An abundance of mushrooms to forage and study thanks to N.B.'s wet summer

While all the wet weather this summer has resulted in challenging times for some New Brunswick farmers, it's been the opposite for people foraging or studying mushrooms.

Heading into the peak season for mushrooms, there's an abundance of them in New Brunswick.

Alfredo Justo, head of botany and mycology at the New Brunswick Museum in Saint John, confirmed the recent wet weather has helped.

"It has been a really good year ... for example, chanterelles started fruiting this year in early July," said Justo in an interview with CBC's Shift.

"Whenever you have a year like these with lots of rain, you're going to see a lot of the summer edibles, before the fall season, fruiting in July and August, and that's what we're seeing this year."

Be careful what mushrooms you eat

Justo said there's a growing interest in mushrooms in general, and he sees it when he's out in the field. But he cautions enthusiasts to make sure they know what they're picking.

"If you're foraging for mushrooms for eating, you always have to be 100 per cent certain of what you are collecting," he said. "You have to have basic knowledge of the most common edibles and also the most common and more dangerous toxic species that occur in your area."

Jessika Gauvin is president of the MycoNB Society, and said her mother taught her to forage for mushrooms from a very young age when she was growing up in Moncton.

She agrees there has been a surge in interest over the past few years, especially during and after the pandemic.

"It's really cool to see all of the excitement around mushrooms," she said. "I go out now and people no longer look at me like I have three heads. They're like, 'Are you after chanterelles?' It's cool to see more awareness around it.'"

Gauvin also runs a company, Enchanted Mushroom Forest, which offers guided foraging tours or coaching. 

She said New Brunswick has a rich diversity of mushroom species, and it does take some dedication to learn to tell them apart.

"We have hundreds of mushroom species here," said Gauvin.

"Our really popular mushrooms have got to be the chanterelles, the hedgehog mushrooms, lobster mushrooms. Those are probably the most common ones here but we have meadow mushrooms, horse mushrooms — those are the ones related to the ones you get at the store."

Mycoblitz project

Justo said there is also a very active citizen scientist community in the province, who often help gather mushrooms for further study.

He and other researchers, including some of the citizen scientists, are taking part in the Maritimes for Mycoblitz, a North American research project spanning Nova Scotia, P.E.I. and New Brunswick for the first time this summer. 

Together, they hope to assemble 1,000 collections of mushrooms.

"That seems like a lot, but it's actually just a small grain of sand in the study of biodiversity," Justo said. "But it's a good number."

N.B. scientists name new mushroom species

A good year for foraging has also meant a good year for scientific study. 

Justo and his colleagues recently published a paper naming a new species of hedgehog mushroom, which was found and identified as part of a project in 2021 to study chanterelles and hedgehog mushrooms in New Brunswick.

"One of the finds was this species," he said. "We have over 30 collections of it. When we got the DNA sequencing back, it was a species that was not formally described."

He described the mushroom, which they dubbed hydnum atlanticum, as very similar in appearance to other hedgehog mushrooms — small-to-medium sized with brown and orange colours on the cap. 

Is the new species rare?

The next step after naming the mushroom species is for scientists to study how rare or common it is, and where it can be found. So far, according to Justo, it has been found in New Brunswick, Labrador and parts of New York.

He said the classification means the data is available to researchers throughout North America.

"Now they have the morphological data available, they have the DNA data available to them," he said.

Justo said researchers can compare their hedgehog mushroom finds to this one, to see if it's widespread or if it's going to be a rare species.

 "We'll have to find out in the coming years."