A boatload of ideas for fungi

There are a million things to do with fungi, from boats to book covers to medicine for bees. Katy Ayers, a Washington State University student and avowed mycophile has done some pretty amazing things with mushrooms and fungi, including a world record canoe and homes for bees.

In this episode, we talk with the bioengineering and biochemistry major about her many ideas, the fungal revolution, and that famous MyConoe.

Read more about fungi saving the bees, helping plants, and modeling a way to make biofuel stock in “It’s fungi to the rescue,” Winter 2022 issue of Washington State Magazine.

Transcript

Larry Clark:

There are a million things to do with fungi, from canoes to book covers to medicine for bees. That's what we're talking about today on viewed escapes, stories from Washington State magazine, and Washington State University, the state and the world. 

[music]

I'm Larry Clark, editor at the magazine. Today I'm talking with Katy Ayers, a mycophile who's done some pretty amazing things with mushrooms and fungi.

Hi, Katy. 

Katy Ayers:

Hi, Larry. 

Clark:

Tell me a little bit about yourself. 

Ayers:

My name is Katie Ayers. I'm a junior at Washington State University and I'm currently dual majoring in bioengineering and biochemistry. 

Clark:

That's really cool. And within that world of biochemistry and bioengineering, we have fungi.

Ayers:

The ruler of all of my thoughts. [laughter]

Clark:

First of all, we have to have the discussion about how it's pronounced. “Fun-jai” or “fun-guy,” which do you prefer?

Ayers:

I like the Scottish version “fun-jee.” But I also love the “fun-jai,” and “fun guy” for when we need to make some jokes. 

Clark:

That's great. I don't think I've ever heard the Scottish version before. So now I've actually learned a little bit. Well, you have a history with it as well. Tell me about the canoe. 

Ayers:

Well, my obsession started clear back in 2018 when I jumped on this idea to grow a boat out of mushrooms. Through a little bit of networking and a lot of help from outside sources, I was able to grow the world's largest mushroom boa. 

Clark:

And you had a great name for it.

Ayers:

The MyConoe. 

Clark:

Why is it called that? 

Ayers:

The Greek prefix for fungi is actually “myco,” and I just kind of slammed up together with canoe to get MyConoe. 

Clark:

That's brilliant. I love that. And it's made out of mycelium. 

Ayers:

Yeah, mycelium. It's the main, like body of the fungus, whereas the mushrooms are just a reproductive structure. 

Clark:

It has this really cool way of growing right, it can grow into almost any shape?

Ayers:

Yeah, so fungi, they actually grow through their food sources instead of around them. So they dig these tiny little tunnels and it really makes everything hold together really well. So it's great for making biocomposites. 

Clark:

That's great. And biocomposites is a word for basically something made out of living material? 

Ayers:

Yep, living material and usually a waste stream. Okay, to make it more sustainable. And yeah, everything from like agricultural waste is the main product we're using right now. So saw dust, sunflower stems and corn husks. All that good stuff. 

Clark:

And so you can form it in any shape like you did with your canoe. 

Ayers:

Exactly. All I did for the canoe was just make a very, very large papier mache mold, which I later found out was not quite strong enough, but I put it in a hammock and it all held together. 

Clark:

And it wasn't strong enough because it ate through the papier mache? 

Ayers:

Well, when you lay the papier mache mold on the ground and start to fill it with 200 pounds of substrate, it just kind of collapses in the middle. So the hammock held it to shape and then the fungus still ate through the papier mache by the end of it. And a little bit into the hammock also. 

Clark:

They're pretty hungry, aren't they? 

Ayers:

They're very hungry. I love how they eat just about everything that we make.

Clark:

I've read about some of the other cool things that people make out of mycelium. I think the first thing I ever read had to do with packing materials. 

Ayers:

Oh, yeah. Ecovative out of New York.

Clark:

Right. There was an article I read years ago and I thought, Well, what a great replacement for Styrofoam and other non-biodegradable materials. 

Ayers:

Yeah, of course, they actually were some of the first people to inspire me. I reached out to them to ask for tips and tricks when I was building the boat. And they've been very helpful, and they have some great ideas. I believe their packaging is being used by IKEA and Dell now. 

Clark:

Sounds like they were supportive.

Ayers:

It’s a really supportive community of people who are working within this space. Mycophiles are the best for everyone. That's mushroom lovers. Generally, we’re just very supportive. And we tried to make a network similar to that we find in the fungi, these interconnected networks that just work together to make a better world overall.

Clark:

And some of the biggest connections and networks in the world among organisms? 

Ayers:

Yes. So fungus is the largest organism in the world. 

Clark:

Do all mushrooms grow mycelium?

