Tiger Sawgill (Thomas Roehl)

Lentinus Tigrinus AKA the "Tiger Sawgill" mushroom is something that has fascinated a handful of mycologists for a long stretch of time. From a fungal evolutionary standpoint, it is a mushroom with a long stretch of phylogenetic-flux. The current fruitbodies develop as a rather straight forward "agaricoid" form while simultaneously exhibiting a "secotioid" morphology within the same phenotypes. If you look back far enough into Lentinus' ever evolving phylogeny you'll find Lentinus Tigrinus is a polypore relative thanks to the postdoc work of Dr. Alexander Bradshaw...This past summer I was asked to talk at Northspore's "Mycology Outside" event and the first person I was introduced to was Thomas Roehl of Cark University. We immediately began chatting about the "Buller Phenomenon" and Thomas filled me in briefly on what his presentation would be about: Lentinus Tigrinus. While we go into a bunch of components of his talk in this episode you can get the pretty complete download on it Here ... Thomas, working along side Alxander Bradshawn and David Hibbett, who was one of the first mycologists at Clark to really dig into the Tiger Sawgill, have uncovered some amazing details about this fascinating mushroom. Thomas' past mycological projects and devotion to fruiting Lentinus Tigrinus in controlled environments, capturing amazing timelapses of both the mushrooms morphologies, brings this genus and species full circle for the cultivators out there!

    

Transcript

0:22

Get out afternoon, good morning, good evening. I don't know what time it is, where you are, but welcome back to another Myco wizards podcast episode. Today, we have an interview that I did with Thomas roll, who's part of this lentinus project. Thomas is undergoing a bunch of projects and studies for insane amounts of education, doctoral degrees and such, at Clark University, and kind of taking on the work of the infamous David hibbetts. David hibbits is a mycologist, largely centered in Worcester, Massachusetts. And kind of a funny story, I got sent this edible Boston Magazine, and in it was Elizabeth from fat moon. There was, I guess, David hibbits. And I want to say there was somebody else in there, and they were talking about, you know, Massachusetts and mushrooms. So it was pretty cool to see our blocks that had been fruited out at Elizabeth's spot, and then get to sort of read about David's work. And then months and months go by, and I'm at that North spore event mycology outside, and Louie introduces me to a dude named Thomas. So I go to Thomas's talk, and this is sort of his project, which is a continuation of David hibbett's work. It's called the lentinus project. If you check out lentinus, dot fungus, Fact friday.com you can kind of learn much more about it in more succinct and, you know, straightforward fashion than maybe this conversation goes. But lentinus, tigrinus is also referred to as the what is it? It's like the tiger saw Gill or something like this. I might be messing that up, but it has evolved this sort of morphology where you'll see like a traditional cap and stem mushroom growing off of a half submerged log in the wild, and next to that, you'll see the same thing, but there's this sort of membrane that grows over The bottom of the spores to almost prevent them from shooting spores. So these are kind of interesting mushrooms, and the way in which Thomas presents it, I won't sort of go into the whole you know, if ands and buts around it, it's just basically a really strange mushroom caught in some form of evolution, perhaps, at least, that's how he sort of presents it. And he has some really cool iNaturalist data to, you know, kind of pinpoint this thing happening simultaneous through simultaneously through the sort of adapted phylogeny over time that you can sort of see from the lentinus genus. So it's a pretty rad episode. It's pretty deep. And what's cool about Thomas is he's actually cultivated these fungi. He's been able to cultivate them in their regular form as well as their succodioid form. And he's trying to do a lot of sequencing, trying to understand gene expressions and really pick out certain components of the whole genome to study in detail. So he's got his work cut out for him, and I think that he's really carrying on a lineage of really interesting Mico mapping through our sort of exterior world, like, what got you into mushrooms? Probably growing psychedelics, eating them, or hunting for mushrooms outside. Perhaps you were doing all three of those at once. I don't know, but I know I was. There's something to this work, and there's something to this concept of just going outside and sort of finding species, and you know, seeing what you can do with them right after this episode, in a couple weeks time, we'll release the conversation between myself and will from snow Valley. And at that time of the recording, we were at the OP fungi fest out on the Olympic Peninsula in Washington, and there was a biodiversity study going on where they collected over 200 species of fungi from this really particular area in the rain foresty sections of the Olympic Peninsula. This sort of stuff is fascinating, man. This is how we get new strains. This is how we understand ecology, and this is how we really get to the meat of what's happening in the real world and how perhaps our cultivation component. Can be affected or is affecting that world at large. So enjoy this episode. Head on over to Micah wizards.com show a sign of support, and sign up for the deep dives culture of month club. Get a brand new culture in the mail every month to mess around with in your own lab. And man, hopefully we'll have a nice, sort of restful winter to be able to load up on some of these interviews that I've got planned for the near future to release. And it's getting cool. It's getting wild. Anyways, that's all we've got. Enjoy this interview with Thomas roll from the lentinus project doing this. I appreciate it. Man, I really enjoyed your your talk there. How's that was something else, man, I didn't get to see a lot planning on talking there anyways, but it was cool just to meet you upon entering the door of that festival or event, or whatever they want to call it. Well, glad you enjoyed it. Hopefully you got something out of it as well. I did. Yeah, you know, I don't know much about lentina stegatus, like in general, but you know that that sort of whole history is steeped in a weird layer of lore, I guess. But I had heard about, I guess, the guy you're working with, hibbetts, prior to lentina stragas or anything. My aunt, hilariously enough, mailed me some magazine, and I think in that magazine, David's brought up, and then our blocks are brought up because we produce a lot of substrate for farms via fat Moon mushrooms, I think. And so, you know, these guys, yeah, yeah, yeah. So it's just a funny Interplay to all of a sudden, then be at a festival, like, months later, and I'm like, Oh, the connections have been made. All right, as my lab partner would say, we are all part of the mycelial network. That's very true. That's very true. So tell me a bit of your background in history. I know you went into a little bit of it, but, uh, but how did you get started in in the mushroom stuff in general? Um, really, that was just random chance because I I did my undergraduate work at the University of Virginia. I'm from Virginia, Northern Virginia, the Washington, DC area, and loved the outdoors, but, like my parents were, kind of typical suburban though, the outside is going to kill you. So I haven't, wasn't, at that point, really exposed that much to the outdoors over a long period. And in undergrad, I randomly took this course called the biology of fungi, and it was from taught by Rita spielgis, who is a another mycologist. He teaches at Duke University, but he was teaching this course at a Biological Station run by the University of Virginia. So I was like, well, I need a lab credit. And it sounds more interesting to take a lab credit at a Biological Station than like in the lab. So I might as well sign up for this. So it was