Science
A Fungi Pioneer’s Lifelong Work on Exhibit
On an early summer day in 1876 near Druid Hill Park in Baltimore, a middle-aged woman carrying three large, putrid mushrooms repulsed fellow travelers riding a horse-drawn trolley car.
Even wrapped in paper, the stench of the aptly named stinkhorn mushrooms was overpowering, but the woman stifled a laugh upon overhearing two other passengers gripe about the swarm of flies around them. The smell didn’t bother her. All she cared about was getting the specimens home to study them, she would later write.
This was Mary Elizabeth Banning, a self-taught mycologist who, over the course of nearly four decades, conducted seminal research on the fungi of her state, Maryland.
Miss Banning characterized thousands of specimens that she found in Baltimore and the surrounding countryside, identifying 23 species new to science at the time.
A gifted artist, she collected these observations into a manuscript called “The Fungi of Maryland.” It consisted of 175 stunning watercolor plates, each an accurate yet intimate portrait of a given species, along with detailed scientific descriptions and anecdotes about collecting the mushrooms.
The manuscript was Miss Banning’s life’s work, and she yearned to see it published. But it ended up in a drawer at the New York State Museum in Albany, forgotten for almost a century.
A selection of her watercolors makes up the backbone of an exhibition at the museum that opened this month and runs until Jan. 4 of next year. The exhibition, called “Outcasts,” recognizes Miss Banning’s long-overlooked scientific legacy as well as the museum’s mycology collection, which is one of the most historically significant in the country, according to Patricia Ononiwu Kaishian, the museum’s mycology curator, who conceived the exhibition.
Miss Banning called fungi “vegetable outcasts.” Back then (and all the way until 1969) fungi were classified as a peculiar type of plant. Most botanists from the mid-19th century viewed their study as a research backwater.
Miss Banning herself was an outcast. “She wanted very much to be part of the scientific community,” said John Haines, who was the museum’s mycology curator until he retired in 2005 and who has extensively researched her history. But as a woman living in the 19th century, that path was largely closed to her.
Similar to contemporaries such as Beatrix Potter, who also sought to make her mark on the emerging field of mycology, “the sentiment was, ‘Well, you go home and make your pictures,’” Dr. Haines said.
One scientist did give her the time of day: Charles Horton Peck, who worked at the museum as New York’s first state botanist from 1868 to 1913. Mr. Peck, a pre-eminent figure in American mycology, dedicated most of his career to fungi, collecting more than 33,000 specimens in surveys across New York and describing more than 2,700 new species in his annual reports.
“A lot of the fungi that people recognize from New York or from the Northeast are ones that Peck described,” Dr. Kaishian said.
Miss Banning first wrote Mr. Peck in 1878, asking for feedback on her manuscript. Unlike other scientists she had tried to contact, he wrote back, and they corresponded for nearly 20 years. Her letters, some of which are exhibited, offer a window into their relationship.
“You are my only friend in the debatable land of fungi,” she wrote to him in 1879. She chronicled her collecting forays and scientific observations, and relayed her dreams for the manuscript. “I have a powerful will,” she wrote in 1889. “I have made up my mind to brave defeat sooner than not make an effort to have the plants of Maryland published.”
Miss Banning’s letters were often whimsical and passionate. None of Mr. Peck’s letters to her remain, but his tone in other letters suggested he was much more restrained. Nevertheless, he treated Miss Banning like a respected colleague — offering her scientific mentorship, publishing descriptions of species with her support and even naming species after her. Their scientific bond was undeniable.
“This is a love story, but not between the two people — they were both in love with fungi,” Mr. Haines said. A play he wrote about their relationship drawing from Miss Banning’s letters will be performed at the museum on April 4 at a gallery opening event for the exhibition.
Love triangles, though, are especially prone to turning sour. With no publishing prospects of her own in sight, Miss Banning sent her manuscript to Mr. Peck in 1890, hoping that he could publish it. “He would have had the resources to make it a permanent part of the mycological record,” Dr. Kaishian said. But he never did.
Although she expressed how difficult it was to part from the work and begged him to reassure her that he appreciated its contribution to the field, she did not receive such recognition. “It seems to me by her letters that she died without really understanding the legacy, the value of her work,” Dr. Kaishian said.
In one of her last letters to Mr. Peck in 1897, six years before she died, destitute and alone in a rooming house in Virginia, Miss Banning lamented the book’s loss. “I hardly know how I ever came to part with my illustrated book,” she wrote. “To tell you the truth, I long to see it and call it my own once more, but this could never be.”
