Pam Catcheside leaves teaching at 58 to forge new mission in South Australia to save fungi, stressing their key role

Pam Catcheside brought Fungimap, a citizen-science group to advance knowledge and conserve Australia's fungi, to South Australia and led to the state's fungal studies group being formed in 2001. Catchside is pictured (left) with a stonemaker fungus and (right) collecting fungi in the field with young field naturalists. 
Images courtesy Pam Catcheside.

Pam Catcheside, in the South Australia environment hall of fame from 2023, transformed a teaching career that ended at age 58 into turning a lifelong passion for fungi that built a valuable biological legacy for the state.

Catcheside’s interest in fungi was inspired by an excellent lecturer in mycology while doing her science degree in London. She started teaching in 1961 in London and, after marrying, in Birmingham with senior biology and general science classes at a girls high school. She stopped teaching when her daughter was born and the young family came to South Australia. When her son was old enough, Catcheside went back to teaching at Woodlands Church of England Girls Grammar School at Adelaide’s Glenelg in 1974 and I stayed there for 25 years until it was closed down in 1998.

At 58 and with the biology syllabus being changed, Catcheside wasn’t keen to continue teaching. Before she stopped teaching, she’d resumed her interest in fungi and was active from 1997 in Fungimap, a citizen-science group to advance knowledge of, and conserve, Australia's fungi. As South Australia coordinator of Fungimap, Catcheside started the Adelaide Fungal Studies Group in 2001 at a meeting at South Australia's state herbarium. Dr Teresa Lebel, who spoke to the meeting about truffle fungi.was later employed as a mycologist at herbarium. The Adelaide Fungal Studies Group became affiliated with the Field Naturalists Society.

Catcheside kept in touch with a botanist she knew at the state herbarium and started working there on fungi. She converted her hobby collecting fungi into concentrated study that enabled her, in her sixties in 2002, to become a research associate at the herbarium. During the “fungal season” from late May to late August, Catcheside went into the field, bush and forest to collect fungi, then document, preserve and deposit them into the herbarium.

She made almost 5,000 collections over 20 years and found around 20 new species. She was helped by husband David, a Flinders Universite professor in areas such as genetics, forensic science and fungal biology, on the extensive work needed to describe new species. Catcheside became expert in a group of fungi called the ascomycetes, along with a special interest in truffles (ascomycete and basidiomycete) and desert fungi.

Catcheside was passionate about the huge importance of fungi have in conservation. Fungi had many interesting capabilities such as chemical sensitivity that helped both the fungus and other plants. Fungi could pick up ions such as phosphate and grow towards the source rapidly and take up those nutrients. Some produce enzymes that could break down rock. Because of its fungal partners, the plant got nutrients otherwise inaccessible.

Fungi also stabilised soil, particularly important after fire. They provided food and habitat for invertebrates and niches for small plants. Without the nutrients recycled by fungi in soild, trees wouldn’t grow taller than two metres. All truffles were symbiotic with plants. In turn, they depended on animals such as marsupials that dug up the fungi, ate them, deposited their dung and the spores within it to benefit all three partners. This is why habitat clearance could be so devastating.