Mushroom man

Ex-Del Norter has become fungi expert

Science with benefits: Dr. Desjardin displays an edible mushroom collected for the table while looking for rarer varieties for research. Del Norte Triplicate/Bryant Anderson

Just hours after a park ranger infuriated him for detaining Desjardin and two fellow scientists for 20 minutes in Jedediah Smith Redwoods State Park for photographing mushrooms for a research project, he could laugh about it, though not without some bitterness.

“Let’s warn the readers in Del Norte County that they’re not welcome to look at or photograph mushrooms in Jedediah Smith State Park because they’re going to get a $125 fine if they do,” Desjardin said sarcastically. “I was born here in Crescent City, and the reason I got this fine today was because of my grandparents. They’re completely responsible for this.”

(For further details of the incident, see “No place like home” on page B1.)

Desjardin’s grandparents moved to Del Norte County in 1920. From Switzerland, his grandparents were accustomed to picking wild edible mushrooms in their homeland and were delighted to discover the same varieties grew here. Picking them became a family tradition that was first shared with Desjardin when he was 3 years old.

Fifty-eight years later, Desjardin is an accomplished doctor of botany at San Francisco State University with a focus on mushroom research, known as mycology.

“To date, I’ve published 225 new species. Not bad. Discovered five new genera. Pretty good. Published 112 scientific refereed papers and received $2.7 million in funding from the National Science Foundation to do research — and a ticket for $125 right here for taking pictures of mushrooms, not even collecting the damn things.”

Fun with names

Outside of the scientific community, Desjardin has made a name for himself by making a name for some of his discoveries.

It started with a trip to São Tomé and Príncipe, a three-island nation off the west coast of Africa. Desjardin was there at the invitation of a herpetologist (reptile biologist), the California Academy of Sciences’ Dr. Robert Drewes, who was studying the islands’ unique biology. Desjardin was brought in to help identify the area’s fungi.

Old friends, Drewes often kidded with Desjardin over the years that the mycologist should name a newly discovered species of mushroom after Drewes.

As the two biologists were exploring the mountains of São Tomé, Desjardin came across a tiny, limp mushroom he recognized to be part of a sparse genus of mushrooms named Phallus. The name aptly describes the mushroom’s appearance. Desjardin knew the species they had just found was, if you’ll pardon the expression, a new member of the genus previously unknown to science.

Desjardin looked at Drewes and said, “Bob, I’m going to name this after you.”

Drewes was genuinely thrilled at the prospect.

“I love it! It’s a form of immortality,” Drewes said in an interview on the June 20, 2009, broadcast of National Public Radio’s comedy quiz show “Wait Wait … Don’t Tell Me!”

“I’m a scientist. I’m delighted,” he told the quiz show’s incredulous, laughing audience. “Regardless of what it describes, that name Phallus drewesii will live on just as long as there’s science.”

The name alone brought a lot of attention to mushroom research. And Desjardin was just getting started.

One of his more important discoveries was a spongy fungus in Thailand that proved to be in a previously unknown genus, which he named Spongiforma, adhering to the science community requirement that taxonomical labels be latinized.

A year later UC Berkeley mycologist Dr. Tom Bruns found in Borneo a bright orange fungus that was similarly spongy. Bruns wondered if it was also a member of the Spongiforma genus and sent specimens to Desjardin for further examination, whereupon it was verified to be another member of the new genus.

The fungus reminded Bruns and his research assistant of the cartoon character SpongeBob SquarePants. It was so spongy that one could wring the water out of it and it would spring back to shape. It had a squarish structure. And it even had a fruity odor, reminiscent of SpongeBob SquarePants’ home, a pineapple under the sea. They suggested to Desjardin that the new species be named Spongiforma squarepantsii.

Desjardin was hesitant.

“I go, ‘Tom, that’s kind of a cutesy name. I’m not really sure that the community would like that,’” Desjardin recalled. “And he goes, ‘Nah, we’ve just got to do it.’”

Indeed, the scientific community had qualms about the name.

‘Frivolous,’ but a big hit

When Desjardin submitted a paper announcing the identification and name of the newfound fungus, the review committee for the fungi science journal Mycologia was divided. The editor and one peer reviewer hated it. The other reviewer loved it.

“The editor said it was a frivolous name, so those reviews came back and said ‘we want you to latinize it,’” Desjardin said.

Desjardin sent the editor a four-point rebuttal:

As a new species, it ought to be published. “The only problem is with the name. Well, it’s the author’s choice what the name is, not your choice,” Desjardin said.

Second, “any discipline that requires you to write your descriptions in Latin could use a little frivolity.”

Third, the name was accurately descriptive. It looked and smelled like SpongeBob SquarePants.

“Fourth thing, if I latinize it, it’s going to be “quadratopantalone” — “Spongiforma quadratopantalone” — which in Latin means ‘square pants.’ That doesn’t have the cachet or the ring of squarepantsii, so, no, we’re not going to change it, so you can either publish it as squarepantsii or we’ll take the paper elsewhere.”

Desjardin won the argument. Within 24 hours of its initial publication online in June, the article had 25,000 hits.

“And it just hit the waves. Everybody just loved it, thought it was a great idea. It made all the major newspapers, and they just thought it was funny as hell,” Desjardin said.

In an on-air interview with the BBC, he was asked why the name was chosen.

“I said, ‘One reason is you would not be talking to me now if I named it something else. It would be just another mushroom, and you wouldn’t be talking to me.’”

The interviewer conceded the point.

Further illustrating that point, now Spongiforma squarepantsii is getting some attention in children’s books.

“Another reason we decided to do this is to call attention to the fact that there are lots of new species out there, so it gave us the medium to discuss the importance of continued studies of biotic surveys around the world before we lose them,” Desjardin said. “We got the general public involved. We got kids involved. Now they’re excited about mushrooms because of this funny little name thing. So there were lots of reasons for doing it.”

“I thought it was an incredibly stupid name and a totally brilliant idea,” said Michael Wood, an advanced amateur mycologist and mushroom photographer who co-founded mykoweb.com, an online mushroom guide.

Desjardin admits he has gotten some blowback from the scientific community about the name and vows to avoid attention-getting names — for a while at least.

“There will be probably a ‘stewartii’ or ‘colbertii’ in the future. Why not? You want to get some cachet, you get onto Jon Stewart’s show or Stephen Colbert’s show. So I need to find something that’s like a really inflated, tumorous gonad, something gross like that. It would be really funny.”