“That just still brings tears to my eyes,” Dr. Haines said.
It was Dr. Haines who originally brought Miss Banning’s manuscript to light.
An eccentric curator showed it to him when he visited the museum for a job interview in 1969. He recalls being dazzled by the colors, which were superbly preserved by the fact that the pages had not been open to sunlight for decades.
He exhibited some of the paintings in 1981, and they were shown a few more times, including in Talbot County, Md., where Miss Banning was born. With the help of this spotlight, Miss Banning was inducted into the Maryland Women’s Hall of Fame in 1994. But since the mid-1990s, in part because the pigments degrade quickly in the light, the pictures had been packed away.
Beyond Miss Banning’s work, “Outcasts” gives visitors a glimpse into the broader historical context of mycology. “Fungi are enormously critical organisms that, going back hundreds of millions of years, have shaped the very texture of the earth,” Dr. Kaishian said. “But their stories are still mysterious and often neglected.”
In addition to Miss Banning’s watercolors and letters, the exhibition includes a host of other artifacts and experiences. Visitors can explore one of Peck’s microscopes and mushroom specimens collected by Miss Banning as well as ones collected recently by Dr. Kaishian, or marvel at a set of strikingly realistic wax sculptures of New York fungi made for the museum in 1917 by an artist, Henri Marchand, and his son Paul.
Murals made by museum artists illustrate the biology of fungi, the role they play in the ecosystem and their evolutionary history. A rare fossil of Prototaxites, a 30-foot-tall fungus that lived during the Devonian period about 400 million years ago, points to just how significantly the Earth has changed over time.
Overall, Dr. Kaishian said she hoped that the exhibition demonstrated why natural history collections like this one deserve public support and preservation.
The 150-year-old specimens hidden in cabinets that visitors rarely see help scientists map the limits of different organisms, both geographically and genetically — and that makes it possible to document changes to biological diversity in the face of climate change, for example.
“Natural history collections are active repositories for contemporary research,” Dr. Kaishian said. “There needs to be a lot more science communication about what goes on here and why it matters.”
NEW YORK — Scientists have unearthed communities of marine life — including jellyfish, tubeworms and brittle stars — thriving on a whale graveyard that is millions of years old.
These graveyards form when whale carcasses fall to the sea floor, becoming a sustaining snack for nearby critters. This one, located up to 23,000 feet below the surface of the southeastern Indian Ocean, spans the largest area and is so far the deepest and oldest found.
A whale’s sheer size and the unique chemistry of its bones are the keys to forming these unique underwater neighborhoods, said Xikun Song, a biologist with the Chinese Academy of Sciences’ Institute of Deep-sea Science and Engineering.
“At the same time, the very nature of the deep ocean makes these sites exceptionally difficult for scientists to locate,” Song, who was involved with the latest find, wrote in an email.
Researchers explored the remains during multiple deep-sea submersible trips in 2023, collecting samples and mapping the extent of the necropolis. They found five carcass sites and fossils, including skulls belonging to beaked and baleen whales. The oldest bones date back 5.3 million years.
Feeding and living on the carcasses were myriad creatures, large and small, including sea cucumbers, squat lobsters and saltwater clams. Many of them are likely species that have never been documented, according to findings published Wednesday in the journal Nature.
“The potential number of specimens is just astounding,” said paleontologist Stephen Godfrey with the Calvert Marine Museum in Maryland, who wasn’t involved in the research.
Many factors likely conspired to preserve the bones for millions of years, according to the study authors. They’re dense enough to outlast attacks from bone-eating worms, and located deep enough in the ocean to avoid getting buried by dust and loose particles. The bones also were coated with a light layer of minerals from the surrounding seawater, which may have prevented them from degrading.
Why did so many whales die here? Maybe they were already living in the area and died of natural causes. A few could have perished from exhaustion or illness caused by deep-sea diving. The area’s shape, akin to the letter V, could also have funneled the remains to their resting spot, the authors wrote.
Such discoveries are important because they clue scientists into the vibrant communities that find a way to live even in remote, hard-to-reach environments.
Studying the whale graveyards “is important for understanding how life can adapt to such extreme conditions, not only due to the lack of light and oxygen but also to the incredibly high pressure,” said study co-author and paleontologist Giovanni Bianucci with the University of Pisa in Italy in an email.
