Map of West Africa showing the ethnomycology spread pattern, apparent mycophilic status (scanty, moder- ate, and average) and vegetation respectively. A = Tropi- cal Forest, B = Savannah woodlands, C = Savannah Grass- land. 

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... many edible and medicinal mushrooms is also a common practice. Bounty harvests are sold for little subsistent income to tourists, hoteliers as well as mycophilic visitors from the cities. The pattern of marketing wild indigenous edible mushrooms however varies from one West African country to another and even amongst tribes. In Nigeria, Ghana and Bénin mushrooms are sold openly either carefully displayed on clean tables during village market days or hawked on trays along highways outside market days. They are displayed in different basket sizes correlating to their quantity and price, or mentally measured on trays. Even though the ancestral origin of indigenous knowledge of wild edible and medicinal mushrooms in the region remained an un- solved mystery, it cannot be separated from evolving understanding and consciousness of the people about their environment and instinctive propensity for food. Folk accounts associated with the accidental or opportunistic applications of wild mushrooms were rooted in traditional beliefs and myths. Some of these controversial beliefs that are fast becoming heresies include 1) any wild mushroom nibbled in situ by insects, rodents and some other form of animals qualify as food for humans, 2) any mushroom fed ex situ to a life chicken, pig, dog or any other domestic stock without deadly sick or death repercussion is edible for humans, 3) brightly coloured, heavily ornamented, funny shaped (e.g. Phallus pp.) and hypogenous mushrooms are associated with the gods and poisonous hence avoided, 4) pleasant smelly e.g. mealy mushrooms must be edible. Presumably products of human experimentations have enriched the knowledge of mushroom uses leading to their edibility acceptance or toxicity discernment. Consequently, this unbalanced knowledge or unwritten codes of wild useful mushrooms guide their collection, transcends generations, and engenders strong knowledge of dialectically variable folk taxonomy and classification across the region [49]. More understanding and documentation of folk knowledge is required for the revision of the current information base on West Africa. The representation of hitherto undocumented usages, or discovery of fresh/cryptic mushroom taxa or setting record straight about mushroom taxa that were previously identified wrongly call for further col- laborative studies. Folk taxonomy of edible mushrooms is restricted to local information distribution and based on different language versions that vary dialectically with tribe and interpreta- tion. This has been found to be inconsistent, amenable to change by transculturation or acculturation. Consequently, the use of local names of wild edible mushrooms will be sparingly discussed in this paper. Limited accounts of wild edible and medicinal mushroom taxa with saprobic and ectomycorrhizal habits have been reported from tropical regions of West Africa [50]. Although, there is yet no consolidative approach and em- pirically estimated value of edible mushrooms for the sub-region comprising 16 nations, some degree of ethnomycological information on Republic of Bénin, Burkina Faso, Cameroon, Cote d’Ivoire, Ghana, Ivory Coast, Nigeria and recently Togo existed in mycological literature [18,25,29,30,51]. A survey of ethnomycological treatise reflected low level of mushroom cultivation practices and production outputs, and poor inventory of vari- ous mushroom diets or useful wild edible mushroom- forming fungi. It may therefore be ideologically assumed that information on mushrooms is restricted to only the useful taxa. The current ethnomycological information on West African edible and medicinal mushrooms is an uncomplimentary representation as lots of useful mushrooms and their diverse utility in some locations within the sub-region are still elusive as well as undocumented. Invariably, some inventorial accounts alluded to the region included Rammeloo and Walleyn [34], De Kesel et al . [35] and Zoberi [38]. There is also no baseline ethnomycology account on Mali, Chad, Niger and Mauritania which were far afield in semi-desert and grassland vegetations. This observation which is in concordance with a study by Nwordu et al. [23], demonstrated the impact of desertification vis-a-vis forestation on the availability of wild edible mushrooms. This invariable explains the rar- ity of ethnomycology literatures from the this parts of West Africa. In addition, the lack of a recognizable mushroom culture and the peoples’ apparent disinterest in mushrooms generally may also account for this. Distribution and pattern of rainfalls are cardinal to the growth dynamics, species composition and diversity of mushrooms. Consequently, it defines the availability and the complexity of people-mushroom relationship. Similarly, it is observed that countries such as Gambia, Libe- ria and Guinea Bissau