four weeks over the summer, and it was the biology of fungi. So we first day there, went outside and looked for mushrooms. And we're all like, I don't know. Man, I'm not seeing anything here. Where are these mushrooms? And Rita's was like, Look, here's some. There somewhere like, oh my god, this is amazing. Mushroom eyes came on all of a sudden, eventually, and the first mushroom I found by myself in that class later down the trail was black trumpets. Oh, wow. Really hard to find when you're not looking. They are really hard to find. But they were, they were everywhere that day, so they were just out, and that's what we found. And of course, we'd come back. He picks up some cream cheese and blends in the black trumpets and like we eat in crackers, I'm like, Oh my goodness. So there's this whole world that opens up from that point, and that was 2011 so 13 years later, I think it is. I'm still here doing my ecology stuff. It sucks, right? It does it, it does, yeah. So that's how I got introduced. After that, I graduated and lived at home for a bit and joined the mycological association of Washington, which I suppose I should show you the shirt I'm wearing. Oh yeah, that's what's up. That's a nice morale that's from the DC club. This was the first mushroom shirt that I bought. So, oh, cool. Do they have much of the scene down there for, like, for, you know, outdoor mycology events and whatnot, or is it just mostly the core mycological group, the there's not a whole lot of oppression of options out there. The mycological association of Washington DC was like the main one in the area, and it covered like most of Maryland. Um, the pretty much all of Northern Virginia, you'd have to drive two hours to find the next mushroom club. So they're the the big one in the area, and they did a lot of stuff. Say, in the summer, you would have forays every week. Eventually I became a foray leader. But, you know, I started out attending them, learn stuff from other people, learn how to identify them. Of course, invited people to give lectures as well, which I got to see some great mycologists give presentations, so like Kathy aim, I remember her talk about mushrooms in Guyana, wow. The the book redwoods of the north, north coast. Yeah, by I'm forgetting, yeah, I don't know who's in the other guy, no, not Christian Schwartz, um, I'm forgetting the author's name. Sorry if you're listening, I apologize. They're in there somewhere. There's so many names in this industry. Now it's like, even I don't know hibbetts only comes to my head right out of the bat is because there's another kind of dramatic story with a fellow up here named Rick Tibbits. So I'm always like, Man, I got Tibbets and hibbetts in the same category. If it doesn't rhyme, I can't remember it, you know? So, so, yeah, so presentation, beautiful book, all these gorgeous pictures of mushrooms. So there they had tasting events, and that's honestly where I learned most about my ecology, from the Washington DC club. And then I also started writing a blog. So I was doing my own like, background research and writing up stuff that I thought was interesting and learning more that way. So still active. Yes, it is. You can check it out. It's fungus. Factfriday.com I haven't updated in a while. I have a list of things that I want to do blog posts for but there's a problem of finding time when you're doing a PhD. I can feel that. So that's cool. So you started that blog around the time you're involved in these different events. I believe I started that 2013 and officially joined the DC club the following year. Okay? And so, like, the bulk of my activity is, yeah, when I was active with the Washington DC club, stuff on my own, yeah, that's got to be such a fascinating area to look for mushrooms, because I've just visited friends and stuff there. And there's these, like, inward colonies of cul de sacs, where you like, eventually woods, you know, but the woods are like, so well hidden that you're like, where am I going to go look for mushrooms, or get out in the wild? I'm sick of suburbia, or whatever. Yeah, it can be tricky to find some nice patches of forest. We did a lot of forays in Maryland, because they were friendly to foragers, which was helpful for us. Every year for morale season, we drove three hours, two hours. It's not three hours. Three hours is West Virginia, one and a half ish hours west to get to Shenandoah National Park for Morel hunting. So they had some good morale hunting up there. I bet, I bet. So there's, there's places to go around. I did a very short research, like informal research project in my own backyard. When I was there once for three years, I had a map and of my backyard and put a pinpoint on the map for every mushroom that every Ecto mycorrhizal mushroom that fruited. And so we had this one Willow oak, Willow Oaks or ectomycorrhizal and then this row of Leland Cypress next to it, there is a birch a bit further back. But pretty much all the trees around were of the only ectomycorrhizal tree around was that Willow oak. So I knew all of these mushrooms were inter interacting with that one tree. Yeah. And so I have this data set for three years where I was doing it all these mushrooms, and I could see, like, how this one species, ionosphere, Mosa, was growing and like taking over territory from other species and some other ones, like, they just kind of have these large networks and kind of overlap with anyone. So I kind of wonder if these Russia, Pulver ulenta, was finding a way to not compete with the inositi and to kind of. Arriving in a different kind of niche with the tree roots. I don't know that's interesting coming from one tree. Yeah, that's sort of how the map mate, yeah, wow. Okay, scleroderma was further out, so that it seems to be doing something else. It specifically wants to be far away from the tree. Yeah? Wow, obviously one tree, one data point there. I can't really draw that many conclusions, but it was really interesting. And it's really hard to do that kind of study in a large scale, because in a forest, you can't look and see which tree are they associating with. But suburbia, you have these little pockets. One person likes this, one nice big tree in their yard, and everybody else has these little Ecto mycorrhizal one or arbuscular mycorrhizal trees surrounding it. So it's a perfect little petri plate for doing that kind of work. I hope somebody takes that up, but it's baby No, but still short term No. But if it's easy, general concepts that if people getting into mycology in general, wrap their heads around, they can be like, Wow, yeah, I live in a middle of a neighborhood I hate and but I love this one tree. And, you know, most of us are the same in the sense that if you're looking at fungi, you're looking at trees. So if you can identify one that's of importance to a fungal network, or, you know, a cacophony of different activity you can't hear. You know, that's, that's amazing. Yeah? Wow, yes. So anybody listening to this, feel free to take this idea, apply it to your own yard. Yeah, I would love to see the results, especially over like, if you can keep it up for 10 years or 2030 that would be cool. Well, yeah. And these typographical things are so fascinating to the general geography, especially in New England, which is, it's so old, but it's still like, it's enclosed on, you know, or it's, it's being, like, taken over by just people and things. Yeah, true. It's, yeah, you kind of have to map two things at once. Maybe we've been talking a lot about that. We were talking about today at the farm of you know, this concept of honey mushroom and telema and sort of forming this abortive anteloma. And it's such an interesting thing to note what in a particular phylogeny becomes parasitic at some point, like the yellow oyster thing that's happening everywhere, and all these things are just they're topics that are so fascinating and entrenched in mystery, you know. And I don't know if that's what continues to pull you into this stuff, but it definitely keeps me happy and interesting. Similarly, I've gone down the mushroom development route