Ramakrishnan writes for The Associated Press.
The Associated Press Health and Science Department receives support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Department of Science Education and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation.
Science
El Niño turns crumbling California pier into climate battleground over what to save — and who pays
As a historic El Niño supercharges the Pacific Ocean and San Francisco experiences record high seasonal sea levels, the latest structural casualty of intense wave action is prompting Bay Area politicians to call for help from the state and federal governments.
They want to rebuild a concrete pier shut down this month after officials deemed it unsafe because of cracking from decades of pounding surf and storms.
As waves crashed against the derelict structure Monday morning, U.S. Rep. Sam Liccardo (D-San José) held a news conference and asked the federal government to follow through on $50 million in climate resilience funding promised by the Biden administration but terminated by the Trump administration in 2025.
The city of Pacifica had been on the shortlist for the Building Resilient Infrastructure and Communities program, managed through FEMA. California and 22 other states successfully sued to reinstate the program, but the funding has yet to be allocated.
Liccardo also asked for nearly $1 million in promised funds from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration for a handrail project on the pier and an additional $9 million to protect coastal bluffs.
Coastlines are already being buffeted and inundated by rising seas. With the closed-off Pacifica Municipal Pier in the background, local politicians and community members said they’re on the front lines and want to rebuild.
“Pacifica is ground zero for coastal resilience,” said state Sen. Josh Becker (D-Menlo Park), as he asked Gov. Gavin Newsom to declare a state of emergency and “help us fix this pier and help this community recover again.”
“This is very much a reminder that an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure,” he said, noting that previous attempts for funding went unheeded. “We cannot wait until infrastructure fails before we invest in protecting it.”
As climate change starts to become expensive, it prompts questions about what to protect and what to abandon.
Chad Nelson, chief executive of the Surfrider Foundation, a coastal environmental advocacy organization, said city piers provide coastal access to people who can’t swim or walk on the beach; they are often popular fishing spots and tend to serve a broad swath of their communities.
On the flip side, he said, they keep getting beat up by the ocean and costing taxpayers millions of dollars to repair or replace.
In Santa Cruz, a public wharf damaged by storms in 2024 recently reopened after $1.3 million in repairs. In Capitola, a storm-damaged wharf reopened earlier this year after $10 million had been sunk into repairs. The city is now considering building an open-air restaurant, public bathrooms, a bait shop and a boat launch.
“I think the larger question is: Are we subsidizing bad responses to problems that we know are going to persist?” he said, responding to a question about infrastructure that won’t last.
Charles Lester, director of the Ocean and Coastal Policy Center at UC Santa Barbara, agreed with Nelson that it’s important to distinguish public from private benefits.
“There’s a bit of a difference between a public recreational pier, for example, and your private development that’s going to impact the beach,” he said.
And at some point, he said, we have to acknowledge things are only going to get worse.
In a white paper authored by Lester and Nelson, the two described the coming El Niño as a “reckoning” for the California coast.
El Niños result in larger waves, elevated sea levels and powerful storms — “predictable signature(s) of a climate pattern that returns every two to seven years and is expected, as the planet warms, to intensify,” they wrote.
Wave energy along the shore can run 50% above average during an El Niño, while sea levels can climb 6 to 12 inches — flooding coastal homes, roads and infrastructure. Coastal erosion increases by more than 69% during extreme El Niño events, according to the U.S. Geological Survey.
During the 1997-98 El Niño, seven Pacifica seaside houses were condemned after powerful waves and storms made them unsafe and irreparable. Seventeen people in the state died as a result of the historic flooding and storms.
The funding requests for the pier also come as San Francisco sees its highest summer water levels ever. On Saturday, the National Weather Service recorded levels 1.83 feet above normal high tide. Early Monday morning, the popular Pier 14 along the city’s Embarcadero waterfront was submerged.
High surf along the coast killed a young girl in Laguna Beach, and hundreds of people have been rescued at Newport Beach. Water stranded a hiker along the cliffs of San Francisco’s Presidio — requiring a seven-hour rescue mission that ultimately left the hiker and a rescuer injured as the waves crashed them into the rocks.
“This stretch of coast has been a continuous coastal emergency declaration for almost 10 years due to the repeat damage of storms in recent El Niño years,” the mayor of Pacifica, Christine Boles, said.
Pacifica has been planning for climate change for years, she said. But climate change is outstripping those efforts, and without financial and regulatory support from the federal and state governments, the battle will be all but lost.