Ayers:

Most. Some of them, so mycelium is what we call a group of hyphae, which is just the stringlike filaments that go through soil or their substrate. But we do have our single-celled fungi, with not quite enough hyphae to call it mycelium.

Clark:

But it's the mycelium that that turns into shapes that you can kind of grow and basically teach it? 

Ayers:

Yeah, exactly. Shapes. It's similar to how they do the bonsai watermelons. You put the watermelon in there and you force it to grow to that shape. 

Clark:

Right. One of the things other things that I've read about it, it's like a hat, and clothing. 

Ayers:

Yeah, I've seen some of these clothes made out of mycelium. I've never gotten to hold them, but I've definitely seen them. Adidas is supposed to launch a new shoe made with mushroom leather. And there's the bags and the amadou hats, which are made primarily in Transylvania. Those are getting very popular. 

Clark:

Well, this is exciting about the shoes, too. 

Ayers:

Yeah, mushroom leather. A major corporation actually working on this is great. 

Clark:

Yeah. I have a question though. So if you if I have a pair of shoes, and they're made of mushroom leather, will they degrade? 

Ayers:

Eventually, in theory, they'll last until you wear out the bottom of your sole. And then once they're in the landfill, that will actually start to degrade again. And break down and be a little bit less waste for us to deal with later. It definitely could be a great option, like a leather replacement for so many items from jackets and coats and bags to lighter things that maybe we start growing it into like burlap, and create a new type of fabric that way. 

Clark:

Does it smell like mushrooms? 

Ayers:

It doesn't smell like your traditional mushrooms. Not like a button mushroom. So I use Ganoderma, which is a genus of fungi. And they have a very unique smell. It's very earthy. But from what I've read, most people in industry, when they use it, they actually heat treat it and then apply some sort of a coat, which I assume makes it smell less. 

Clark:

Yeah, I was just wondering, you know, if I had like a mushroom leather jacket, you know, people would wonder if I've been eating mushrooms. 

Ayers:

I think personally, I would like to leave mine alive. So every time I go in the rain, a week later I have mushrooms on my coat.

Clark:

That would be really cool. 

Ayers:

It would probably break down a little faster, but it would be worth it. 

Clark:

Yeah, I think you would definitely get some eyes, you know, looking your way. What are some of the ideas that you have? 

Ayers:

I have so many ideas. I have notebooks full of ideas. Some of my favorite revolve around recreation because I like to have fun. So like making bobbers out of mushrooms instead of out of plastic could really reduce the waste that we see around fishing holes and make a better environment for our fish. So maybe potentially healthier fish and like hunting blinds, tree stands because the mushrooms they're fireproof, waterproof, biodegradable, antistatic, they're buoyant, as you can tell from the boat. Yeah, so many great qualities. 

Clark:

Well, it's a great idea. So would the fish possibly eat it? 

Ayers:

I think they would start to eat it, especially if you had lost it in their bugs would start to grow, like want to come and eat the mushroom. And then the fish would pop up and eat them bugs.

Clark:

That's a really good idea. You know, I used to see them all the time when I would go fishing a lot as a kid. And I would always see them in the lake. You know, they get caught in the weeds. So and they would be there forever because they were plastic. 

Ayers:

Yeah, it takes a long time unless somebody is actively going out there to clean it up. 

Clark:

Wow, that's a really good idea. I like the hunting blind idea, too. You could just leave it out in the woods. Yeah, and it would degrade and you buy a new one the next year? 

Ayers:

Yeah, the trick would be to get it at a low enough cost that you can afford to do that every year. 

Clark:

Do you think it's really expensive to make material out of mushrooms or fungus? 

Ayers:

Not really. I think once you have it in like an actual manufacturing setting, the cost would plummet. But like for the boat, I spent roughly $500, which is a little bit expensive. But I was starting from scratch, I had to buy all of the materials and the tools. So that added a lot to my costs.

Clark:

Well, it doesn't sound like too much to me, though. You know, I mean, if you think about the price of a canoe or a small boat of any sort, you know, you're gonna spend that much easily. 

Ayers:

Yeah, a lot more probably. The main cost was definitely the tools because I think I spent $100 on three tons of wood chips. And then like $50 on a culture and that was basically it. The newspapers were free. The glue was $10.

Clark:

So question about your MyConoe? You did it first at a state fair? 

Ayers:

Yeah, the Nebraska State Fair funded the project for me. So it's been on display for the last three years. It just finished its third fair. 

Clark:

Is it gonna last much longer? Do they have it in an environment that'll it'll stick around? 

Ayers:

It's still alive and still going it's actually on display at Central Community College. So I think it'll be around for a while. Yeah. I don't see anything taking it down.

Clark:

So what are you working on here at WSU?