in my research. I get my Master's at the University of Wisconsin. La Crosse, I did a project looking at the development looking at the development of flamino Fauci piece. So enoki mushrooms like because they make normal mushroom shaped things normally, but if you grow them in high CO two and dark conditions, they make these long, skinny things. Yeah. So I was looking to see if there are differences in gene expression in the different tissues within the mushroom as well as between the different growth forms. Yeah, I remember asking you about that, because that's such an interesting one in particular, and you're seeing a lot of I remember we brought this one strain. We call it just FV 4200 I think it's, it's like one of the more popular strains right in this area, or whatever people use your gourmet wise. But it's a largely people didn't realize you could just, like, cut the side of a block and allow these sort of golden enokis to form, you know? And it's such a different mushroom when you grow them that way, as opposed to, like, these traditional Japanese bottle methodologies or something. But I never even thought about looking at it from a DNA perspective until you mentioned that, that's pretty cool. Yeah, so I was looking to see which genes are active at different times. And I now, after looking at the I have this kind of idea that development is largely controlled by changing the cell cycle. So are they growing? Are they getting bigger? Are they dividing? Are they elongating? What's, what are they doing? Those kind of tweaks to the part of the cell cycle, kind of move development along. That's, I haven't tested this, yeah, I was gonna say I'm talking about, like, in terms of two nuclei in a coronacytic cell. You're saying that those change, or the amount of them change, well, high, full at the level of different hyphys. So hyphae can grow forward. They can branch and fuse with one another. They can inflate and get bigger. And so tweaking what they're doing, so flamelina, it can grow this big or into the dark. It will grow like that big, while tall. And so this big, the cells don't have to grow very long, but to get that larger form, then my idea is that you're. Not dividing as much. So you're not, like, making branches, you're not making new hydel tips, you're just making the cells bigger. Yeah, that makes sense. And that's cell cycle control. Gotcha. Yeah. I mean, these are a lot of questions. You know that many different cultivators have, you know, questions and cultivators are so funny. We're all like, we're the football players, like, we're just straight up, like, slamming forward, trying to get, like, the best yields. But it occurred to me, after you said it at the event, that you were like, you know, I don't know why nobody has written this down, but like, certain mushrooms are balloons, and certain mushrooms sort of had this, like, chitin construction, almost like a 3d printer or something. And I don't know, maybe you can elaborate on that a little bit, just because it's interesting in terms of self, yes, so you've got the your typical but mushrooms and things flammulina That I was just talking about, they make primordium, which, if you think about an Amanita button, you cut it open, you see the gills and stock in there, all ready to go, and then, so you just have to inflate the cells, and so it swells up like a balloon. That's our typical model of mushroom development. But then we have these poly pores that you know, if you find them in the wild, you they'll be like growing around sticks. They'll have little bits of debris embedded in them. I found a lovely hen of the woods once, which was just perfect, except it was growing on a sand dune, and it had rained the previous night, and when I looked at it, I'm like, Oh, great, there's no sand on the bottom, but the water had splashed all the sand up onto the underside, and it just grew a new layer over top of the sand. Oh, what a tragedy. And so I bit into it, and I was like, Oh, it was, I have that one still as a teaching material, so not a complete loss, but no, but it's some of these things you don't think about how fast they grow, right? They make layers. And our traditional model of inflating a balloon to make a mushroom, it can't explain what happened with my head of the woods, because the sand should be on the outside still, but clearly it's not. And yeah, as you said, nobody has actually written down this phenomenon, that we have these two different kinds of mushroom growth. But everybody who goes out in the woods and forages and grows mushrooms, they know this. Yeah, so the science is lagging behind a little bit. And, yeah, well, at least that's exciting for me anyway. Oh yeah, you're right in the you're right in the throes of it, like cultivators are right now. It's trying to, like, find these inroads of discovery. And, you know, for example, like you said that, and it totally just like, for some reason, it registered in my head the moment that we're looking at in vitro cultivation. So we're growing lions, man, for instance, next to Ganoderma in the same bag. And you know, it's in bags with the filter patch, and there's something within the CO two structure similar to, probably the situation you saw with an Okta key, where you can create a like ground swell of water absorption in this high CO two environment. So it looks as though you're getting a heavier mushroom, but you're just getting more water weight in there, which means you have to remove it. So regardless of when you kind of harvest a lion's mane, in vitro, let's say you're not getting more weight. There's no actual material being constructed. And in reishi, it's the polar opposite. If you let it keep growing, it'll keep creating, like this density of layers that actually does yield higher so all of a sudden, we noticed that the other day in a data set, and I looked over at Kate, who's working on this stuff, and I was like, Holy shit, this dude, Thomas, like, totally said this, and it just like, clicked. I was like, Oh my god. So it's amazingly simple, but you're right, it hasn't been written down. You got to write it down. Dude, that is a long term goal, probably not for my PhD, but maybe my first work after my PhD. All right, all right. So okay, let's go back a little bit. So you're, you're doing these sort of classes, and you're getting into this more and more. What is the steps that you sort of took to get to this? So no, Kotaki said you were going through an undergraduate school, and that's sort of what became of that. So I did my undergraduate at the University of Virginia, graduated, wasn't really sure what to do. I had found my ecology at that time, but I guess wanted to explore that a bit more. I worked in retail for a bit, so learned a whole bunch of stuff, had a job, and then I decided I want to go back to get a graduate degree. And so I applied some places. There's not that many places that offer master's degrees in biology where you have a focus on fungi. There's not many places. Have a focus on fungi to begin with. So it makes sense that there's even fewer with master's program. So I was out of school for like, six years, so I was like, Okay, I'll go back, get a Master's, do some research, build up, and then hopefully apply to a PhD. So 2019 started my master's program at the University of Wisconsin, La Crosse with Todd osmondson. If you've ever run across Tom Volks fungus of the month pages, yeah, sure. He was, he was also there at the time. Oh, man, rest in peace. Tom Volk that guy was, yeah, I was really sad to lose him. And it happened, like, right after I left, yeah, I have gone back and saved all of his focus, of them on the pages, just in case they disappear. Well, yeah, as you pointed out, right? Yeah, there's some page or website you pointed out. And I was like, man, I've never heard of this, but you're like, it's really hard to get to these things, sometimes they disappear in the code. Yeah, it's a sad shame of it. So that's amazing. So you got to spend time with them in that sort of environment. Wow, yeah. So it was relatively small school, but they had two