FISHERS ON ‘SHROOMS

Source Researchers studying a forest predator known for killing porcupines discovered that nearly half its summer diet was mushrooms. The fisher, an animal famous for dismantling porcupines face-first and pulling muskrats from beaver lodges, was spending its Sierra Nevada summers eating fungi. The paper that documented it called the fisher an unexpected mycophagist. In plain language: nobody expected the porcupine killer to be a mushroom enthusiast. G. Bradley Smith, Jody Tucker, and Jonathan Pauli published the finding in the Journal of Mammalogy in 2022. They analyzed stable isotopes from hair samples collected during long-term population monitoring of the southern Sierra Nevada fisher, a population so small and so isolated that it has been the subject of federal protection efforts for over a decade. The isotope ratios in the hair recorded what each fisher had been eating during the period the hair was growing. The summer signal was unambiguous. Fungi accounted for 47 percent of…