A true mycophile

It’s been so disturbingly dry and bereft of fungi here in the Northeast that I feel a strong sense of foreboding. At any moment, I expect to see the Five Horsemen of the Apocalypse galloping down the road toward me. Five Horsemen? That’s right, for the newest and most potentially dangerous Horseman of the Apocalypse is Climate Change.

Bolitotherus cornutus, male

Mack is a Bolitotherus cornutus male.

In such difficult times, the fungally-deprived person can inspect horse dung for a fruiting of Coprinus or wait until one of the Apocalyptic Horseman’s mounts dies, then examine its moldering hooves for Onygena equina. Even better, perhaps, that person could look for an insect that makes perennial polypores its home as well as its breeding ground. I’m referring to the Horned or Forked Fungus Beetle (Bolitotherus cornutus), a tenebrionid species far more pleasing to me than the so-called Pleasing Fungus Beetle.

A few months ago, I collected a male and female Bolitotherus on a Ganoderma applanatum in Vermont and brought them home for study. The male, Mack, has a pair of horns sprouting anteriorly from his pronotum, the better to thrust a competing male from his polypore home (big horns are probably good for mate selection, too), while the female, Sue, lacks horns. Otherwise, both look quite similar… like miniature medieval armored tanks. This morphology suggests that they could survive anything, perhaps even climate change. Their actual survival mechanisms consist of (1) rolling over and playing dead at the slightest provocation, and (2) releasing a benzoquinone defensive volatile in the direction of a breathlike air stream. I’ve tried to get Mack and Sue to release this volatile by breathing on them, but they’ve refused to do so. Maybe they like me…

Certainly, I like them. In the time I’ve spent studying them, they’ve exhibited an almost total absence of movement that seems almost zenlike. What can they be thinking about? Perhaps about nothing? That would be very zenlike, too. And whenever I watch them for any length of time, I start to move into a zenlike mode myself. Indeed, I would recommend that aficionados of meditation and Eastern religions seek out Bolitotherus cornutus for inspiration.

On at least one occasion, however, Mack and Sue were positively unzenlike. One night I woke up around 3am and couldn’t get back to sleep. All of a sudden I heard a peculiar rasping sound from Mack and Sue’s terrarium. I saw that the ventral surface of Mack’s abdomen was grating against the dorsal surface of Sue’s thorax. From what I’d read about the species, I knew that this was the position a male and female Bolitotherus assume prior to mating. And, sure enough, Mack and Sue were soon going at it with, for them, reckless abandon. I’ve been so delighted with the two of them as companions that I’m currently hoping that another generation of Bolitotherus will grace my abode.

For another, equally delighted response to Bolitotherus cornutus, please visit the Cornell Mushroom Blog, from which I have gratefully borrowed Kent Loeffler’s photo.

North of Siberia (Part 2)

Wrangel Island

Still on Wrangel Island (red arrow)

For those of you who read my previous bog post, I still haven’t left Siberia’s Wrangel Island. In the island’s tiny cemetery, among several rows of Russian Orthodox crosses, I noticed a Star of David. There was no name on the grave, so I asked one of the scientists on the island if he knew who was buried there.

“A Jewish doctor, Nikolai Vulfson,” he told me. “Killed by fascists.”

Later I researched Vulfson for a book I was writing on the Arctic and learned that he hadn’t been killed by the fascists. At least not by those of the German or Italian persuasion during the Great Patriotic War, so-called.

Let’s travel back to the 1930s. Vulfson was Wrangel’s doctor, a man who was dedicated to the health of the local Eskimos (Siberian natives never call themselves “Inuit”). In this, he was opposed by the island governor, Konstantin Semenchuk, who said: “If you give Eskimos what they want, they’ll become lazy or turn against us. Then we would have to shoot them.”

On December 26, 1934 Semenchuk seemed to have a change of heart. He told Vulfson to visit the village of Mys Florens and investigate an apparent typhus outbreak. The doctor left the main village of Ushakovshoe by dogteam, accompanied by Semenchuk’s henchman Stepan Startsev. Only Startsev reached Mys Florens. He told the Eskimos that Vulfson had somehow gotten lost in a blizzard. But there hadn’t been a blizzard at the time.