great mycologists there, yeah. Couldn't be happy with that. And so, yeah, graduate work, there's courses. But more importantly, in the sciences, anyway, is the research that you do. So, you know, you talk with your advisor, come up with a research plan. And just from, you know, being out in the woods seeing things like weird amanitas That never make a cap and Stipe, they just make this really big base. There are two different growth forms. I came in with an interest in mushroom development, and we came up with this research project together. And Todd Tom, they haven't really studied mushroom development at all. So this was, like, a Okay, go for it. And I did it. I learned a bunch of stuff along the way. Came up with some interesting results. And, yeah, there was a pandemic involved too. Oh, right, right, that that was interesting, because I ended up growing the mushrooms for my research in my apartment. Oh yeah. Look, I can't rely on the labs to stay open, so they got to go in this cardboard box. That's amazing, though, man, it gets you that much closer to it. And you know, from a cultivator standpoint, is the majority of people that I interview on this podcast, like we're all growing in our homes until the spores take over and we have to got my, yeah, improved setup behind me here. Yeah, that's nothing in there at the time. But that's cool, though. I mean, a few things I want to call Yeah, I was gonna say, if you're interested in the development and that sort of stuff, it happens so fast that you have to, like, sleep next to it. Practically, you have to, like, yep, be there and see it, you know, and document it. And I loved seeing your I've never seen anybody else document Lentini in terms of a time lapse. So, man, kudos to you for doing that. There's not many people working on there's basically just me and my advisor, David hibbett, who's who are working on lentinus to grind us. So that's amazing, man, small field to begin with. Yeah, yeah. Well, we'll get into that. All right. So you're working with these guys. You're interested in sort of mutations and morphology and sort of the evolution of phylogeny, I guess, right, right. So now, with my PhD work, I'm working on lytinous tigrinus, which is a weird little mushroom it grows on, oh, I should have gotten a sample from the lab so I don't have one with me. Sorry. I know this weird little mushroom grows on silver maple wood that's sitting in water. It really likes to be in rivers with that periodically flood and have this fluctuating water level and the a weird habitat to begin with. The other weird thing about it is that it makes two different growth forms. In the wild, we have one which has gills like normal, and in the other one, the gills get closed off, and so all the spores are trapped inside the mushroom. There's lots of mushrooms that do that. We call it succodioid, and typically we see that in deserts. So there's a lot of these weird desert fungi that do something similar, like potaxis. Looks a lot like a shaggy mane, except it just doesn't open and sits there, keeps all the spores inside and slowly decomposes the outer layer. And those spores blow off over a long period of time, and that's how it reproduces. That's what is known for succodioid fungi. Ours, of course, is in a completely different habitat, in the desert. You can it makes sense, because if you keep. Spores inside, then you don't you lose less water to the environment, because you need water in order to release the spores in basidiomycetes anyway, and that's not water is not the limiting factor for lentils to grind as it grows right next to the water line. So it's in the water, sometimes in the water, you often see them. It likes to come out right above the water line. But if the river is rising, you'll get flooded mushrooms a whole lot of the time. If the river is dropping, you'll just see the dried out ones are up here. And then as you go down, you get fresher and fresher until the little pin pricks of the primordia right now at the water line. Yeah, that's what it likes to do. It doesn't it? It has as much water as it needs. So we're not quite sure what role this membrane is playing in the environment. We don't know if there is a benefit to keeping spores inside in such an environment. But if we go out in the wild, or one of our collection sites is at the Ipswich river mass, Audubon Society has graciously allowed us to sample from their property, and they have a beautiful site up here. Mass, Audubon's Ipswich river Wildlife Refuge. If you have chance, beautiful birder, if you're a birder in Massachusetts, go check it out. It's a amazing property there. So we've sampled from there, and we get about half of the ones are so COVID, and half of the ones have gills like normal. So it's if this was a problem and the mushrooms couldn't reproduce with this morphology, with the psychoduoid morphology, they should all die out from the environment by natural selection, yeah. But it just looking outside, that seems to be not happening. So there's either how closing off your gills either makes no difference and it's just evolving randomly, which we call drift, or there is some other kind of benefit that we don't know about to having your sports trapped inside in this environment. Either way, it's kind of mind blowing when you think about mushroom evolution, because it breaks so many rules. Yeah. So one of our projects is we're going to look at the population of this mushroom across the US, sequence genomes for about 100 specimens, and then there's computer programs that can compare the genomes, and based on ratios of different genes in well different variations in genes in the broad population, we can guess whether natural selection is the primary factor driving evolution or genetic drift, or some other options as well. That's amazing, man. Yeah, the only other guy that I know who's really spending a lot of time on the fungal evolution side is Jason slot, and it's like kind of saturated in the psychedelic side, which is, I was really hoping that at some point I would discover somebody doing this on some other side. And I'm really glad that you are man. You're the right dude for the job. Sylosphere is also a great system for looking at it from a developmental point of you, because you have so many of these weird morphologies that growers have found and cultivated, and so I really want to use that as a developmental model system, sure, except you would there is a lot of paperwork involving the DEA as well as state agencies and short term, that is not an option for me, but eventually made with long term, depending on how laws are edited, I would love to be able to do that sometime. But yeah, yeah. I mean, it's amazing that you're like, yeah, he's definitely somebody who, I don't think realized what his research would excite in such an emerging, you know, micro stoked industry and world right now, so I'm glad that he did it. But I think it's, it's philosophy is interesting, for sure, but the morphology, I think, has so much to do with, like, interbreeding from the Gor, you know, from the cultivators perspective, that it's not necessarily a lot of people taking other species of philosophy and crossing them yet, or coming up with different sort of things that are interesting in nature, where they find them. Well, every time you have a developmental difference, you. You can figure out what causes that, and that's how we learned how humans development works with fruit flies. So you grow up a bunch of fruit flies that one has a hunchback. I wonder why it has a hunchback. So you look into the genes, and you find one gene that is responsible for this. So they named the gene hunchback. That's how it works. And with fungi, we have so few developmental features that anytime there's a little like, a little difference there, I get excited, because that's something we can start with, and silos, but you have this whole range of developmental features with the same species. So that's what excites me about the silos the strains out there. Yeah, that, of course, tells you within one species what's going on. We might