Enthusiasts and experts collect mushrooms during a field trip near Port Angeles in Washington state, but the dozens of species they found represent just a tiny fraction of life that is neither flora nor fauna. Of the at least 2.5 million species of fungus thought to exist on Earth, scientists have described around 150,000 -- six percent -- says mycologist Amy Honan. There is a burgeoning awareness of the importance of fungi, whose role is also set to come up for discussion at the UN Convention on Biological Diversity COP16 meeting in Colombia, which kicks off on Monday.
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00:00Erin, did you get the, yeah, dang it, I'm not ready.
00:12Just walking through here, if it wasn't for fungi, we wouldn't be able to walk through
00:19here at all.
00:20It would be all through the downwoods that we couldn't get through.
00:27We only have described in science about 150,000 species.
00:32So there's many metrics or estimates of fungal biodiversity.
00:36If we take it at its lowest value, we've described less than 6% of fungal biodiversity.
00:43So we know very little about fungi, especially relative to vertebrates.
00:47We know about 98% of the vertebrates that are on the planet.
00:50We know about 85% of plants that exist on the planet.
00:55We know about 20% of invertebrates.
00:58So we take percentages, we know relatively the least amount of fungal biodiversity.
01:07You have to smell this.
01:19It's so important because we may not even have flora and fauna without funga.
01:25So, yeah, I mean, we really need to start working together as scientists, too,
01:30and becoming more multidisciplinary in the way that we look at ecology
01:36and we look at biodiversity.
01:38And fungi is one of those interconnected webs almost between all of the forms of life.
01:45So it's got three gills.
01:47And it will be pink-spotted.
01:50Oh, look at that.
01:52Those are both the same species.
01:54The yellower species is much more, like, mustardy.
02:03This would be my first time actually going on a mushroom walk like this,
02:07and I've learned so much, and it was so interesting to see.
02:10This would be my first time actually going on a mushroom walk like this,
02:13and I've learned so much, and it was so interesting to see.
02:16They're obviously going to take them to the lab,
02:18and I'm kind of curious to understand a bit more about them.