hunting fungi usually number close to 20,000. In the annual rat race to find the elusive delectable morel, or Morchella esculenta (its surname Latin for "deliciously edible"), it's every hunter for himself. As the competition ranges from wild animals to fellow hunters, Tansey, Shackelford and Shipp know it pays to be prepared for the annual "morel mania."
"The Expert"\nTansey has felt the pull of morel mania for each of his 34 years as IU's resident fungi expert. Once he has looked over the morel figurine he keeps in his office year-round to fix a field image in his mind, he's on the move to find mushrooms. He's relentless. Once, he even "arm-wrestled a squirrel" behind Memorial Hall for a morel -- and won. He teaches classes about fungi, leads local mushroom hunts and identifies poisonous mushrooms in emergency situations through the Indiana Poison Control Center.\nBut he recognizes the darker side of a mushroom-habit. One time, he ate a small amount of a sulfur shelf mushroom, a fungi known to make some people ill, and suffered gastrointestinal distress as a result -- despite the fact that he ate the same mushroom several times before with no side effects. It goes to show, Tansey said, that you cannot be too careful with what you eat: the chemicals a mushroom contains and how an individual responds always vary.\n"You're talking about a hobby where one mistake can kill you," he said.
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Morels are identifiable by their oval rubbery caps covered with irregularly spaced pits and ridges. This cap is secured at its base to a short white stalk that covers a completely hollow interior. The body cavity is one of the easiest ways to identify a "true morel," Tansey said, because it is easy to slide a finger all the way up inside them to check. In contrast, false poisonous morels like Gyromitra esculenta -- commonly called the "beefsteak" -- are usually stuffed with pith, or soft, spongy tissue found inside the stems of some plants. Others, like the false morel Verpa bohemica, are identifiable by a cap attached solely at the tip of its stalk. It wobbles, unlike the securely attached head of a true morel. The texture of a false morel cap is also notably different than those of true morels: The caps can be smooth, wrinkled, wavy, ridged or folded, according to data collected by the University of Michigan -- but none have the deep pits that identify a true morel. \nDespite all these telling signs, mushroom because of false morels and others hit a seasonal high each May, according to data collected by the Indiana Poison Control Center.
"The Real-life 'Mr. Yuck'"\nIPCC Director James Mowry has recorded scores of mushroom poisonings in his 20 years of working with poison cases, and can testify to the mushroom madness that grips Indiana each spring. Of all he has known, he vividly remembers two of the worst mushroom poisoning cases he has ever seen. One was from the sorrel webcap, a mushroom that produces the toxic chemical orellanine. In humans, orellanine can cause kidney failure in severe cases, according to data from the Federal Department of Agriculture. The second case was from ingesting the most poisonous of the false morels -- the beefsteak. It contains the carcinogen gyromitrin, a cancer-causing chemical. The poison can damage the liver, and the Food and Drug of Administration has recorded other reactions such as abdominal discomfort, vomiting and diarrhea as well as disturbances to the blood cells and central nervous system.\nBoth people involved in these cases were hospitalized but luckily survived, Mowry recalls.
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The IPCC keeps tabs on fungi experts around the state who are able to rush to the scene of a poisoning faster than the IPCC can respond. Mowry estimates that Tansey is one of about six state mycologists on call in case of a potential fungi poisoning. During the warm, moist months of spring -- right on top of prime morel season -- the IPCC often relies on the extra help. IPCC's 2004 records show a jump in calls received regarding mushrooms in May particularly: 54 of the 192 calls about fungi-related poisonings last year were in May.\nTansey estimates that half of the typical six calls he receives each year are toddlers who have eaten something suspicious, as he has been privy to many calls where a picnicking family panics when their child eats a wild mushroom. Most are not serious. If he gets to the scene and recognizes the mushroom as non-poisonous, he will sometimes pop it into his mouth right in front of the victim, he said. But carelessly eating a wild mushroom is like playing Russian roulette. Like the potentially suicidal game, sometimes the best medical treatment money can buy cannot save a victim. This is why when he teaches about mushrooms, he often tells the story about a wealthy member of a California wine-producing family who ate a poisonous mushroom and died, despite the high caliber specialists who treated him. \n"The idea is, one mistake can kill, and although medical attention can sometimes save your life, sometimes it can't," Tansey said.
"The Amateurs"\nGreenwood resident Jim Shackelford and his wife Sharon Conner were infected with mushroom mania 15 years ago when they saw people walking around with bags filled with morels in a park near their home. The two were immediately intrigued. But after taking a naturalist class through the Department of Natural Resources, co-taught by Tansey, and hearing his warnings about eating wild mushrooms, they have reined in their passion with some caution.\n"That guy put the fear of God into me with his stories of people who've died," Shackelford said. "Ever since we took that class we've been a little leery of eating them."\nBut this fear has not stopped them. The two self-described "fair-weather mushroom hunters" usually head out each year to a favorite park near their home -- a heavily-wooded 25-30 acre plot covered with old-growth trees and lots of morels ... sometimes. The pickings, Shackleford said, are either really good or absolutely terrible.\n"We haven't made a big strike yet, but it's kind of like looking for gold," \nShackelford said.
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At prices of nearly $30 per pound sold commercially, morels truly are the fungi-equivalent of gold. Indiana's largest annual mushroom festival at Mansfield, Ind., April 23-24, features a contest for the biggest mushroom, (last year, the winning 11-ounce morel was auctioned off for $40), a widespread hunt and hundreds of cooked and fresh mushrooms. And it is hardly the only festival a mushroom enthusiast can hit this year: Irvine, Ky., will also hold a "Mountain Mushroom Festival" April 23-24, which even features a 5K Fungi Race and Miss Mushroom Pageant; Boyne City, Mich., will hold a three-day Morel Mushroom Festival May 12-15; and Muscoda, Wisc., -- which calls itself the "Morel Mushroom Capital" -- will hold its annual festival May 14-15. Magnolia, Ill., also annually holds the "Spongy Fungi Festival" and "Morel Mushroom Hunting Championships," but has not yet announced a 2005 date. And those are just some of the Midwest festivals -- others extend up and down both coastlines, creating morel mania everywhere.
"The Morel Maniac"\nConnie Shipp, who lives on an acre of land by the Flatrock river southeast of Shelbyville, Ind., does not usually hit up mushroom festivals. She does not need to -- she already has morel mania bad. Really bad. During the 17 years she's lived with her husband Kim and discovered morel mushrooms, she has refused to cut her lawn during the month of April. Shipp has her favorite spots picked out, ones that have sated her appetite through over the years. A few excess straggly weeds on her lawn are a small price to pay for the mushrooms that "melt in your mouth," she said. If the weather stays warm, she expects to find some within the week. She's already picturing it.\n"It's like finding gold," \nshe said.
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Most serious morel hunters' rule of thumb is to start searching for morels "when the oak leaves are the size of a squirrel's ear," -- or in other words, right now.\nThe hunt is on.\n-- Contact Managing Editor Kelly Phillips at kephilli@indiana.edu.
