October 2007 OutdoorIllinois / 5

The turkey tail mushrooms found on dead wood are known by their colorful bands.But did you know these paper-thin fungi might someday help create paper?

FungusFans

Story By Joe McFarlandPhotos By Adele Hodde

Sometimes, being rotten is agood thing. When it comes tobreaking down solid woodinto wood pulp for paper pro-duction, a little woodland fun-gus known as Trametes ver-sicolor has demonstrated for

researchers and the paper industry thatenvironmentally cleaner and energy-effi-cient paper production might somedaycome naturally.

The subjects of this month’s cover arethin, paper-like mushrooms commonlyknown as the turkey tail. The undersur-face is covered with tiny pores, while thetop is banded in variable shades oforange, gray, red or brown (they canresemble a banded turkey tail, hence thecommon name). Many hikers throughoutthe woodlands of Illinois have spottedthese flat mushrooms on logs or stumps.Often, massive stacks of individual turkeytails can be observed on dead wood,appearing like miniature shelves.

And while these multi-colored fungiaren’t edible, their benefit to our forestsand humans is both rotten and great. Asdecomposers of lignin, the “glue” that

binds together the cellulose of woodcells, Trametes versicolor causes what’sknown as a “white rot” in dead wood.Ever pick up a surprisingly light piece ofdead wood in the forest? Perhaps younoticed that the lightest, rotted woodmakes lousy firewood. That’s becausethe highly combustible lignin and pitchhave rotted away, leaving behind onlythe light-burning cellulose.

Trametes versicolor, the funguswhich creates turkey tail mushrooms, isamazingly efficient at selectively dissolv-ing lignin in wood while leaving the cel-lulose basically intact. For industry,that’s an intriguing biological trick. Papermills today still must expend consider-able effort to mechanically and chemi-cally do what comes naturally for Tram-etes versicolor, along with a few otherlignin-decomposing fungi. Beginning inthe 1950s, paper industry researchersbegan experimenting with “biopulping,”a biological alternative to chemical andmechanical pulping techniques. Small-scale tests showed fungi not only could

break down lignin for paper production,in some cases the paper created withbiopulping was stronger when comparedto paper made through the harshermechanical and chemical process tradi-tionally used to free the cellulose.

While wood chips inoculated withlignin-rotting fungi produced encourag-ing results in several experiments,including increased pulp yield andreduced energy costs, converting theworld’s massive paper mills to fungi-friendly operations isn’t yet a reality.

Meanwhile, take a moment to appre-ciate these small wonders of our Illinoisforests. Hunting for turkey tails is alwaysin season.

As a primary decomposer of lignin

in wood, the fungus Trametes

versicolor is an important “recycler”

of our Illinois forests.