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July 28 - August 7, 2025
mushrooms are only the fruiting bodies of fungi,
Fungi produce around fifty megatons of spores each year—equivalent
Mycelium describes the most common of fungal habits, better thought of not as a thing but as a process: an exploratory, irregular tendency.
Fruiting bodies, such as mushrooms, arise from the felting together of hyphal strands.
The lives of leaf-cutter ants revolve around a fungus that they cultivate in cavernous
chambers and feed with fragments of leaf.
banana that accounts for ninety-nine percent of global banana shipments, the Cavendish, is being decimated by a fungal disease and faces extinction in the coming decades.
it’s not always easy to be comfortable in the space created by open questions. Agoraphobia can set in. It’s tempting to hide in small rooms built from quick answers.
You carry around more microbes than your “own” cells. There are
more bacteria in your gut than stars in our galaxy.
Even bacteria have viruses within them (a nanobiome?).
Really, to make my findings vivid, to allow them to build and contribute to a general understanding, imagination was required. There was no way around it. In scientific circles imagination usually goes by the name of speculation and is treated with some suspicion;
George MacDonakd A Dish of Orts
of bacteria surfing on waves of electrical charge—chemical
Truffles are the underground fruiting bodies of several types of mycorrhizal fungi.
Instead, their entire surface behaves like an olfactory epithelium.
First, they branch. Second, they fuse.
arises like a blister in soft human minds: untrained, undisciplined, unhardened.
To grow truffles, you have to grow trees. You have
to acknowledge that the soil is full of life. You can’t cultivate truffles without thinking at the level of the ecosystem.
Perfumers and wine tasters use metaphors to articulate differences in
aromas. A chemical becomes “cut grass,” “sweaty mango,” “grapefruit and hot horses.” Without these references, we would be unable to imagine it.
Our descriptions warp and deform the phenomena we describe, but sometimes this is the only way to talk about features of the world: to say what
they are like but are not.
mycelial networks can even migrate through a landscape.
the bioluminescent fungi known as “foxfire”
Animals put food in their bodies, whereas fungi put their bodies in the food.
Mycelium is a living, growing, opportunistic investigation—speculation
When hyphae felt together to make mushrooms, they rapidly inflate with water, which they
must absorb from their surroundings—the reason why mushrooms tend to appear after rain.
They inflate with water??
He held the word brain at a safe distance, clamped in the forceps of quotation marks to emphasize that a metaphor was in play.
Remarkably unchanged, mycelium has persisted for more than half of the
four billion years of life’s history, through countless cataclysms and catastrophic global transformations.
How can this and evolution both be tdue
The names used to describe lichens sound like afflictions, words that get stuck in your teeth:
can be considered a relatively harmless habit, like eating peanuts, unless it assumes the form of an obsession; then it becomes a vice.”) However, in
the 1970s Margulis was proved correct.
How?
“sticking by” the theory, “from unorthodoxy to orthodoxy.”
small biospheres that include both photosynthetic and non-photosynthetic organisms, thus combining the Earth’s main metabolic processes.
Universal A andnot A
Lichens have evolved independently between nine and twelve times since.
How do they know this?
it was “the song, not the singer” that appeared to be important.
Lichens are stabilized networks of relationships; they never stop lichenizing; they
are verbs as well as nouns.
These are qualities, not quantities. Yet science deals in quantities.
and it is likely that we have been using mind-altering drugs for longer than we
have been human.
Mushrooms were
the original tree of knowledge.
And yet the absence of evidence does not provide evidence of absence.
In the words of Hughes, an infected ant is a “fungus in ant’s clothing.”
As one researcher observes, psilocybin mushrooms “occur in
abundance wherever mycologists abound.”
