When foraging, the idea of doing so ethically has been a part of many family traditions and knowledge passed from generation to generation. The unspoken rule of thumb is to harvest all but one or two mushrooms, leaving some for wildlife that depends on them. Some hunters harvest morels by plucking the stem from the ground with their hands, while others use a knife to cut them at the base to keep the root system intact.
Mesh bags, and how to harvest morels, are a source of debate in the community. Some hunters claim that plastic bags make the mushrooms slimy before they can get them home to clean them. Others claim that the mesh bags help with the spreading of the spores so that more mushrooms will grow.
To explore the idea of ethical hunting, it’s important to examine the lifecycle of a morel mushroom – research that is still a work in progress - and focus on how they reproduce their numbers. Morels can reproduce using either a two-parent model or an asexual model. The lifecycles are similar but introducing a second set of parent cells creates a longer cycle. For the sake of simplicity, we’ll be looking at the asexual means of reproduction.
Morel mushrooms, unlike other fungi species, have a honeycombed cap. The individual cups within the cap contain bundles of tubes, called asci, that vent bursts of spores into the environment. Spores can be carried by the wind, on clothing, animals, or travel on the water until they land on something suitable for germinating and producing new mushrooms. Once the spores have germinated, they become mycelium. Mycelium is the name of the white, vegetative filament network found in the soil. The mycelium doesn’t form fruit bodies without an environmental stressor to prompt them to form sclerotia. Stressors can include fire, flood, drought, and freezing temperatures.
Sclerotia are structures within the mycelium that store energy, or nutrients for fruiting later. It forms in the summer and fall, and stressors such as freezing temperatures encourage more sclerotia to form. Experiments have shown that morels require a “chill hour” in which soil temperatures are a consistent 32 degrees 4-10 inches deep. The following spring, when the soil temperatures begin to elevate and if the moisture reaches a level desirable for the morel to grow, the fruit will extend above the soil and release spores once the light touches it. It continues to grow until it reaches maturity and releases a second burst of spores before it begins to decay.
Cutting the morel at its base prevents disruption of the mycelium network, which could unearth sclerotia and remove the source of nutrients for morels that have not yet fruited for the season. Since the morel spores twice in its lifecycle – once as it erupts from the ground, and again when it matures - there is no need to worry about harvesting them too early. Spores can be shaken from the cap, as evidenced by cultivation experiments, so the mesh bag theory holds water. Or doesn’t, which is another reason so many hunters opt for mesh bags.
Because of their complexity, they’re not an ideal mushroom for cultivation. Many have tried and many have failed, but research continues and there have been a few successful experiments.
Morels have been classified as saprophytic, because they help decompose leaves and natural debris on the forest floor, which returns the nutrients to the soil. They’ve also been classified as a mycorrhizal, or a fungus reliant upon trees for nutrition. While it’s unclear which of these categories the morel should fall into, it’s also theorized that the morel is both at different times during their lifecycle, which could be part of the problem in learning to cultivate them.
Because of their symbiotic relationship with trees, the most likely place to find morels is in the woods around trees that are in their first year of decay when it doesn’t have buds and may be beginning to lose their bark. Each region of the U.S. will have specific trees that the morels will be found around, such as American elm, slippery elm, white ash, tulip poplar, sycamore, green ash, domesticated apple, cottonwood, bitternut hickory, and black cherry. Many of these trees are found around streams and river bottoms where flooding is a frequent event.
Early in the season, morels tend to grow on the South and Western facing slopes and later in the season, on the North and Eastern sides. If a hunter observes the environment surrounding morel caches they find from year to year, they may notice that peak morel season occurs when the mayapples have sprung from the ground and while lilac bushes and crabapple trees are blooming.