be able to apply it out to other species. Maybe not, as we know, there's two different types of growth, so cylospy Does our inflationary growth. So there's definitely can only apply it to those species, and not all of those are related to each other. So there's a lot more work that has to do to actually bring that from any one species you have in the lab or in the farm, to understand what's happening with it. Can we apply it elsewhere? And right now we don't really know, yeah, yeah. It's fascinating to sort of see these different evolutionary states. Like, I'm sure you're familiar with this rogue tidal wave, whatever you want to call it Enigma. It sort of grows, you know, in more of a quarterly fashion. It's sort of just a mutated blob, if you will, right? So that, in particular, I know a lot of cultivators of that in the industry who, when you dehydrate that, it does not, you know, lose the same amount of water weight. So it does not have the sustainable loning effect as, say, like a regular cubensis cap and stem mushroom. Is that weird? That is so exciting, yeah? So that's a good, exact love to get my hands on that strain, except, yeah, regulation, prevention. I mean, I think a lot of people are kind of like, we're stuck in this developmental stage where, if, if the feds, can loosen up at all from an academic standpoint, it just opens up the floodgates for the research that can be done. You know, it started so long ago, and I've just been reading these interesting things. I don't know if you're familiar with a he was actually a Clark graduate in like, the 40s or the 30s, but he was the poet Charles Olson from Gloucester, Massachusetts. Was born in Worcester by him. But, okay, yeah, so, well, you should look this up. It's kind of interesting. He was part of Timothy Leary's early group in, I think, 1960 down in Mexico. And, you know, he wrote this whole thing and gave this talk called under the mushroom where, you know he's, he's creating these linguistical sort of concepts, as he's sort of talking to this group of people at grattwick Highlands. And at that time, he's pretty far away from Clark University, but it still is entrenched in sort of his DNA. And Clark has had this fascinating history. My uncle went to Clark and started all these crazy different petitions and things like the new Clark School during, during the Vietnam War and stuff. So you're, you're kind of in this kind of particularly special, you know, area where you might be able to get, you know, philosophy. I don't know. The key might be there somewhere in Clark, you know, maybe not, I don't know. We would also have to convince the department that to allow us to have a schedule one controlled substance growing in one of the labs, and that might be a hard sell, just because of academic careers for certain man, I don't know how they've gotten away with it. You know, Jason slots, sort of arena. That's a question. There is a, currently, a ballot initiative to decriminalize philosophy in our psilocybin in Massachusetts. Oh, wow, but we'd still have to deal with federal government regulations, and that can be a lot of paperwork. Yeah, it can be a whole thing, yeah, for certain. Well, one of these things you brought up that was really interesting in your talk was using and utilizing iNaturalist in terms of, like, a data set. Do you want to go into that a little bit and share that with us? Yeah? So iNaturalist, for those of you who don't know, is this community science platform that allows you to go out in the woods, go out well, anywhere, really find an organism, you take a picture of it. Or if you're dealing with birds or frogs or something like that, you can record the sound. And upload that to the database, and they have an AI program that will suggest identifications for you, and then also other people who are community members can go through and suggest identifications. And this has created this enormous data set of I found species x in my state at this time, and from a mycology perspective, that is something that we have not had at all until iNaturalist mushroom observer and similar sites came along. We have herbarium records, but those are like one. Mycologist went out at a particular year and found a mushroom, dried it out, deposited, deposited it in a herbarium. And so those records are valuable. They span a much longer time frame. But if you want to know that range of a mushroom, for example, you might have five collections from the US. Can you really identify the mushrooms range from just five collections? There's some limitations there. So iNaturalist helps us overcome some of those limitations where we have this all these people going outside and taking pictures and uploading them. And so now, if you want to know the range of lentinus to grind us, you can go to inet, type in lentinus to dryness search, and it'll show you everywhere that they're found throughout the entire world. Of course, some of them are misidentified iNaturalist. Ai really likes to call any whitish mushroom with dark spots on it lentinus To grind us. So you'll get all these kind of old moldy things. Ooh, moldy spots on a mushroom. It's lentinus to grinus. So there's some limitations, and you have to go through and curate your data set. But I had one of my master's students, Sophie, go through all the iNaturalist records for lentinus to dryness in the US, continental US. And there were about 2000 records, and she went through throughout the ones that we couldn't confirm Merlin's, and then scored the rest as a gyrocoid, so with gills on the underside, or so COVID with a membrane on the underside. And we had about just under 1000 records that we could use. And that's like a mycologist dream there the entire east coast we had covered with observations. Observations kind of fell off in the Rocky Mountain area. It's possible, because there's not as many people there. So a lot of data sets end up looking like that, just because there's fewer people making observations out there, but we have so many records, and we were actually able to find that the Erik COVID form is present throughout the US, basically, but the So COVID form is absent from Florida and the areas around Florida, in the southeast, which nobody had known this before, right? You couldn't. So just by Yeah, we couldn't have because a data set like this didn't exist. And it does exist now, and that's just one example of how it's been used. It's been used in other mycology projects. I know some people are using it to, like, track invasive species, for example, which we have some invasive fungal species. So that's helpful from there, because otherwise, how do we know where the golden oyster is going? How fast is it progressing? Yeah, so it's, if you haven't used iNaturalist before check it out. It's takes a bit to learn how to use it, but it helps people like me to do our science. I also use it as, like, birders have like a life list. I try and put all the organisms that I've seen on iNaturalist at least once. Yeah, so I get like, a list of like all the organisms I've seen. So it's a fun tool for anyone who's going out and finding things in the wild. It really is, man, it's, it's a shame, like, I think half the time I'm in the woods, I'm trying to get away from my phone. So it's always, like, a hard That's true, yeah? But you're like, it's a double edged sword. You're like, Man, I should have taken a photo of that, you know. But I think the geo marketing is just such an important facet. But nice. I see it up here, like, I'm in a pretty, pretty room. Cool, you know, like, there's not a lot of people up where I live, in the mid Coast area of Maine, and I'll just pop on iNaturalist, and I'm like, Holy shit, there are people all around my house and, like, everywhere, just making observations all the time. And you're like, This is incredible. It's not just one person, you know. That's the beauty of iNaturalist. As you can see, all these different people, just like, scampering around. It's kind of phenomenal. You know, it's pretty cool stuff. So you did you find in this data, and maybe I'm mis remembering this or