which are located within the woodlands (tropical rain and deciduous forests) region of West Africa disputatively lack ethnomycological data ( Figure 1 ). While the reasons for this are discordant with the aforementioned, they are unconnected to the availability of useful mushrooms and poor rainfall patterns. Poor mushroom representation and uses in the regions may be invariably linked to a combination of factors that may ideologically include (not exclusively) undocumented ethnomycology research, endemic mycophobic culture, paucity of mycologists, limited traditional mushroom cuisines, disintegrative cultural mushroom heritage, political instability and occupation besides non-availability of mushrooms. This disagrees with claims in literatures that mycophagy is prevalent in the tropical rain forests and woodland savannahs areas of the world with huge agroforestry base [1]. It is also observed that mycophobic culture apparently suffuses desert nations within the region most of which parade lifestyles that derive less benefit from the verse range of ambient forests. Consequently, it can be hypothesized that indigenous mushroom culture and the knowledge base involving their multidimensional uses and their diversity have suffered many years of neglect. Furthermore, these have had negative consequences on the overall global knowledge and diversity representation of African mushrooms. Suffice to say that the region promises many yet unknown species of mushrooms with valuable potential but equally unknown uses. This study recognizes the lack of ethnomycological information from some of the West African nations unconnected with lack of mycophagy culture or use of mushrooms and advocates more study of indigenous mushroom heritage research in such places. The study also showed marginal variations in mycophagy culture, the choice and representative composition of useful mushrooms. Auricularia auricular -Judae, Cal vatia cf. cyathiformis , Daldinia concentrica , Ganoderma lucidum , L. tuber-regium Syn. Pleurotus tuber-regium , Schizophyllum commune , Termitomyces microcarpus , T. robustus , T. striatus , Volvariella volvacea are common organoleptic (or gastronomic) and folk medicine mushrooms in the region ( Table 1 ). The use of Phallus species in Nigeria, Amanita strobilaceovolvata in Ghana, Hy grophoropsis aurantiaca and H. mangenotii in Cote D’Ivoire, and Tubosaeta brunneosetosa as food are isolated examples of endemic uses that were stricto sensu preferential neglected as food in other cultures even when they are available in the wild. Although, the variations and relative endemism of certain edible mushrooms may be rooted to the traditional lifestyle and dietary habits of the people, nevertheless further understanding is required on the stochastic sociological and anthropological dynamics of the West African mushroom diet culture. The interplay of correlated physical factors driving the emergence of this observed cultural differences and similarities in mycophilic habits as well as tradition- ally accepted variety of selected wild culinary mushrooms is not fully understood. A few mushrooms hitherto categorized in other places within and outside West Africa as poisonous e.g. Chlorophyllum molybdites , Ama nita spp., Agrocybe spp. and Coprinus spp. were reported as edible in other cultures within the W. African region. The reason for this inconsistency is not yet fully understood. However, logical but differential thoughts abound in many ethnomycological literatures. The most popular ideological reason alluded to the paucity of mushroom taxonomy expertise and/or misidentification of traditional wild edible and medicinal mushrooms in many developing countries. This has negatively affected the quality of ethnomycological works, global representation of both edible mushroom taxa and mushroom taxonomists of West African extract position on the board of the Nomenclature Committee for Fungi (NCF) and the International Commission for the Taxonomy of Fungi (ICTF). Furthermore, it has confounded integrative cata- loguing of wild edible and medicinal mushrooms of West Africa. The popular approach to ethnomycology research in the region relies on some of the more common literature guide or pictured monographs from the more ad- vanced inventory of Europe and America for the identification of wild edible mushrooms. Not employing the benefits of molecularly identification technology could have also accounted for the inconsistency in earlier mentioned. Furthermore, the influence of resident phytochemicals and/or the level of heavy metal contamination that characterizes the environment/substrate of domicili- ary mushrooms were reported as possible sources of chronic poisoning and has also been implicated in the questionable edibility status of certain mushrooms ab initio poisonous [23,46,52]. The peculiar feeding habit (extra-cellular digestion) of many useful saprotrophic mushrooms which invariably has the highest representation of wild poisonous ahead of mycorrhiza mushrooms strongly supported this logical derivation. Consequently further understanding of the ...

