While mushroom foraging for personal use may be defensible (Letters, 30 July), large-scale and indiscriminate picking of wild fungi for commercial exploitation will eventually have a major effect on the survival of species in the wild. Britain is already the last redoubt of some mushroom varieties that have become very rare on continental Europe and, while the reasons for this are probably complex, removing their reproductive bodies before they have shed their spores can only do harm. Mushrooms are beautiful, spanning every colour of the rainbow, and the vast majority are of no culinary value, or poisonous. They should be left for others to appreciate in the wild. There is nothing more depressing to a naturalist than finding a mass of mushrooms that have been trashed in a fruitless search for porcini. It would be inconceivable to treat wildflowers in the same way.
Professor Richard Fortey
Henley-on-Thames, Oxfordshire
