Entangled Life: The Illustrated Edition: How Fungi Make Our Worlds

by Merlin Sheldrake

Without this fungal web my tree would not exist. Without similar fungal webs no plant would exist anywhere. All life on land, including my own, depended on these networks. I tugged lightly on my root and felt the ground move.

Today, more than 90 per cent of plants depend on these ‘mycorrhizal’ fungi. This ancient association gave rise to all recognisable life on land, the future of which depends on the continued ability of plants and fungi to form healthy relationships.

We all live and breathe fungi, thanks to the prolific abilities of fungal fruiting bodies to disperse spores. Some species discharge spores explosively, which accelerate 10,000 times faster than a space shuttle directly after launch, reaching speeds of up to 100 kilometres per hour – some of the quickest movements

This is not unusual: although fungi have long been lumped together with plants, they are actually more closely related to animals – an example of the kind of category mistake that researchers regularly make in their struggle to understand fungal lives. At a molecular level, fungi and humans are similar enough to benefit from many of the same biochemical innovations.

Anthropomorphism is usually thought of as an illusion that arises like a blister in soft human minds: untrained, undisciplined, unhardened. There are good reasons for this: when we humanise the world, we may prevent ourselves from understanding the lives of other organisms on their own terms. But perhaps there are things that we pass over – or forget to notice – when we reduce another life form to an ‘it’, an inanimate object. Might we be able to expand some of our concepts, such that speaking might not always require a mouth, hearing might not always require ears, and interpreting might not always require a nervous system? Are we able to do this without smothering other life forms with prejudice and innuendo?

Researchers have begun to use network-based organisms like slime moulds and fungi to solve human problems. The researchers who modelled the Tokyo train network using slime moulds are working to incorporate slime-mould behaviour into the design of urban transportation networks. Researchers at the Unconventional Computing Laboratory at the University of the West of England have used slime moulds to calculate efficient fire evacuation routes from buildings.

The difference between animals and fungi is simple: animals put food in their bodies, whereas fungi put their bodies in the food. However, the world is unpredictable.

distances. These are rhizomorphs of the honey fungus, or Armillaria. Networks of Armillaria are among the largest organisms in the world. The current record holder weighs hundreds of tons, spills across 10 square kilometres, and is somewhere between 2,000 and 8,000 years old. Photo by Alison Pouliot.

The record-holding lichen lives in Swedish Lapland and is more than 9,000 years old.

Some time around 600 million years ago, green algae began to move out of shallow fresh waters and onto the land. These were the ancestors of all land plants, and would go on to transform the planet and its atmosphere, creating the conditions for all subsequent life, including our own.

Today, more than 90 per cent of all plant species depend on mycorrhizal fungi. They are the rule, not the exception: a more fundamental part of planthood than fruit, flowers, leaves, wood or even roots.

association was already some fifty million years old. Mycorrhizal fungi are the roots of all subsequent life on land.