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... interaction of humans and mushrooms dated back to many millennia and peaked in the food gathering era, the documentary evidence of ethnomycological knowledge is a more recent conception. The earliest accounts of ethnomycology emerged within the century and became a migrated discipline from ethnobiology (people- biota-environment interactions) and ethnobotany (cultural uses of plants). Controversially, it also overlapped with social science based disciplines like anthropology (study of human kind) and ethnography (empirical data on human society and culture). This concurred with the views of [1]. Ethnomycology popularises more the diversity of useful mushroom species over the poisonous ones and provides insight into their sociological impacts on human behaviours, indigenous uses and the yet misun- derstood influence of ethnoecology in mushrooming. Furthermore, it emphasizes mushroom-forming fungi (mushrooms, macrofungi) over their microscopic (conid- ial) counterparts, contextualizing them as the essence of ethnomycological knowledge around the world. Ethnomycology derived from human insatiable and dynamic desire to improve his food and medicine base, civilization and culture. It is a representation of a balanced tri- partite ecological relationship between humans, mushrooms and abiotic components of a complex ecological system. Consequently, this formed the basis for understanding the unquestionable importance of fungi to past and present civilization globally [2]. The sustainable but rapid drive for mushroom domestication as a better alternative to the ancient practice of mushroom hunting in the wild remained controvertible in West Africa. It is therefore logical to presume that domestication of wild edible mushroom would help preserve ecosystem dynamics, and its associated goods and service delivery capacity. It also reduces risks associated with hunting mushrooms in the wild. Mushroom domestication has attracted donor-funded projects of the Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO) of the United Nations to Africa to assist governments in combating issues of poverty and food security. These initiatives, especially those deploy- ing valuable species of mushrooms were however cock- eyed to central, east and South African nations with limited representation in West Africa. It is incontrovertibly possible to ascribe this to limited mushroom research collaboration, slow publication of mycological works and far-in-between revision of existing inventories of both valuable and valueless mushrooms. Many published ethnomycological works from Asia, South America, Canada and America are prolific and represent diverse areas of mushroom knowledge that includes cultivation [3], entheogenics (spirituality and mythological values), my- copharmaceuticals, mycophagy, nutriceutics [4,5], folk mushroom taxonomy and the dynamics of inherited folk knowledge of mushrooms [6,7]. The intrinsic sociological factors driving the heritage of traditional based knowledge of mushrooms along generational lineage and culture transformation were outlined by Garibay-Orijel et al . [7] to include experimentation, innovation transculturation, acculturation and syncretism. Although, these and their influences on human behaviour toward edible mushrooms require further studies, they are seldom the focus of ethnomycological works in the region. A few of these studies, though theoretically derived from agelong interaction between humans and the environment, have not presented adequate insight to humans’ cultural attitudes and idiosyncratic emotions toward fungi (mycophobia and mycophilia). This is in addition to the influence of psychedelic fungi on religion and knowledge heritage of local mushroom [8,9]. West Africa lies close to 10 ̊ East longitude and com- posed of 16 sovereign countries spread over a land area 2 of 140,000 km , all sandwiched by the Atlantic ocean on the South border and the Sahara desert on the North side. The region accommodates 3.4% of the over 1.0 billion African population with an average population density of 2 approximately 175/km . The sub-region is endowed with rich gradation of tropical rainforests and verse savannah woodlands ( Figure 1 ). This made the region potentially fertile for foreign donor-funded conservation and mushroom research initiatives. The historical transcultural and accultural dynamics of the West African people predates colonial dominance and accounted for the recognizable similarities in their culture, cuisines, religion, dress style and music in the region. Although