Let’s face it - mushroom hunting is a competitive activity. You have to find morels before your neighbor does or the turkeys scratch up your patch looking for acorns. But it goes further than that, too, because when you do locate some prized species, you have to get them before the “worms” (actually, larval stages of insects) chew them up from the inside. When you get right down to it, much of the protein you ingest from wild mushrooms is probably of such origin any way :).Just as humans have learned how to cultivate mushrooms to avoid the vagaries of braving the wilds to find their own, so to have well known species of certain insects, namely a group of ants, the leaf cutters, which eat fungi that they purposefully cultivate or farm! Some white lab coat types from a lab in Germany have gone further afield, i.e., south east Asia, and have described other species of ants that simply eat mushrooms that they find in the wild, just like you! One species (Euprenolepis procera for those of you who just have to know these things) are keen mushroom hunters as they roam through the rain forests of Malaysia. Once that individual has been consumed, they move on in search of others.
In the lab, these critters can live entirely on mushrooms and can they stow them away! The report indicated that they can scarf down a 10 cm cap in about 3 hours. A typical colony can polish off several specimens per night. And they have nothing on you when it comes to preferring delectables. They even have their own list of preferred species.
Now try this on for size. What if some mushrooms whose toxins are poorly characterized are not innate with the fungal species, but rather are introduced by some other partner, in this case the ants? This idea is not so crazy when you consider the Central and South American species of so-called “Arrow Poison Frogs”. Some of these species have skin secretions so toxic, they can not even be safely handled when caught in the wild. Curiously, when specimens of certain of these skin-toxic species are taken to labs or zoos to be raised in captivity, they lose their toxicity. It turns out that the toxin is picked up from the environment from certain species of beetles, ants, etc. which constitutes the frogs’ normal diet obtained from their native environment!It has long been known that certain fungal species are reportedly toxic to some individuals, but are eaten with relish and impunity by others. What accounts for the difference? Maybe to "toxic" ones are being goobered by some tricky ants or even the insect larvae infesting their innards!
