Edible Ectomycorrhizal Mushrooms in South America

Abstract

Edible mushrooms have been part of the human diet almost worldwide since prehistorical times, many of them are formed by mycorrhizal species (Pérez-Moreno et al. 2021). A comprehensive treatise on edible ectomycorrhizal mushrooms from a global perspective, but with special focus on some American countries, has recently been edited by Pérez-Moreno and coauthors (2020). Earlier, a checklist of saprobiotic, parasitic, and mycorrhizal fungi with edible sporomas has been published by Garibay-Orijel et al. (2010) for Mesoamerica and South America. In this chapter, we present a more specific and updated review of habitats, diversity, management, and conservation of ectomycorrhizal edible fungi (hereafter EEMF) in South America, especially in the Andean-Patagonian region of Argentina and Chile.At species level, many ectomycorrhizal fungal symbionts are characterized by specific requirements in terms of vegetation type and climatic and edaphic conditions (Lilleskov and Parrent 2007); having co-evolved with their respective tree host, their geographical distribution is often more sharply defined than in case of less specific, saprobiotic species. Contrasting the dominance, high diversity, and wide extension of ectotrophic forests in the northern hemisphere, especially in the temperate and boreal zones, South America is characterized by only rather few autochthonous ectomycorrhizal tree taxa in disjunct areas (Singer and Morello 1960; Nouhra et al. 2019). Most of those areas coincide with cool temperate climate zones delimited by altitude or latitude, such as the high Andean oak forests in Colombia, the Alnus acuminata belt along the northern to central Andean slope, and the Andean Patagonian Nothofagus forests of Southern Chile and Argentina. Especially the more extensive woodlands with the presence of Fagales trees bear a considerable variety of autochthonous fungi, which produce edible mushrooms, although the mycophytosociological background of the respective Quercus and Nothofagus forests, which are geographically isolated from each other, is very different: The Q. humboldtii ectotroph in Colombia shows affinity to Central and Southern North America, whereas the ectomycorrhizal community associated to Nothofagus is of Gondwanan origin (Nouhra et al. 2019).The scarce historical records indicate that collection and consumption of EEMF have a long tradition in local and regional indigenous populations (Coña apud Moesbach 1930; Molares et al. 2020). Although mushroom hunting has hardly been as popular among a broader public in South America as it is in many countries of the northern hemisphere (Commandini and Rinaldi 2020; Niveiro et al. 2009), a growing interest in EEMF can be observed in more recent times, as well with a commercial as a recreational background and evidently boosted by increased use of social media via Internet.Among the most notorious anthropogenic changes of landscape and vegetation in many parts of South America during the last 50+ years is the large-scale replacement of native forests with timber trees, mostly conifers and eucalyptus (Echeverría et al. 2006). An increasing number of adventitious ectomycorrhizal fungal speciesG. Palfner et al.323forms part of these alien ectotroph communities, among them edible taxa, such as Suillus or Lactarius, which are not compatible with native ectomycorrhizal trees but often grow in large numbers in their monoculture habitat, making them a sought-after non-timber forest product not only for local and regional trade but also for food industry and exportation (Silva-Filho et al. 2020).Finally, attempts have been made to culture introduced EEMF, such as truffles (Reyna and García-Barreda 2014), or to boost production of certain species in their natural habitat through enrichment of substrate with selected inoculum, a technique of mycosilviculture, which is increasingly applied worldwide (Wang and Chen 2014).In this chapter, we did not include those wild EEMF from the region, which have either occasionally been categorized as being edible in the sense of being nontoxic and palatable but of low quality, such as Laccaria spp., or which represent rare and/or insufficiently known species, but we rather focused on those taxa that are regularly harvested and consumed and/or that have a market potential at local, regional, or international scale.