But back to Cordyceps. As expected we encountered hundreds of pounds of caterpillar fungus being traded on the markets in Lhasa and Bayi. Markets are much busier once all the caterpillar fungus is harvested.


A Tibetan offering a shoebox full of Yartsa gunbu at the Bayi Market .

   
A Hui dealer with around 10 pounds worth US$40,000 to 60,000.

Freshly collected Bu karpo I encountered in a village near Draksum Tso. Here the white Yartsa Gunbu being dried on a threshold.
Bu Karpo deserves its own entry at some point. I have encountered it several times in Kongpo where it seems endemic.



I really loved our homestay with a Tibetan family who took us matsutake (Tricholoma matsutake) hunting in their evergreen oak woods on the foot of the majestic 7500m high Gyala Pelri. When back home we cooked up several mushroom species and shared our cooking. I still got to finish the report, but already uploaded 50 pics or so.

Also we found so many orchids that I had to make an orchid page which so far has 23 species including stunning lady slipper orchids Cypripedium (C. tibeticum, C.himalaicum, C.flavum and C. guttatum) and gorgeous Habenarias.


Cypripedium himalaicum on Serkim La                                    Habenaria arietina flowering in Pome / Bomi

Many more pictures are to viewed on my web pages from this summer's Floral & Fungal Foray to Tibet.

Not much is happening once it snowed. Collectors just hang out and have to kill time waiting until the snow melts. The day before the snow was already a day of rest since it was the 15th day in the Tibetan calendar, many collectors take off this holiday from collecting.



Dorje, Thubten, Tashi Tsering and Drolma scanning the ground for bu. These guys are off course fully licensed collectors at CNY600 per person, nearly USD100.  Without license one is not allowed to collect Yartsa gunbu. As tourists we probably could not even buy a license and we are not there as competition interested in searching the mountains 12 hours a day for 5 weeks. So we just ask local bu hunters if we could accompany them and usually we are received warmly. If we find some bu ourselves we buy it from them, but here they found ten Yartsa gunbu while we found only one.




We found our specimen in 4650m / 14,500 ft !  2010 seems to be an excellent year forOphiocordyceps sinensis on the Tibetan Plateau. 




Close by grew this beautiful Iris, probably Iris ruthenica var. nana. 




Vultures feeding on a yak carcass. We were awed watching them walking and hopping up the slope. Their bellies were apparently too full to allow them a take off in the valley ground without gathering momentum by running downhill.

Prices are higher in 2010 than in 2009. Maybe that is the reason that these Yartsa gunbu dealers are smiling in Litang.




"Chongcao" being processed in a high end store in Chengdu. Prices here ranged from CNY 20,000 per kg for stromata only (none of the highly desired insect parts) up to CNY 360,000 per kg for the fattest, finest caterpillar fungi. 

Rongpatsa, Kandze / Ganzi County June 2, 2010

"Kar Sha" - Agaricus campestris

 

Kar Sha or Karpo Shamo, the "White mushroom" in Tibetan denotes several Agaricus species. It is a favorite edible in Tibet, nearly everyone knows, since it grows in pastures and around camps and villages.
Here Agaricuscampestris is growing in the grass.



Loga showing some Kar Sha in front of Rongpatsa's ShedaMountains. I heard many stories about it and this time I had the chance to watch the preparation [see below].



Kar Sha mushrooms, gills up without stems, are being roasted on an electric coil stove. Butter, salt and tsampa [roasted ground barley flour] is placed on top of the gills and cooks in the juice of the field Agaric.


Dechen offers some of the cooked Agaricus campestris caps. They were very tasty!



Our driver Mr. Song took off on his own hike while we looked for Yartsa gunbu. He found a big patch of Lepista saeva = personata, the field blewit or blue foot. Some local Tibetans knew about its edibility, but it is by far not as known or common as Kar Sha, Agaricus campestris.

Caterpillar Fungus Hunt

Yartsa Gunbu, caterpillar fungus habitat we searched with success after hiking in for several hours. Mount Dinu, probably 16000ft in the background.