something, that there is like, sort of an evolution to these two formations in terms of the so COVID and the Erik COVID, like, seasonality wise, was it that in shoulder seasons, there's more so we are we found two differences between the Erik COVID And so COVID forms. One we've talked about so COVID is absent in Florida. The other difference is that our mushrooms appear at two different times of the year. If you look at the entire data set, there's two peaks. One peak is in the spring and the other peak is in the fall. Okay, that's reasonable. Other mushrooms do that as well, but if you filter for looking at only so COVID, they peak in the fall, but not in the spring. So that was also kind of mind blowing for two reasons. We had kind of noticed that in the Ipswich River, if we went out in the spring, we would find basically all the gericcoid, and if we went out in the fall, we would fall find probably 70 ish percent worse the codiod, sure. So we're like, this is an interesting difference. I wonder if it's repeated throughout the US. And so we pull down this iNaturalist data set, and like, I run that analysis, and it comes back to exactly match what we see in our local population, which, if you ever do science, that never happens, you always like, Oh, I see a difference here. Let me try it at the larger scale, and you can find a very distinct difference, but this was very distinct, and so it was just like, wow, yeah. So there's some difference there. I have no idea what this means. I think it's it's a fascinating thing, because in nature you you, like you said, you'll see these different formations of different, you know, sport producing and sport propelling varieties. But you can't quite understand, like, the reason why, and I think that something like iNaturalist will, in due time, just kind of blow the doors open as our phones are refined and cameras are refined, and AI just seeps itself in there in a kind of insidious way. But the good side of it is that it lends itself to this quick researching. I mean, you have these, you know, astrophysicists using it in stars, and we're using it with soil, you know, and it's, it's an amazing tool. It's fucking unbelievable. So, you're, you're growing. I like that you, you know, you're living in this world where you're also cultivating these varieties, and you're, you're kind of saturated in it. What kind of things have you done in that realm of actually cultivating these because you had some pretty amazing photos of I've never tried to grow in tyna spaties at all. So it's kind of out there for me to see it and be like, Wow. But how did you So mostly, mostly, we have this difference between the Erik COVID and the COVID form, and most of the cultivation I've done has been related to trying and find the gene that's responsible. So what we typically do is we collect mushroom in the field, we bring it back to the lab, and then we isolate spores from it, and those spores grow out. And at this point, they just have a single nucleus. So we call those monocarians. In order to make a mushroom in the basidiomyocytes, you need two nuclei, one from each parent. So once we have a bunch of these monocarians, we can cross them together on a petri plate, and if they're mating compatible, they will fuse with one another and make a mycelium with two nuclei, which then can then go on and make a mushroom. Now for us, what we're most interested in is this morphological difference. So for classic Mendelian inheritance, I'm going really far into intro bio here, right now. But this was worked out by this monk in, I think the 1600s Gregor Mendel. He was working with peas. He takes two peas, he crosses them together, and the new pea plants have this certain color, flower color. And so we figured out that there's two kinds of genes, dominant and recessive. If you take um. Two true breeding strains so that will always have the same flower color. I think White is dominant and purple is recessive, but I might have gotten that backwards. It doesn't really matter. We'll say white is dominant, purple is recessive, in this case. So you have a plant that always makes white flowers, you have a plant that always makes purple flowers. You make them together. Your offspring plant will be white flowers, so it has one gene from each parent. It has the purple gene, it has the white gene, but we only see the white gene, so the white gene is dominant over the recessive purple gene. And then, if you take that plant and makes, take some pollen from the flower and like make the flower with itself, you'll recover the purple gene phenotype in 25% of the offspring, 75% will have the white flower color, and 25% will have the purple flower color. And so you can do the math with this. I won't go into too much detail, but it tracks. If you have one thing from each parent, you make them together, the offspring, and the numbers work out too. That's what it should be, 2075 25 now you can also do this by taking a if you know your plant has one copy of the white flower gene, one copy of The Purple Flower gene, and you've made it with a plant that has two copies of The Purple Flower gene, then you expect half the offspring to be purple, half the offspring to be white. And so this was our first entry into genetics. Thank you. Gregor Mendel, and this holds for a lot of genes, and there's a lot of exceptions to this rule that we have since discovered in the couple centuries we've been working at this. So going into something as a biologist, you see a phenotypic difference, you think, Okay, well, it could be genetic based, but it could also be epigenetic. It could be a virus, pathogen. It could be phenotypic plasticity. There's all these other options. So for us, we have this strain that makes gills and the strain that has the succodioid membrane, the codioid membrane, past work has discovered it is recessive. So if we take one spore from the psychodioid, an individual that we know is the codioid, and cross that spore with a whole bunch from a wild specimen, then we can tell, okay, every time we've crossed this wild spores from this wild specimen, it's come out a gyrocoid. So it has gills. So we know that this only has the copy. It has two copies of the gill forming gene, yeah. But if we take a specimen for the wild, cross it with our succodioid Spore, and half of them have the succodioid phenotype, and half of them have the guild phenotype, then we know that the parent, the wild isolate, was had one copy that was for the Erik gene, one copy for the sodium gene. Wow. So that's primarily what we've been doing in the lab. So by crossing them together, growing out the mushrooms, we can tell what Gene our original wild mushrooms have, yeah, and then the actual mushroom just proves it, because it adds that membrane or not. Wow. We don't know what this gene is yet. So we can't just drop it in a DNA sequencer and figure that out. We have to go through the test cross set process and look at the morphology. So we gazillion base pairs. Yeah. The main goal of my PhD work is to try and identify this gene. That's amazing. To do that we have to have a whole bunch of spores from a whole bunch of wild specimens, and we have to know for each of these spore isolates is it, does it have the Erik COVID gene, or does it have the secular gene? So we get them, bring them into the lab, do these test crosses cultivate the mushrooms? And that tells us what Gene it has. And we're building up this culture bank so that we can sequence all of these isolates and figure out what parts of the genome correlates to the succodioid form versus the Erik hoy form. And through that, we should be. Able to identify what gene we have. That's amazing, man. So are you seeing a change at all in this sort of recessive or dominant gene over time, or is it, quite literally, just inherent it's always there. And is what it is, you don't see any sort of evolutionary moves so far we have the longest that our lab has maintained, one of these crosses. So cross it with itself multiple times. Has been for three generations, and that work was done in published in 2018 so there's a woo et al