Science
Californian is infected with rare tick-borne illness. What to know about the deadly bacteria
A Northern Californian has been confirmed as the fourth-ever person diagnosed with a newly recognized and rare tick-borne disease that causes symptoms similar to Rocky Mountain spotted fever.
The California Department of Public Health confirmed the latest case of Rickettsia lanei bacteria in a patient who was diagnosed in April of this year. Two other California cases were reported in 2004 and 2023.
Public health officials told The Times that the infected person “was seriously ill, hospitalized and has since been discharged and is recovering.”
It is unclear how long the person was in the hospital or what their symptoms were. The state agency said it could not disclose the home county of the person but confirmed the infected person lived and worked in Northern California.
Rickettsia lanei comes from the spotted fever group Rickettsia, bacteria transmitted to humans from the bite of an infected tick.
In California three types of ticks — the American dog tick (Dermacentor similis), the Pacific Coast tick (Dermacentor occidentalis) and the brown dog tick (Rhipicephalus sanguineus) — can transmit the bacteria that cause Rocky Mountain spotted fever in humans and dogs, according to the California Department of Public Health.
Symptoms of Rocky Mountain spotted fever can range from fever and a rash to long-term effects that include damage to internal organs or neurological disorders.
The tick-borne disease has been spreading globally since the early 2000s, most notably in Mexico and Brazil, with reported fatality rates that can exceed 50%, according to a study published by UC Davis.
What is Rickettsia lanei?
Rickettsia lanei bacteria were identified this year in a few Pacific Coast ticks, including a tick in Contra Costa County, according to SFGate, where the latest case was first reported in April.
The new bacterium was added to the list of potentially transmittable pathogens in 2024 by the state public health department after its severe symptoms were studied in two cases of infected men nearly 20 years apart, according to a report published in the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Emerging and Infectious Diseases journal.
“Sustained investment in public health has enabled development of the advanced molecular tools that detected these infections,” the California Department of Public Health said in a statement to The Times.
According to the report, both men fell ill after spending time outdoors, one playing golf at five courses in Alameda and Contra Costa counties within 14 days of the onset of his symptoms. This first patient had fever, headaches, muscle pain, malaise, loss of appetite, diarrhea and abdominal pain, among other symptoms. His condition worsened on his third day in the hospital, according to the report. The man was ultimately in the hospital for 22 days, including 11 in the intensive care unit with a primary diagnosis of rocky mountain spotted fever and a secondary diagnosis of acute kidney injury.
The other infected person had visited and camped at a county park and state beach in San Mateo and Marin counties. The second man reported a five-day history of headaches, vomiting, light sensitivity, neck pain and confusion, according to the report. On the third day of hospitalization, the man became comatose and was intubated, the report stated. After 13 days, he was discharged with a primary diagnosis of severe Rickettsia.
Researchers have known about Rickettsia lanei since 2018 when it was detected in rabbit ticks in Sonoma County, but they didn’t know its potential harm to humans because the rabbit tick rarely bites people.
“The Pacific Coast tick, which bites humans more frequently, may occasionally acquire the organism from an infected rabbit, which is the most likely route for the rare human infections that have been identified,” the state health agency said.
Should I be worried about contracting Rickettsia lanei?
Human infections are rare but could be underreported because Rickettsia lanei symptoms are very similar to those of rocky mountain spotted fever, said Janet Foley, veterinarian and disease ecologist at UC Davis.
“I think it’s so new that I don’t know if anybody’s really gotten a grant to study it or put it under a microscope,” Foley said.
Rickettsia lanei bacteria cases could also have gone undetected for so long because some cases were not severe, she said.
Foley said Californians should be aware of Rickettsia lanei and take precautions against tick bites.
How to keep disease-carrying ticks at bay
The best way to avoid ticks and tick bites is to be vigilant in your surroundings, Foley said, noting that ticks can transmit other diseases such as Lyme disease.
To keep a disease-carrying tick at bay, Foley recommends:
- Covering up your arms and legs when outdoors by wearing pants and long-sleeved shirts.
- Staying out of the grass where a tick can latch onto your clothing. Instead stay on a cleared path.
- Wearing light-colored clothing so it’s easier to spot a tick if one jumps on you.
- After an outdoor activity, take off your clothes, toss them in the wash and take a shower.
- If your dog goes with you for outdoor activities, give it a bath and then apply tick medication.
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