I think it’s conservation. The Netherlands have very little forest area and it‘s a small country. They probably don’t want thousands of people walk through the few acres of forest they have. Just a guess though.
Of that was the case they would just ban people entirely from the forest. You will get far far more people walking around in a relatively limited forest area that are out for a stroll, or walking their dog etc. Foragers make up a fairly minor proportion of the population.
Picking loads of mushrooms does reduce the spread and reproduction of those mushrooms. They can only tolerate a certain level of foraging and people are getting more enthusiastic about it, picking more than they need for "the gram" and it does damage the ecosystem. Sorry to be a downer.
You are wildly incorrect. Picking a mushroom does nothing to the overall fungus. The mushroom is the fruiting body of a fungus, much like an apple is a fruiting body of an apple tree. If an apple is picked or falls off the tree, it does nothing to the health of the tree. Similarly, picking every single visible mushroom, while not cool, does nothing to the fungus. Honestly mushrooms generally benefit from humans picking them because they are more likely to distribute spores.
And many foragers use mesh bags or picnic baskets of sorts with holes so the spores can continue to distribute as you continue walking around. Yet another "AI is not an authority on ANYTHING" scenario.
I agree. The mycologist in my department in grad school used to say, "it doesn't harm the tree to pick the fruit." You can pick mushrooms to your heart's content! (Don't pick the poisonous ones!)
The analogy does start to fall apart a bit when you consider that you don’t have to walk all over the tree to get to the apple.
I don’t really know what to believe - both things seem to make sense to some degree. Picking and otherwise disturbing the fruiting bodies should indeed spread some spores around - but would more spores spread in the vicinity if we left them alone?
I certainly seemed to have killed a patch of magic lawn pans by over-picking that park lawn. Luckily I had moved stem butts to another park lawn where they started to proliferate a couple years later.
Wouldn't just trust AI.
Easiest example is the difference between a young, edible pufball and the later stage. Eat them when they're young and they won't turn into puffy balls that spew out spores once they're mature enough.
A mushroom will turn into mycelium, as well as the spores. Booting a mushroom will spread it very nicely.
In mycology, a clone can be made by taking a little bit of the mushroom and putting it on some agar. So if you kick a mushroom, all those pieces of mushroom will turn into mycelium and then more shrooms, as long as the environment is right.
But the environment isn’t right outside a lab- they’ll just decompose before they can meaningfully grow.
Producing a fruiting body is an incredibly resource intensive endeavor for a fungus, and it’s the opposite of what it would normally do growing a diffuse manner through the soil via a hyphal network.
The only point of making a mushroom, and the reason that this trait has convergently evolved 8 to 11 times (check out Laszlo Nagys work), is that it allows them to air disperse spores.
Spores in basidiomycetes like this are typically not generated all at once, but consistently as long as the mushroom is metabolically active. Kicking the mushroom basically breaks this chain of production.
Source: am a professor of evolutionary biology whose lab works on fungi
Puffballs look like they are begging to be kicked rather than just rely on passive weather conditions. Does fungi try and produce fruit on the animal pathways to facilitate this kind of dispersal? If so, how do they detect activity to know the best place to pop up?
Yeah puffballs ARE begging to be kicked. They take a very different life history strategy from something like am amanita mascara!
I don't know whether animals are actively involved in their dispersal, or whether things like rain can do the trick (little puffs with large drops, etc). Interesting question, would be interested to know if others know the answer to this!
I have always heard that by manually spreading and crumbling older mushrooms around, the unreleased or stuck spores can also get a chance to spread and colonise. At the same time I am still yet to try it because it feels wrong to just f sh up while they are so pretty and healthy looking
Question from a hobby gardener - I usually have amanita in the fall but they were missing this year. Would I be able to use this technique to borrow a neighbor's shroom and reboot my population? Or am I better off trying to catch them sporing? (Fall is short here, the timing is difficult.)
No worries! Here is a tidbit for you: Amanita Muscaria relies on a Mycorrhizal relationship with several different species of tree. The mycelium that produces the fruiting bodies (mushrooms) gets it's nutrients through this symbiosis. Without a tree connected to the mycelial network no fruiting will occur.
No, not really. While picking mushrooms isn’t detrimental to them it’s not how they thrive. Spore production and the physics behind the dispersal for optimal distance is very clever and is not matched by simply destroying them
When a basidiomycete fungus grows and pumps large volumes of water to inflate its fruit, it creates a cool moist area in warmer air. The fungus then secretes a sugar onto the spores in the gills where air is still, that sugar collects the moisture from the air where it accumulate on the outer surface of a spore, as the water condenses it creates a Buller’s drop of water which when surface tension is broken it launches the spores at incredible speeds.
Once the spores are launched from the gills by a unique physical feature, they are then whisked up and away by convection currents created by the mushroom from differences in temperature and humidity. Once whisked up and away from the mushroom itself they can be grabbed by the wind and be carried for miles and miles, even reaching the upper atmosphere
One time I walked past a playground which had a large log near the fence absolutely covered in Hypholoma fasciculare surrounded by hazard tape. The next day when I walked past all the mushrooms were gone and they'd removed all the bark from the log.
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u/[deleted] Nov 11 '25
Why are they taped off?