sedentary farming began around the fifth millennium, it is however yet unclear when mushroom commodification began in West Africa neither is the extent to which has influenced the dynamics of mushroom knowledge and heritage, uses, and mycophagy across West Africa. More information is therefore required to fully understand how the improving trend of mushroom commodification bares on indigenous mushroom knowledge and culture evolution. Traill et al . [10] recognizes the relevance of rainfall to species availability, composition and spread, and as the most important denominator that separates West Africa from Central, East and South African sub-regions. In addition, the rich vegetation covers that characterized the West African region could have accounted for the high population density. This correlates with logical thoughts that pitched humans’ settlement in places that provide easy access to food, fruits, water and security as typified by the overwhelming presence of forests, rivers and tribu- taries respectively in the region. The climate condition of the region according to Kauserud et al . [11] supports rich mushroom development and diversity. Suffice to say that West Africa incontrovertibly ranked among other parts of the world and recognized as one of the major hotspots of fungi. Current polemic world fungal diversity estimate is based on the ratio of 5:1 (higher plants to fungus) ex- trapolation of Hawksworth [12]. In addition, using documented plant species data, Hawksworth [13] reported a total of 140,000 global species of macrofungi for which only 10% were already documented and an a priori estimate of 35,000 - 40,000 remaining “unknown” species as reported by Mueller et al . [14]. He ascribed an estimated 25,000 known species of macrofungi to Africa. Similarly, Rossman [15] gave 10% of Hawksworth (2001) conser- vative estimate to be between 53,000 and 110,000 macrofungi out of which over 2800 was reported by Boa [16] to be used worldwide. This is however at variance with Germishuizen and Meyer’s [17] list of flora of the South African regions consisting Botswana, Lesotho, Namibia, South Africa and Swaziland. There is still no correct estimate of the diversity value of mushrooms and macrofungi represented in Africa. Efforts in this direction may be confounded by discontinuous revision of existing lists of mushroom taxa and their unrecorded traditional uses. This study while appreciating commonalities in mushroom culture, especially mycophagy and the abysmal level of unrecorded uses of mushrooms, marvel at the state of ethnomycology research in the region. Emerging reports on ethnomycology studies in many parts of Africa are varied, incoherent, culture based, skewed, biased against mushrooms of unknown uses. It is ecology dependent and showed comparative degree of inconsistency in their use as food, source of income and medicine [18-20]. In addition, African ethnomycological works are reflection of the depth of understanding of the potential values inherent in mushroom genetic resource and strongly influenced by folk taxonomy. It could be philosophically presumed that the over-shadowing effect of traditional nomenclature practice in most African suburbs may have constrained the development of ethnomycology, mushroom diversity and taxonomy researches, and become the apparent root cause of inconsistent global scientific nomenclature. The dominance of folk taxonomy in West African ethnomycology is attributed to reasons that may include inherited cultural knowledge, access to modern taxonomy information, and dearth of trained mushroom taxonomists. The engendered practice of ascribing traditional (dialectic) name only to the useful mushrooms and rarely the poisonous ones or those with unknown uses mushrooms have also limited the quality of ethnomycological information from West Africa. Compared to recorded advancements in other ethnosci- entific studies of botanical and zoological origins, the theoretical and dimensional utility of mushrooms in West Africa is not yet fully represented in ethnomycology literatures [21]. Invariably, it can be summated that the formal institutionalization of mycology (mycodiveristy, ethnomycology, mycosystematics, mycoecology, etc.) research structure is still developing and incongruous with reports affirming Africa as a potential biodiversity hotspots of mushroom diversity with undocumented and cryptic taxa [14,18,22]. The reports of Gryzenhout et al . [22], Labarère and Menini, [26] and Crouse et al . [27] on African mushrooms were limited to central and east Africa. There are however few ethnomycology reports ...