Tenzin found a nice Yartsa gunbu. The season here is nearly over, all Ophiocordyceps sinensisare sporulating [see below]




Yartsa gunbu hunters showing each other their bounty.



A late stage caterpillar fungus. Tibetans called it "tsar bu", overmature yartsa gunbu. While the fungus is sporulating the underground larva becomes soft and will shrink heavily whendrying and result in low value.




Perfect ending for a perfect MushRoaming day. Our guide Dorje relaxes in Rongpatsa's famous hot springs! What a view!

There are still spaces avaialble for the July 14- 27 Tour to Tibet.
Check out: 
www.danielwinkler.com/foray_announce.htm

Yartsa Gunbu season is peaking in Tibet right now. I heard from Kandze / Garze / Ganzi Tibetan Autonomous Prefecture [TAP, Sichuan] that the harvest is going well and that the price is higher than last year. I am glad to hear that. I was a bit worried, when I heard about the persistent drought in Yunnan. I was wondering if that drought would extent into the mountains of the upper Mekong catchment. However, already in the context of the devastating earth quake in Jyekundu / Jiegu / Yushu [see the links for donations below] there were reports of rains in Jyekundo. I hope to be able to report via this blog from my Cordyceps tour when we cross Kandze and Golok / Goluo [Qinghai] TAPs. I have to see how accessible the net will be in the Tibetan hinterland.

Yartsa gunbu collectors camp at Chungba La in Lithang in May 1999.

For the time being, I will post some links in here on this years reporting on Cordyceps. Each year we see more reports on the phenomena (see below). When I first got into caterpillar fungus it was such an exotic thing and I had a really hard time figuring out what I had encountered on the alpine pastures in Bachen in early June 1997. Of course the value was nowhere near where it is now, high up in the sky, but still the income from Yartsa gunbu was already very important back then and many communities relied on it as one of their main cash sources.

Now onto the reporting in the media:
A short clip in French "Les Cordyceps du Qinghai will introduce you to Yartsa gunbu harvest and trade in Qinghai:

An unnamed researcher from Beijing's Tibet Research Center (CTRC) has published an article "Tibet enters Cordyceps sinensis collection peak" on this years collection in Tibet AR including some interesting figuress" "Tibet enters cordyceps sinensis collection peak" 

In China Daily Daniel Chinoy published an interesting 3 page article entitled  "Rare fungus faces extinction " on April 15,. Much of the article is on the sourcing of Chinese medicinal material, its value and problems regarding sustainability, but a good junk is dedicated to dongchong xiacao = Caterpillar fungus. One page talks about collection and dealing in Qinghai and photos show Hui collectors and dealers. Chinoy quotes Yang Darong's absurd claim without naming him as his source, that nowadays only 10% are left of the production commonly harvested 20 years ago. As discussed earlier in this blog, this claim is not supported by real data.

Last, but not least, I discovered Shiva Devkota's blog spot with lots of interesting articles on Cordyceps and other fungi in Nepal and the Himalayas. Check it out!

An article on Cordyceps sinensis in Science [Science 322:1182, 21 Nov 2008] reported Chinese entomologist Yang Darong's claim that currently only 3-10% of Cordyceps can be harvested what used to be harvested 20 years ago. This outrageous claim was published without consulting any other researchers on this issue. I wrote a letter to the editor that did not get published. Down below the long version of this letter.

My Reply to Science:

I am very glad to see that Science took up the issue of Yartsa gunbu, summer grass-winter worm, as the Tibetans know Ophiocordyceps / Cordyceps sinensis for at least over 600 years. I am confused why Yang uses the Maori term aweto, which is coined for a New Zealand species. I rather use the Tibetan term Yartsa gunbu, since it also includes the larva and not only the fungus. In addition the Chinese term dongchong xiacao is most likely a literal translation of the original Tibetan term. 

