Reported in today’s journal of Mycologia, these discoveries also shed some light on the evolution of luminescence. San Francisco State University Biology Professor Dennis Desjardin and colleagues discovered the fungi in Belize, Brazil, Dominican Republic, Jamaica, Japan, Malaysia and Puerto Rico and these discoveries mean four species that are absolutely new and three new reports of luminescence in already known species. What’s really interesting is that three quarters of these glowing shrooms belong to the Mycena genus, a group that feed off and decompose organic matter as a source of nutrients