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

by Merlin Sheldrake

Many types of organisms, then, have evolved flexible networks to help solve the problems that life presents.

The problem was that we did not know whom we meant when we said “we.”

A drug affects a receptor, which triggers a change in symptoms. By contrast, psilocybin—like LSD and other psychedelics—appears to act on symptoms of mental illness via the mind.

Besides the hundreds or thousands of meters of fungal mycelium in a teaspoon of healthy soil, there are more bacteria, protists, insects, and arthropods than the number of humans who have ever lived on Earth.

the carbon that powers the life of Monotropa—the bulk of the stuff from which they are made—must ultimately come from other plants via a shared mycorrhizal network: If carbon didn’t flow from a green plant to Monotropa through shared fungal connections, Monotropa couldn’t survive.

the possibility that resources could pass between plants suggested “that we should place less emphasis on competition between plants, and more on the distribution of resources within the community.”

In another study of birch and Douglas fir in Canadian forests, the direction of carbon transfer switched twice in the course of a single growing season.

Resources passed from areas of abundance to areas of scarcity.

When broad bean plants are attacked by aphids, for example, they release plumes of volatile compounds that drift out from the wound and attract parasitic wasps that prey on the aphids. These “infochemicals”—so-called because they convey information about a plant’s condition—are one of the ways plants communicate, both between different parts of their own bodies and with other organisms.

A similar phenomenon has been observed with tomato plants attacked by caterpillars, and between Douglas fir and pine seedlings attacked by budworm.