paper, if you want to look that up, yeah, that has described that past work. So that carried on for three generations, and for the most part, you could assign these are Erik white. These are so COVID. There were some that were weird, but that was probably just the culture conditions. We have a nice deli fridge that has been converted into our fruiting chamber for that 2018 paper they didn't have that. So they're growing them in boxes to keep up the humidity. So CO two regulation was a bit of a problem. And so a lot of those sort of intermediate forms, I think, were just the CO two levels got high and they developed weird. But if you get wild spec, from my experience, which has been crossing wild specimens, so I haven't really gone through the process of maintaining this in the lab and crossing populations, because that's a lot of work. From my experience, I've seen an intermediate form twice. I think, okay, it's quite rare. It's really, yeah, yeah. And those, they have gills, but the gills kind of split at the tips and get flattened. So it's not really the so codiod morphology, but it's sort of different than the erikoid morphology. I'm not really sure what's going on with those. I'm paying attention, but pretty much it's all either a gyrocoid or also codiod, which suggests it's a single gene, one of which is always dominant over the other. Yep. And that makes there's other options. And I'm excited when we can actually get our DNA results back and actually look, is this what we expect it to be or not, that's so cool. Man, that's incredible. How do you feel working at Clark and with I'm always forgetting his first name. I'm just saying hibbitts, but David hibbett, yeah, David, how is that relationship? How is working with him? Is he's an advisor for this project? Or yeah, he's my advisor. He's been working on lentinus COVID for most of his career, off and on. And so he's also interested in figuring out, finally, figuring out what this gene is, yeah, bringing this DNA fraction to the level, which is like, I mean, that's got to be sort of a breath of fresh air for his sort of work and studies. Most of David's work has been looking at phylogenetic so he's done a lot of DNA work from the standpoint of, how are things related to each other, which is another important part of our project, because we once we figure out what happens with lentinus to dryness, we want to know, how has this gene evolved over time? Do we see it in other members of the genus? So his experience is super valuable for this project, because he has this broader phylogenetic perspective. How are things evolving over time? Which is really cool, yeah. So you can see these sort of like morphologies over time in the phylogeny of polypore to gild mushrooms and so on and so forth through just lentinus, or how it's changed. Yeah, lentinus is a weird genus, because we have lentinus to grindus makes gills. Polyprice arcularius is also in lentinus that makes porous polypromal. I'm forgetting my B words. I think it's brumaless, which is also in the spring polypore and winter polypore. Those two are also in lentinus. They make pores. So there has been a switch. Lentinus itself is in the polyporeals, so its ancestors made pores. There has been at least one switch in the genus, from making pores to making gills. We're not quite sure. How many times it's switched, and in what direction we need a better phylogeny of our we need a better evolutionary tree for the genus. And once we have that, we can figure out, okay, lentinuous makes gills. Did it evolve from a polypore ancestor within lentinus. That's cool, because there's two morphological switches. Then one, it switched to being a gyrocoid, and then two, it switched to developing the so COVID morphology in lentils to brightness in the US. Yeah, so yes, we can identify that gene. There's something. We can track its evolution through the genus and probably through the polypores as well. Okay, be really cool. That'd be phenomenal. Man, yeah. So are you sort of, I think you brought up something in your talk as well, in terms of crossing and sort of seeing these patterns in Europe as well. So this is sort of non Continental, right? So lentinus covidness is its range. If you look on high naturalist, you'll see that US lights up bright orange, and Europe lights up bright orange. It's known from the United States, Canada, probably some places in Mexico, it's known from Europe, Western Asia, the Mediterranean area in general. There's scattered reports outside those areas, but a lot of those are misidentifications, because even outside of high naturalist, a lot of people like to call things lentinus to dryness, because that's the one that you know the genus for. So a lot of stuff gets called lentinus to grind us when it might be, actually be a new species from Southeast Asia, Oceania, South America, but we know definitely it's in North America and Europe. The interesting thing is, we have this, the COVID form in North America, but it is not present in Europe. So it's only North American in Europe, though their mushrooms have a partial veil. So there's a fibrous there's a ring of fibers that gets left on the stalk when that membrane breaks open. Okay, we don't see that in North America. So there's two morphological differences that we have one species. But these morphological differences don't cross continents, yeah, so it's possible that they should be given different species names. Yeah, I'm currently working on going through the biological species concept with this. So how do you know if something is a species? Well, the most basic way is mate them together and see if they produce offspring. If they don't produce offspring, then obviously they're different species. Yeah. Of course you have weird things like donkeys, which from mules, no mules. Mules are right, from donkeys, offspring of horses and donkeys. Yeah. So those are, that's an example of a species where they can mate with each other, and we get donkeys, but the donkeys themselves aren't can't reproduce, right? So therefore horses and mules are different species. Yes, yeah, so I've been working on testing that same concept in lentinus, to dryness by taking some from Europe and from North America, mating them together and seeing if they will make a mushroom. Previous research has been done on this. There's a study from the 90s, I believe, or maybe 2000s I forget exactly where somebody did take a spore from Europe, made it with spore from the US, and they were able to make structures that we call clamp connections, which are only present when you have two nuclei, one from each parent In the same mycelium. So in theory, it's viable. And so I went one step further with that. We're actually made a mushroom with them, and it did make a mushroom. I of course, have to, I'm working on that. Now the mushroom is dried out. I have to get spores from it and put it on a petri plate to see if those spores are viable, to really decide are these one or two species with that concept. There's other concepts of what a species is out there that some of them a lot of times make more sense with fungi. So I also have to test those as well, but this is the most basic one. Yeah, for sure. Yeah, and I know, with the sort of super intrigue now, with Protoplast fusion and dedicaratization models, people are kind of getting super into mating Ganoderma with, you know, or like, let's say a lucidum with a ostriatis or something. So it's not necessarily going to produce an offspring, but you can get to cell, or, I should say, two nuclei, to be in a cos state. So it's interesting how far that stuff has been pushed over the last, I guess, like 40 years or so that, you know, people started working on these monokaryotic breeding models. I don't know if it goes back before that. Do you know where this sort of stuff began? I will admit that I am not up much on the history of making protoplasts. Yeah, that's something that I have just started to dive into the literature on for some other work that I'm planning for my project. Cool. I don't know where it started. Obviously, have been looking at fungi