Ayers:

I'm so lucky because I actually came to WSU after reading a research article that inspired the research I'm going to do right now. The article was out of the bee lab, and they're feeding the exudates of Ganoderma to their honeybees. And they showed a drastic reduction in their viral loads, or how much virus they carry. And the virus can take out entire colonies. So it's really important to do with that. And when I read that, I thought, well, what if we help the solitary pollinators, which are pollinators that don't live in a hive, but they pollinate almost 80% of our native plants. So right now, I am growing habitat for those solitary pollinators to nest, but I'm using the fungus to do it. 

Clark: 

So they'll be able to live in it and eat it. And basically, it's like medicine. 

Ayers:

Exactly. Hopefully, it's a three in one. 

Clark:

Yeah, that's really cool. If I remember correctly, you made some in Nebraska. 

Ayers:

Yeah, so I've had two prototypes already. The first year, I just made one. The second year, we put out almost 40. And then this year, I'm changing the prototype again, and get them put out, hopefully, at least another 25. 

Clark:

Is that for next year? That's for this coming summer? 

Ayers:

This coming summer. Yeah. 

Clark:

Great. Well, that'll be exciting to see what the results are. 

Ayers:

Yeah. And measure that and spread them all across the state, hopefully. And it's really cool, too, because the solitary bees, many of them are native species. And some of them are endangered. 

Clark:

I understand that there's a lot of them. 

Ayers:

The viruses are also affecting our native pollinators. There’re 4000 solitary pollinators in the United States. There's over 600 in Washington. And a lot of those are on the endangered or threatened list. But a lot of us would never even know if they did go missing until we didn't see our favorite flowers or didn't have that commodity on the shelf when we needed it. Because like, leafcutter bees pollinate our alfalfa, which feed our livestock, which then feed us. 

Clark:

I think you're right. You know, a lot of people don't know about these solitary bees. What are they like? 

Ayers:

They're my favorite. Most of them don't have stingers. So that means that you can go up and pet their little bee booties. And they're also they're all different colors and shapes and sizes. There's some that are like the smallest piece of lead and my pencil and others that are as big as my thumb. A wide variety. 

Clark:

Oh, that's great. It's got to feel good to be able to help them out, too. 

Ayers:

Yeah, that's the goal. I view all insects as almost like people, they’re somebody. So I do like to be able to do my part. 

Clark:

Kind of stepping back a little bit, can you tell me what else inspired you or who else inspired you to get into this field? 

Ayers:

The mushroom obsession actually started in an English class, my introductory English class, when a professor at Central Community College in Nebraska told us that we were going to write a synthesis essentially of a problem and how to solve it. And that problem needed to be around climate change, so we could pick anything. And I stumbled across this documentary called Super Fungi. And that documentary, they talked about the packaging, and they talked about, Paul Stamets did this experiment where they had piles of polluted soil, and they treated one with nothing one with a chemical and one with the Ganoderma. And after two months, the one that had the mushroom treatment, I think it was oyster mushrooms, actually, but the one that had the mushroom treatment had life, it was growing again. There were plants, there were insects, there were birds. The chemically treated one had no plants, and the one that wasn't treated was still just a pile of sludge, essentially. So it can really, really increase how fast we can clean up these messes that we keep making. 

Clark:

Yeah. It's kind of a wonder material. 

Ayers:

It really is. And there's so many fungi, I think there's over, they think there's over 1.5 million. We've only identified about 200,000. So there's so much opportunity for going into taxonomy and fungi and finding which mushrooms eat what pollutant. It's kind of an amazing thing. 

Clark:

Is it something that you were interested in doing? 

Ayers:

I would love to do all of this. There's so many opportunities in mycology as a field that is really hard to pick sometimes. 

Clark:

I think it's really fascinating that you went into bioengineering as well. You know, the engineering aspect of mycology, if you want to call it that, it's a thing. It's something a lot of people don't necessarily think about. 

Ayers:

Yeah, so I'm very hopeful that I'll be able to help, like start this new field of myco-engineering underneath of bioengineering. And essentially, instead of engineering for biological systems we engineer from and with biological systems. 

Clark:

Sure. I mean, that makes sense to me from everything you've said. 

Ayers:

Yeah. Sometimes I think the fungi are way smarter than we are. And I'm just learning about metabolic engineering in my cellular engineering class. And it's really inspiring me for a lot of other ideas. Because there's so many intermediate chemicals that mushrooms produce, and they're so complex compared to like a bacteria. And they're understudied, completely understudied. Yeah, we know essentially next to nothing for the Ganoderma fungus as looking and they identified 217. They call them functional immune proteins. They're basically proteins that are in the fungus when consumed by a human, they either boost or slow down your immune system based on what you need. So that's incredible that it can take somebody who has an overactive immune system and bring them back to regular, but also an underactive and bring them back. 

