Although he’s old-school,

Are there glow-in-the-dark mushrooms in Hawai‘i?

“We don’t know. We get a lot of reports from people saying they see glowing at night, and that’s probably the mycelium, which glows also,” Hemmes says. “Someone sent me a photo they took with a cell phone of mycelium glowing at night on Mauna Kea. So that’s exciting.”

For Hawai‘i’s mushroom man, that’s further proof that the secret realm of fungi holds endless marvels. “The most amazing character of the fungi is the intricate forms and bright colors of fruiting bodies: stinkhorns, bird’s nest fungi, jelly fungi, club fungi, coral fungi, shelf fungi, tooth fungi, morels, truffles and of course the myriad mushrooms, all emanating from a tangled mass of plain white threads,” says Hemmes. “I joke that I have a gene for collecting and classifying things. My mother had that gene—she collected bells. My brother, stamps and coins. My sins are seashells, plants and mushrooms. I wanted to write a field guide to mushrooms because people often would contact the university for information. There were all these bird, plant and insect people in Hawai‘i, but nobody for mushrooms. I knew I was sitting on a gold mine.”