grow for a long time. Yeah, there's been some great work done on hyphal how my Celia respond to each other when they fuse. I know Reginald Buller wrote in great detail about behavior of fungi on Petri plates, and he was working about the 1920s Yeah, is this where the bully effect comes from? I think this is when we first figured out how spores are discharged off of the gills. And he has a has a whole, whole structure named after him because he sat there with a microscope and, like, puzzled all this out and really did some amazing work for that. There's so many interesting people in the, you know, mycological history sphere that some did really amazing work, and some seemingly just didn't do shit. But they're like, they're something's named after them, you know? And they're like, I put it in a vial with sawdust. And you're like, great, that's what he did, you know? Yeah, there's you get that with effort field, I guess so. So for the kind of cultivation, cultivator component to this, like, what are you growing these things on? What do you have the most success in terms of, like, getting any sort of mushrooms from the Titus Tigris? Is it just a wood base on any particular Yeah, it's pretty happy on hardwood. So, okay, in the wild, you find it on, like silver maple, but it in if you're got it in culture, it doesn't really seem to care, as long as it's hardwood. So we have some hardwood sawdust that we're using. We've got, like, I don't know what it is, those compressed blocks, probably, of like, whatever sawdust was running through the mill at the time, compress it down into a block, and that's primarily what we've been using. So generic hardwood, we mix in a little bit of wheat bran and just add some water until you can squeeze it, and just tiny bit of water comes out, and that's what it grows on. And it grows like crazy. It'll sometimes produce mushrooms in on our spawn blocks when the fruiting chamber and then go contaminate somebody else's spawn blocks in the fruiting chamber. It's, it's very happy when you have it in culture, really. Oh, that's so cool, man. I'd love to play with it. It's one of those species that I don't, I don't have a culture of it at all, but it's one of those ones that I've just read about, like, you know, had OC for a very long time, and it is a, is it a tasty species? In your opinion? I have not tried eating it yet. It gets that, like, poly pore toughness to it, yeah. So you have to get it when it's really young. And I've been a little wary of you know, like taking lab samples out of the lab and like cooking them up. So at some point I will grab a culture. Yeah, I can't use the lab created cultures, though, because of USDA requirements, so I'll have to grab one from outside, and do it outside of the lab, and then I can go actually try eating it. But I am a fan of eating your research. I definitely ate some of the mushrooms I was growing for my master's project. Yeah. I mean, they were tastier than the cultivated ones. Oh, really were they? I grabbed the strain from my local forest and, okay, so that was just a wild strain, and grew it up. And was like, oh, yeah, these are tastier. This is the enoki you're talking about. Yeah, the enoki, yeah. So we'll see about one Tinus. It's supposed to be edible. Um. I just have to grow it outside of our research lab in order to safely eat it. For sure, for sure. Oh, that's very cool, man. We'll report back when you do. I think that's awesome. Well, where can people go and find more about this research? Your blog in particular, or is there any particular thing you want to promote. I have a lab web, a project website for this. It's one of the things I haven't quite gotten around to putting on my blog, but it's a section of my website that I haven't linked yet. So if you want to learn more about my research for lentils to dryness, that at, let me just double check. I believe it's lentinus dot fungus factfriday.com Okay, yes, lentinus dot fungus factfriday.com my blog, of course, fungus factfriday.com if you want to hear more about my master's research, I do have a post up about that. So, yeah, perfect, man. Well, we'll send people your way. I think this is great work, Thomas, and I really appreciate you taking the time. I hope you do more events in the future and sort of you know, just keep promoting your findings, because there's a lot of cool stuff at that North sport festival. But I was really glad I sat down and got to hear your stuff, man, it's, it's great work you're doing, so keep it up, man, thank you. I love talking about my research, like, what scientist doesn't but also I love hearing from other people at at that festival, also because, like, they were, yeah, we were talking, I was talking with somebody else about blanking on senescence in search. And that's something that I've run across as well, and I have some hypotheses about that. So now I'm like, yeah, get some some of these senescing strains from these people in the out there, in the mushroom growing community, so I can test to see what's causing this, obviously, beyond my PhD work as well future project that I'm interested. So I love hearing from people and like, what's going on, because there's so many cool things that we might not see in the lab, or when we're collecting DNA from specimens in the field. So, yeah, yeah, it's totally true. Man. Well, if people can get a hold you through the website, we'll send them that. Yeah. And I think, I think the senescence thing is huge. It's funny how these rabbit holes have so many different, you know, avenues that you can go down. There's a fungal genomics book that one of my plays gave me. I forget what it's called. I think it's just called fungal genomics, but I'll send it to you, but it's got this piece on breeding out senescence in an ascomycete. And it's kind of an interesting thing, because it pinpoints a lot of the issues in which people have senescence, quote, unquote, issues with something like a courtier said militaris. So there's something in there, in the genome, where it basically is just like, Yeah, I'm done, you know. And it sort of, yeah, kicks it out, you know. And it's, I think, that can be kind of regulated or turned on and off. So it's exciting to see where some of this stuff goes, and definitely, yeah, you're at the edge of it. Man, well, thank you so much. Man, I appreciate you doing this with me. Thank you for having me. Man, oh, man, what did you think of that episode? If you want more of this Michael wizardry, stay tuned, because we are turning up the heat. We are shooting for a release a week on Michael wizards.com in a release a week on Spotify, Apple, iTunes, slinger, Stitcher, bewitcher, really, you know, wherever the fuck you get your podcast, so be on the lookout for that ear candy, because it's coming your way. This podcast is produced and sponsored by main cap and stem. Need cultures, spawn, substitute equipment, raw materials, consultations. Reach on out to the amazing team of cap and STEM at WWW dot C, A, P, N, S, T, E, m.com. If you want to support this podcast, swing on over to Michael wizards.com and become a member of the largest culture bank on the fucking planet. Seriously, our team is focused on bringing you commercial, gourmet and experimental cultures from around the globe. So become a member of our culture club at Michael wizards.com today. Don't dig the flow hood work. That's okay. Come on in for the videos, the deep dives, the exclusive interviews and Pheno flicks. Yeah, that's what we're calling them, Motion Picture flicks focused on the phenotypes we are working with every day. Don't want videos. Don't dig the fungus on dishes. Just want to support this podcast. Well, shit, you can do that too, for five bucks a month to keep this show. On the road. Speaking of the road, I have to send a special thanks to the new and improved and magical and mysterious Micah wizards team, consisting of Mr. Michael Vance, Dr Daniel Ashley, as well as Tyler Crawford and the flow hood man, sir. Gregor Jones, okay, I'm Erik Lomen. Stay weird. My mic a wizard family, and hopefully we'll see you out there in you.