Clark:

That's interesting, though I haven't heard of that. But I know, you know, from some Indigenous practices, and even so-called folk medicine, you know, fungus and mushrooms have been a big part of that for a long time. Have you heard of any old ideas that might be reintroduced? 

Ayers:

Yeah, so in ancient Chinese literature, they actually call this mushroom I'm working with the mushroom of immortality, and they would make teas and tinctures out of it and drink that and it would help them live longer. And like the lion's mane mushroom, that one's actually been shown to increase the myelin sheath in your brain, which connects your neurons to send signals. And so there's a chance that that could help reverse or stop the symptoms of Alzheimer's. 

Clark:

Wow, there's just seems to be so much possibility. 

Ayers:

There really is, and their connections with plants. And those plants are oftentimes the base of our medicines as well. So there is a chance that they play a role in that the aspirin that we get from willow trees, those willow trees are connected by fungi to other trees, and they're sharing nutrients through that fungal connection. 

Clark:

Oh, like a food network of sorts? 

Ayers:

Yeah. A big food pantry, if you will, sharing is caring. 

Clark:

So it sounds like you know, there are all these possibilities, all these different ideas? How are you gonna choose which one to do next? Or have you already thought about it? 

Ayers:

That's a great question. So right now, I'm really focusing on figuring out where I'm gonna go to grad school so that I can continue to do this research. But for right now, my heart is still with the bees, until we get this problem somewhat solved. So I'm dreaming on a big scale of  bee myco-hotels, like as big as a trailer and you drive it onto a farm. And it's halfway stocked with bees. So you have that initial like population to go out and pollinate and then come back and lay more eggs. And then after those hatch out the next year, you could actually use that as a soil amendment to feed your crops. So you're getting pollination, crop feeding. And hopefully that will help reduce erosion as well. Because stronger soil means less erosion. 

Clark:

That's a great idea. Because you could just till it right back into the ground once you're done with it. 

Ayers:

Exactly. They'll feed your plants and your microbes in your soil and help out the bees at the same time. 

Clark:

And then you would bring in a new one. 

Ayers:

Yep. And you can essentially use the waste product of those crops to grow the new one. So it'd be a low cost alternative to paying for like honeybee colonies to come in. 

Clark:

I think all of your ideas are amazing, and a lot of fun. And before we go, I I'll pitch an idea for you. I had a friend that retired recently, and I bought her a journal. And as I was doing it, I saw, Oh, it's got this leather cover. So, could there be like a journal with a mushroom leather cover? 

Ayers:

Oh that’s a great idea. I have not seen any of those on the market. But I will bring it up to the Toadstool Troop because we're looking for project ideas right now. 

Clark:

What’s the Toadstool Troop?

Ayers:

We’re a group of students here at WSU starting a mushroom club, but we didn't want to call ourselves the mushroom club. So we're now the Toadstool Troop. Last week we decided between growing a Cougar pontoon or gift boxes, but I think journals would also be a great idea. 

Clark:

Could you have like the Cougar logo embossed into that. I would buy that. I would support your club.

Ayers:

Fundraiser achieved. 

Clark:

There we go. Any other ideas or anything else that that our listeners might be curious about? 

Ayers:

Oh man, there's so much I don't even know where to start. One of my favorite projects was when NASA came out with their drone back in 2014. They grew it out of mycelium so that we could be more sneaky when we surveil other countries. So if you crash your drone, it would just decompose and leave behind electronics. So it wouldn't be as suspicious. But imagine like a plane of mushrooms. You just need a fiberglass coating. But it could be a lot lighter weight if you use the insulation of fungus instead. Or like giant floating generators that sit out on the ocean. And they would sit there and flow attached to a weight at the bottom. And you could use the potential energy changes of that floating thing to create energy or windmills on the ocean that also take the wind turbine energy and that potential energy. 

Clark:

So we get two kinds of energy for one thing.

Ayers:

Yeah, that wouldn't be damaging to the environment. And microbial fuel cells are coming around. They mainly rely on bacteria. But people are using fungi to help boost the output voltage. There's just a lot happening in a very short period of time. 

Clark:

Sounds like a fungal revolution. 

Ayers:

It really is. 

Clark: 

In a good way. Thank you so much for talking with me today. And really looking forward to everything and to seeing what the Toadstool Troop puts together. 

Ayers:

Yeah, of course. Thank you for having me.

[music]

Clark:

Thanks for listening to Viewscapes. Our theme music was by Regents Professor Greg Yasinitsky. If you want to read more about fungi and a whole bunch of other stories, visit magazine.wsu.edu