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

by Merlin Sheldrake

What’s astonishing is the gulf between what we expect to find, and what we find when we actually look.15

After a day, the slime mould had found the most efficient route between the oats, emanating into a network almost identical to Tokyo’s existing rail network.

The methods fungi use to hunt nematodes are grisly and diverse. It is a habit that has evolved multiple times – many fungal lineages have reached a similar conclusion but in different ways. Some fungi grow adhesive nets, or branches to which

Fungihunting worms

She arranged soil into the shape of the British land mass, and marked cities using blocks of wood colonised with a fungus (the sulphur tuft, or Hypholoma fasciculare). The size of the wood blocks was proportional to the population of the cities they represented. ‘The fungi grew out from the “cities” and made the motorway network,’ Boddy recounted. ‘You could see the M5, M4, M1, M6. I thought it was quite fun.’

Using fungus to design motorways in Britain

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 transport networks.

The wounded area lit up immediately. What confused him was that within ten minutes the light had spread a distance of nine centimetres across the whole network. This was far faster than a chemical signal could travel from one side to the other within the mycelium itself.

Wtf

A mycelial network is a map of a fungus’s recent history, and is a helpful reminder that all life forms are in fact processes, not things. The ‘you’ of five years ago was made from different stuff than the ‘you’ of today. Nature is an event that never stops. As William Bateson, who coined the word ‘genetics’, observed, ‘We commonly think of animals and plants as matter, but they are really systems through which matter is continually passing.’

Perspective of what life is

‘Women Gathering Mushrooms’ is an example of musical polyphony.

polyphony

In all these views, intelligent behaviours can arise without brains. A dynamic and responsive network is all that’s needed.40

What isrequired for intelligence

It is an extraordinary discovery because the fossils date from 2.4 billion years ago, more than a billion years before fungi were thought to have branched off the tree of life. There is no way to identify the organism with certainty, but whether or not it was a true fungus, it clearly had a mycelial habit. It is a finding that makes mycelium one of the earliest known gestures towards complex multicellular life, an original tangle, one of the first living networks. 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.

Mycelium networks from 2.4Bya

Ways of Enlichenment.

Lichen website

a lichen is one of the principal ingredients in the spice mix garam masala.

Which lichen is used in indian food? Dagad phool

Different species of fungi, different species of algae – it doesn’t seem to matter. Completely new symbiotic relationships emerge in less time than it takes for a scab to heal.

Formation of new lichens

The authors of a seminal paper on the symbiotic view of life take a clear stance on this point. ‘There have never been individuals,’ they declare. ‘We are all lichens.’51

we are all Lichens

Roots turn into worlds under a microscope. I’ve spent weeks immersed in them, sometimes enthralled, sometimes frustrated. Put fresh, fine roots in a dish of water and you’ll see fungal hyphae stringing off them. Boil roots in dye, squash them onto a glass slide, and you’ll see an intertwining. Fungal hyphae fork and fuse and erupt within plant cells in a riot of branching filaments. Plant and fungus clasp one another. It’s difficult to imagine a more intimate set of poses.

How close is the relation between roots and mycelium

Matsutake associate with a mycohet cousin of Monotropa that has a red and white striped stem, known as ‘candy canes’ (Allotropa virgata).

How to find matsuke mushroom

mycorrhizal network that might allow a young plant to survive in a heavily shaded understory, or infochemicals to ripple out across a stand of trees in a forest. ‘A young seedling will quickly become tied up within a complex, interwoven and stable network,’ Beiler explained. ‘You would expect this to increase its chances of survival and

often wondered how all the material needed to make an entire plant could traverse such a delicate passage.

Materials required for one whole plant...

We know that mycelial networks are able to fuse with one another and prune themselves back, redirect flow around themselves, and release – and respond to – plumes of chemicals. We know that mycorrhizal fungi form and re-form their connections with plants, tangling, detangling and retangling. We know, in short, that wood wide webs are dynamic systems in shimmering, unceasing turnover.35

A burly oyster mushroom soon bundled itself up and out of the top.

Footnote leads to timelapse

Saccharomyces cerevisiae, the species of yeast used in brewing and baking,

To study a flexible network, I had to assemble a flexible network. It is a recurring theme: look at the network, and it starts to look back at you.

Look at a network and it looks back at you