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... subsequent dependence on them as the primary source of edible mushrooms and forest protection/conservation legislature have gradually subverted the ancient practice of their collection from the wild. Suffice to say little or no integrative ethnomycological information on mushroom traditional uses, cuisines and complete list of useful macrofungi in Africa or West Africa existed. Collaborative efforts are therefore required under the platform of either the African Mycology Association (AMA) or the African Society for Edible and Medicinal Mushrooms (ASEMM) to capture the representative macrofungi species (both valuable and my- coflora of unknown uses) of Africa with a view to revis- ing their global representation. The people of West African sub-region still rely on wild edible mushrooms for their livelihood especially as a low-cost alternative for animal proteins and flavouring in diets. In addition, they represent a venerable source of subsistent income and incontrovertible raw material in local traditional medicine practice. Women and children according to Guissou et al . [25] and De Román et al . [46] are more involved with the vocation of picking wild edible mushrooms either for sale at local markets, cooking, dye extraction for rural cosmetics or hair dye, voodooism (mysticism) or for religious rites. This concurred with the report of Garibay-Orijel et al . [7] and Okhuoya et al . [18], and raised the question on the influence of gender on the heritage of local knowledge of mushrooms. Despite the paucity of reviews linking gender and ethmycological knowledge, the role of local African women and children cannot be delineated from the economy of the homestead. It is therefore logical to assume that women wield better knowledge of edible mushrooms as well as the poisonous ones, their characteristic and identification features which are mostly macroscopic than men. In addition, they also have the best capacity to distinguish edible and poisonous mushrooms, knowledge of their spatial distribution in terms of habitat, phenology and associated substrate(s), processing (handling, drying and cooking) and appropri- ate local cuisine uses. The emergence of commidification of collected edible mushrooms at rural markets could also be linked to the innovation of local suburban women and may be one of the theoretical causes of secrecy of information observed in the West African region. Although the role of gender in the evolution of folk taxonomy is still unclear, it could be hypothesized that mushroom collectors derive local (indigenous) names of va- rious edible mushrooms from their habitat, season/phe- nology, shape, colour, folktale and uses [23,28,29,47]. On the contrary, a study by Akpaja et al . [48] reported that aged (50 - 75 years old) men in the suburbs also command relatively sufficient knowledge of indigenous wild edible and poisonous mushrooms. Although, the influence of occupation type on the depth of indigenous knowledge of wild edible mushrooms remains unclear, the distribution of this knowledge logically relates to occupation. Personal communication with some mushroom biologists and observation within the region affirmed high knowledge of mushroom heritage in local men linked to forest-related occupations like game hunting, farming, palmwine tapping, foresters, firewood collector, herbalists, fruits, latex, palmfronds and nuts gathers. It is invariable philosophical to deduce that uses of wild mushrooms in the region are limited only to medicinal, psychoactive (psychedelic or entheogenics), cosmetological (colouring of hair), flavouring and food. Uses this could be as a result of ignorance of other uses due to poor explorative ethnomycological research that provide values for hitherto valueless species of wild mushrooms. The appearance of edible mushrooms, majority of which are fleshy or non-xeromorphic, in West Africa is restricted to the rainy season, planting seasons (mostly in farm communities) and within the broad canopy woodlands. This has consequently compounded their availability and affected peoples’ behaviour, diets and mushroom utility pattern. In many farming communities, around West Africa, farming season represents low availability of food hence mushrooms were the most favourable option for overwintering the abysmal food season. Millions of years of cultural interaction among the West African people has evoked commonality in mushrooming pattern, mushroom recipes, folk believes, socio- economic class and age of mushroom hunters, and uses of mushroom collected. In addition, many believed that several wood decaying saprotroph or tree associated mycorrhiza mushrooms are edible because of a genea- logical conception derived from the “wholesome ingest- ible value” of trees. Thus every part of a tree serves as food per time to different spatial and temporal organisms. The spread of the tropical forests (rain, deciduous and mangroves) vegetation across the nations