By collecting mushrooms over the seasons and years, Dan and I had figured out that the old-growth forests contained special old-growth fungi. Some only showed up in particularly rainy months and years, and some appeared only once. Others fruited only in dry months, while some mushrooms flushed no matter the season. We’d also dug up roots of birch and fir in forests ranging from a few years to hundreds of years old. We’d analyzed their DNA and compared it to data in a universal genetic library to determine the fungal species.