I definitely share the concern regarding the sustainability of current Yartsa gunbu harvest intensity. However, Yang Darong's claim that there is only 10% left of this resource is an extraordinary claim and I think we would need to see the data to support such an extraordinary claim. In an earlier South China morning post article Yang was quoted: " Where there used to be 40 specimen per square meter there is now only 5 fungi". That must have been a very special square meter with such a fungal population density! Definitely not the common patch found by many of the Tibetan collectors. Also Yang states, there used to be a production of 1000t per year on the Tibetan Plateau. I really would love to see the base for this figure. At 1000t, mind you, we are talking about roughly 3 billion specimens. At an overall population of 6 million Tibetans on the Plateau, Yang is suggesting a family with 6 members on average needed to collect over 3000 specimens, impossible! To approach this claim from another angle, a 1989 report from the Plateau Biology Research Institute in Lhasa estimated total potential production of about 70t annually for Tibet AR, and reported an average annual harvest of around 13-15t between 1957-1983. TAR provides around 30-50% of the annual production, thus an overall Plateau production total not even close to 100t. In addition, I have interviewed through the years many Tibetan collectors and Tibetan, Chinese and Hui dealers on the Plateau. None of them had reported a substantial reduction in production. All collectors pointed out how they find less caterpillar fungi, but attributed that to the fact that there are so many more collectors. Also, most interviewees pointed out that there are good years and bad years when collecting fungi. Official TAR production figures from 1999 to 2004 indicate an annual harvest between 25 to 50t, the 2006 figure is 38t, nowhere a production crash documented on the scale Yang and his team is claiming.

In trying to make his case of a total resource crash Yang is using the change in value as another indicator. He is stating that 25 years ago he could have traded a bag of salt for a bag of Yartsa gunbu. This reflects much more on the economic situation in China back then than the availability of Yartsa gunbu. Its main consumers are now rich and upper middle class Chinese, a segment of society not in existence in China outside the party structures [the government is still the biggest single buyer of caterpillar fungus in TAR and NW Yunnan. It uses them as presents for visiting officials and as New years presents for its members, a special perk for anybody working in Tibet]. Also, in the 60 and 70s Tibetans had to collect Yartsa gunbu for the government. Per capita quotas had to be filled annually without real payment, which surely ruined the price. Economic reforms only came slowly to the Tibetan areas in the 1980s, but caterpillar fungus prices rose quickly.

Back to the present (= late 2008), this collection season prices peaked, but in recent weeks for the first time in more than a decade Yartsa gunbu prices have decreased substantially. The loss of 20-30% indicates clearly prices were fueled by the coastal economic boom and the availability of discretionary spending rather than reduced harvest level. 2008 was an average harvest and the price decline seems much more connected to the Shanghai stock market crash and the global financial crisis, since Yartsa gunbu has turned from a medicinal tonic into a status symbol in recent years.

I doubt the extent of Yang Darong's extraordinary claim for another reason. Ophiocordycepsand its host, the ghost moth [Thitarodes spp.] are both at the end of their life-cycle. The larva is already killed by the fungus, and the fungus will die off after sporulation. Thus, as long as there are enough spores released, reproduction should be secured. The fact that Yartsa gunbu has been collected for centuries and is still present in areas where intense collection has been carried out suggests that it is a rather resilient organism. A more detailed analysis can be found in Winkler, D. 2008. Yartsa Gunbu (Cordyceps sinensis) and the Fungal Commodification of the Rural Economy in Tibet. In: Economic Botany 62.3.

But we really need long-term fieldwork, something I am sure Yang Darong agrees to. We need to find out if we can come up with harvesting schemes to minimize negative impact an this organism, which has turned into rural Tibet's most important cash source. Some areas derive 80-90% of their cash income from yartsa gunbu. On TAR average it is 40%, contributing more value to the TAR GDP than the industry and mining sector! [ Winkler 2008].

Here the full reference: Stone, R. 2008: Last Stand for the BodySnatcher of the Himalayas? In: Science 322:1182 [21 Nov 2008] www.sciencemag.org