It wasn’t until January 4 of the next year that Vulfson’s bullet-riddled body was found. Someone, perhaps Vulfson’s widow, radioed for a government investigation, not believing the death was a suicide, as Semenchuk had professed. An investigator arrived and began collecting information about Semenchuk, who not only seemed to have been responsible for Vulfson’s death, but commonly raped young Eskimo girls and also promoted famine conditions on the island. He was recalled to Moscow.

At Semenchuk’s trial, his prosecutor called the governor “human waste.” Semenchuk protested. He was a visitor from Mars, he said, and thus was not subject to the same rules as a typical Soviet citizen. The court did not buy this defense. Along with Startsev, Semenchuk was declared an enemy of the State and executed by a firing squad.

If I had known Vulfson’s story in advance, I would taken a photograph of his grave. No, I wouldn’t have taken a photograph. For I would have been too saddened by the fate of this good man to reach for my camera.

North of Siberia

The more remote the destination, the happier I am, so in the summer of 2003 I joined a Russian expedition to Wrangel Island, a 5,180 square kilometer chunk of Arctic real estate several hundred miles north of Siberia. Such is the island’s remoteness that its first documented visit didn’t occur until as recently as 1881, when the American whaling captain Calvin Hooper briefly went ashore with the naturalist John Muir.

Wrangel Island

Wrangel Island (red arrow)

Wrangel is a state nature preserve, the Russian equivalent of a natural park. But unlike Yellowstone or Yosemite, it has no facilities for the public (no public, either). We first went ashore at Rodzhersa Bay, where there was a small Russian research station. For want of funding, this station was remarkably rundown. I got the impression that the half dozen scientists who worked here did so for love. They certainly weren’t here for the money.

Inside a makeshift barn were four baby musk oxen, descendants of 20 animals brought here from Canada in 1975. Something about Wrangel’s air must be aphrodisiacal, since now more than 800 musk oxen roam the island.

I asked one of the Russians — a lavishly-bearded man who resembled the young Dostoevsky — whether a large invasive species like the musk ox might have a detrimental effect on the local ecosystem.

“Is problem, da,” he replied, “which is why we will be sending these babies to the mainland. We have another problem — no womens.”

Before he could mention any more problems, a border guard approached me and said: “CIA?” The look on his face was very serious.

“Nyet,” I replied. “Ph.D.”

The border guard burst into laughter, and I was off the hook. But if I had been found guilty of stealing local secrets, such as (for instance) whether insects or the wind were responsible for early spring pollination, what could he have done? Send me to Siberia?

Later I decided to hike the several miles from Cape Litke to Cape Uering, where members of the 1914 Karluk research expedition had overwintered. I should say some of them had overwintered. Of the 25 expedition members, 11 died of food poisoning, malnutrition, and hypothermia. If it hadn’t been for Captain Bob Bartlett’s heroic heroic sledge journey back to civilization, all of them would have died.

Half a mile into my hike, I came upon a group of tumbledown wooden huts and an outhouse, perhaps the northernmost structure of its kind in the world. A broken anemometer suggested another Russian scientific station fallen on financial hardship.

Soon I was walking over seemingly endless rolling tundra. Birds were everywhere. Screaming tour-a-wee, tour-a-wee, a female black-bellied plover feigned a broken wing, a maneuver designed to lure me from her nest. Wildflowers were everywhere, too. Blue harebells. Red rose root. Yellow poppies. Bright pink bistorts. Lilac fleabanes. Buttercups. Such an explosion of color gave the lie to the notion that the Arctic is a dull, achromatic place.

And then I reached Cape Uering. Whatever might have survived of the Karluk expedition was gone, either picked up by the Russians or reclaimed by the Arctic itself. The site was now buried beneath a veritable carpet of moss campion, harebells, and purple saxifrage. This pleased me more than any Karluk artifact would have done. But then who would not be more pleased by a small, perfect wildflower vibrating in the wind than by a scrap from an old tent or a rusty tin can?