Entangled Life: How Fungi Make Our Worlds, Change Our Minds & Shape Our Futures

by Merlin Sheldrake

Some fungi have tens of thousands of mating types, approximately equivalent to our sexes (the record holder is the split gill fungus, Schizophyllum commune, which has more than twenty-three thousand mating types, each of which is sexually compatible with nearly every one of the others).

Some organisms—like most animals—find food in the world and put it inside their bodies, where it is digested and absorbed. Fungi have a different strategy. They digest the world where it is and then absorb it into their bodies.

The closer we get to lichens, the stranger they seem.

we, like all other life-forms are symborgs, or symbiotic organisms.

The Vertical Earth Kilometer is a brass pole one kilometer long buried in the ground. The only visible part of it is the very end of the pole: a brass circle that lies flat on the floor

fungal networks form physical connections between plants. It is the difference between having twenty acquaintances and having twenty acquaintances with whom one shares a circulatory system.

Fungi are prodigious decomposers, but of their many biochemical achievements, one of the most impressive is this ability of white rot fungi to break down the lignin in wood. Based on their ability to release free radicals, the peroxidases produced by white rot fungi perform what is technically known as “radical chemistry.”

However, it turns out not to be the fungus that confers the ability to survive high temperatures after all. Rather, it is a virus that lives within the fungus that confers heat tolerance. When grown without the virus, neither fungus nor plant can survive high temperatures.

It appears that there are only so many ways to make a life as a network.

the way hyphae grew together to make complex forms was one of the central riddles in all of developmental biology.

it may be helpful to think of mycelial networks as a type of “liquid computer,”

The “moving hypothesis” posits that brains evolved as a cause and a consequence of the need for animals to move around.

In late 2018, a low-frequency seismic hum traveled around the world, evading mainstream earthquake-detection systems. Its trajectory and identity were pieced together in an impromptu collaboration between academic and citizen seismologists interacting on Twitter

I was inspired by the excellent book Sacred Herbal and Healing Beers (Buhner [1998]).

i should brew some of these

This planet belongs to microbes.

McGann JP. 2017. Poor human olfaction is a 19th-century myth. Science 356: eaam7263.