I live on the west coast of north america - the last few years following wildfires my mum heads up to the scorched mountaintops to pick morels and sells them. Big hauls, hundreds of dollars' worth of rare mushrooms growing in ruined forests.

WA picked them near Crystal last year. This year it'll probably be near Index. The forest service provides burn maps.

PNW Mushrooms FB group for more info. Here are all the rules on commercial, personal harvesting and maps: https://www.fs.usda.gov/detailfull/okawen/passes-permits/for...

I knew a lady who, her and her two kids, make $1500 in a weekend. Oregon Coast range, don't remember what types. It's important to remember with all mushrooms there are only a few good days a year.

Perhaps the "rare mushrooms" should be left alone. Perhaps they would become less rare.

Edit: that's right folks, keep those downvotes coming for suggesting actually conserving something instead of exploiting it.

They aren't really 'rare' they just can't be cultivated in captivity at a commercial scale well due to their need for a symbiotic relationship with trees as well as Morels being very picky about their fruiting triggers. I have seen people successfully 'seed' an area by making a slurry by blending molasses, water, and wild foraged morels that were subpar and letting the spores germinate with a water aerator running in the bucket and dumping the slurry in areas on their property that were favorable to Morels.

>wild foraged morels that were subpar

That sounds kind of like the opposite of how you'd want to slowly end up domesticating a lifeform, doesn't it?

subpar here can mean harvested too late to be palatable, not that the mushroom itself had anything wrong

Yeah, I meant past prime, slimy, partially eaten by slugs etc.

We should put more effort into learning how to farm them, as they are so highly prized.

A hundred years ago, there was enormous production of truffles (fungi with underground fruiting bodies) in Europe, but all of that production was lost when they fell out of favor. They are not the most nutritious use of the land, but lost none the less.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Truffle

Mushroom picking does not impair future harvests – results of a long-term study in Switzerland [1]

[1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S00063...

Mature mushrooms drop a billion spores a day and picking them doesn't harm the mycelium. They will be ok.

Picking them right, doesn't harm mycelium.

Digging them out and leaving the mycel exposed for examole, is bad. Cover them up again please.

And mushrooms need a lot of spores, because for a new mushroom, 2 spores have to come together by chance.

As far as I agree with the sentiment, mushrooms are the fruit-tip of the mycelium network.

I honestly don’t know if harvesting them change much. ( bare of methodically harvesting everything over a season )

Maybe they were rare because forests didn't use to burn that often.

Some do, naturally. Otherwise, there wouldn't be so many adaptations to exploit it, thus the subject of the parent post and its linked article.

"In the wild, many trees depend on fire as a successful way to clear out the competition and release their seeds. In particular, the giant sequoia depends on fire to reproduce: the cones of the tree open after a fire releases their seeds, the fire having cleared all competing vegetation... Eucalyptus regnans or mountain ash of Australia also depends on fire but in a different fashion. They carry their seeds in capsules which can deposit at any time of the year. Being flammable, during a fire the capsules drop nearly all of their seeds and the fire consumes the eucalypt adults, but most of the seeds survive using the ash as a source of nutrients; at their rate of growth, they quickly dominate the land and a new eucalyptus forest grows."

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Controlled_burn