of the sub-region ( Figure 1 ) coupled with associated coastal and geologic features complimented the conjecture by Oso [41] that over 75% of the tribes in the region are inherita- bly mycophilic. A paradigm shift in peoples’ mycopha- gic behaviour from mycophily among rural suburban areas to mycophoby in city or urban dwellers is also an observable trend in the region. It is imperative to meas- ure the impact created by the pressure of mushrooms collection in Africa on forest diversity, ecosystem dynamics and distribution of edible mushrooms with a view to identifying need for conservation or the evolution of legislature that protect the forests and rescue over-ex- ploited mushrooms from eminent extinction. Wild mushroom collection practice in the sub-region is largely forests linked, indiscriminate, and precludes any conceptualized plan for germplasm conservation, forest preservation nor consideration of the consequences of over-exploration and over-exploitation of mushrooms on forest ecosystems’ functions, species composition, rich- ness and diversity. Collected edible mushrooms are han- dled ex situ in almost similar manners and this may in- volve the careful removal of dust, cooking fresh and/or dried for eating or cooking at a later time. The methods of preserving or drying mushrooms which are rampant among the West African people include, sun-drying on a mat and in suspension over local hot coal pot or burning firewood stove, smoking and salting. Modern civilization and the introduction of electricity to diverse formally non-electrified suburbs in many West African communities have expanded the process of preserving edible mushrooms to include refrigeration. Depending on the morphology of collected wild edible mushrooms, the cap and the pileus (cap) may be separated prior to cooking or drying or cooked whole in the case of edible polypores. The reason for this practice is not fully understood but may either make for effective and fast drying or better still cooking which could be an unconscious strategy to detoxify (remove toxin) the mushrooms. Secrecy of in situ knowledge of many edible and medicinal mushrooms is also a common practice. Bounty harvests are sold for little subsistent income to tourists, hoteliers as well as mycophilic visitors from the cities. The pattern of marketing wild indigenous edible mushrooms however varies from one West African country to another and even amongst tribes. In Nigeria, Ghana and Bénin mushrooms are sold openly either carefully displayed on clean tables during village market days or hawked on trays along highways outside market days. They are displayed in different basket sizes correlating to their quantity and price, or mentally measured on trays. Even though the ancestral origin of indigenous knowledge of wild edible and medicinal mushrooms in the region remained an un- solved mystery, it cannot be separated from evolving understanding and consciousness of the people about their environment and instinctive propensity for food. Folk accounts associated with the accidental or opportunistic applications of wild mushrooms were rooted in traditional beliefs and myths. Some of these controversial beliefs that are fast becoming heresies include 1) any wild mushroom nibbled in situ by insects, rodents and some other form of animals qualify as food for humans, 2) any mushroom fed ex situ to a life chicken, pig, dog or any other domestic stock without deadly sick or death repercussion is edible for humans, 3) brightly coloured, heavily ornamented, funny shaped (e.g. Phallus pp.) and hypogenous mushrooms are associated with the gods and poisonous hence avoided, 4) pleasant smelly e.g. mealy mushrooms must be edible. Presumably products of human experimentations have enriched the knowledge of mushroom uses leading to their edibility acceptance or toxicity discernment. Consequently, this unbalanced knowledge or unwritten codes of wild useful mushrooms guide their collection, transcends generations, and engenders strong knowledge of dialectically variable folk taxonomy and classification across the region [49]. More understanding and documentation of folk knowledge is required for the revision of the current information base on West Africa. The representation of hitherto undocumented usages, or discovery of fresh/cryptic mushroom taxa or setting record straight about mushroom taxa that were previously identified wrongly call for further col- laborative studies. Folk taxonomy of edible mushrooms is restricted to local information distribution and based on different language versions that vary dialectically with tribe and interpreta- tion. This has been found to be inconsistent, amenable to change by transculturation or acculturation. Consequently, the use of local names of wild edible mushrooms will be sparingly discussed in this paper. Limited accounts of wild edible and medicinal mushroom taxa with saprobic and ectomycorrhizal habits have been reported from tropical regions of West Africa ...