"Entangled Life"

[fiefoe]

Between Merlin Sheldrake dainty yet weighty instroduction into this hitherto unseen world and "A Desolation Called Peace", clearly fungi is the new frontier. I also recall the heroine of "The Signature of All Things", who made litchen her seemingly modest specialty.

• The ability of fungi to prosper in such a variety of habitats depends on their diverse metabolic abilities. Metabolism is the art of chemical transformation. Fungi are metabolic wizards and can explore, scavenge, and salvage ingeniously, their abilities rivaled only by bacteria. Using cocktails of potent enzymes and acids, fungi can break down some of the most stubborn substances on the planet, from lignin, wood’s toughest component, to rock; crude oil; polyurethane plastics; and the explosive TNT.
• MUSHROOMS DOMINATE THE popular fungal imagination, but just as the fruits of plants are one part of a much larger structure that includes branches and roots, so mushrooms are only the fruiting bodies of fungi, the place where spores are produced.
• Some species discharge spores explosively, which accelerate ten thousand times faster than a space shuttle directly after launch, reaching speeds of up to a hundred kilometers per hour—some of the quickest movements achieved by any living organism. Other species of fungi create their own microclimates: Spores are carried upward by a current of wind generated by mushrooms as water evaporates from their gills. Fungi produce around fifty megatons of spores each year—equivalent to the weight of five hundred thousand blue whales—making them the largest source of living particles in the air. Spores are found in clouds and influence the weather by triggering the formation of the water droplets that form rain and the ice crystals that form snow, sleet, and hail.
• However, most fungi form networks of many cells known as hyphae (pronounced HY fee): fine tubular structures that branch, fuse, and tangle into the anarchic filigree of mycelium. Mycelium describes the most common of fungal habits, better thought of not as a thing but as a process: an exploratory, irregular tendency.
• Diseases caused by fungi cause billions of dollars of losses—the rice blast fungus ruins a quantity of rice large enough to feed more than sixty million people every year.
• I have tried to find ways to enjoy the ambiguities that fungi present, but 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. I have done my best to hold back.


• Fungi, too, trick us out of our preconceptions. Their lives and behaviors are startling. The more I’ve studied fungi, the more my expectations have loosened and the more familiar concepts have started to appear unfamiliar.
• The first is a growing awareness of the many sophisticated, problem-solving behaviors that have evolved in brainless organisms outside the animal kingdom. The best-known examples are slime molds, such as Physarum polycephalum (though they are amoeba, not fungi, as true molds are).
• Fungi inhabit enmeshed worlds; countless threads lead through these labyrinths.
• Their solution is to smell. But to smell above the olfactory racket of a forest is no small task. Forests are crisscrossed with smells, each a potential fascination or distraction to an animal nose. Truffles must be pungent enough for their scent to penetrate the layers of soil and enter the air, distinctive enough for an animal to take note amid the ambient smellscape, and delicious enough for that animal to seek it out, dig it up, and eat it. Every visual disadvantage that truffles face—being entombed in the soil, difficult to spot once unearthed, and visually unappealing once spotted—they make up for with smell.
• our noses can distinguish well over a trillion different odors. Humans can detect virtually all volatile chemicals ever tested. We outperform rodents and dogs in detecting certain odors, and we can follow scent trails.
• In France, Saint Anthony—the patron saint of lost objects—is regarded as the patron saint of truffles, and truffle masses are celebrated in his honor.
• Male orchid bees collect scents from the world and amass them into a cocktail that they use to court females. They are perfume makers. Mating takes seconds, but gathering and blending their scents takes their entire adult lives.
• Truffles differ from humans in that either + or - mating types can be maternal or paternal... How the sexual attraction between truffle fungi plays out remains unknown. Closely related fungi use pheromones to attract mates, and researchers have a strong suspicion that truffles, too, use a sex pheromone for this purpose.
• Both plant and fungus use volatile chemicals to make themselves attractive to one another, just as truffles make themselves attractive to animals in a forest. Receptive plant roots produce plumes of volatile compounds that drift through the soil and cause spores to sprout and hyphae to branch and grow faster. Fungi produce plant growth hormones that manipulate roots, causing them to proliferate into masses of feathery branches—with a greater surface area, the chances of an encounter between root tips and fungal hyphae become more likely.
• it would feel like the performance of a jazz group, with the players listening, interacting, responding to one another in real time. <> Piedmont white truffles and other prized mycorrhizal fungi, such as porcini, chanterelle, and matsutake, have never been domesticated in part because of the fluidity of their relationships with plants, and in part because of the intricacies of their sex lives. There are too many gaps in our understanding of how basic fungal communication happens.
• Watching a hypha explore a single clinical maze is bewildering, but scale up: Imagine millions of hyphal tips, each navigating a different maze at the same time within a tablespoon of soil. Scale up again: Imagine billions of hyphal tips exploring a patch of forest the size of a football field.
  Mycelium is ecological connective tissue, the living seam by which much of the world is stitched into relation... According to some estimates, if one teased apart the mycelium found in a gram of soil—about a teaspoon—and laid it end to end, it could stretch anywhere from a hundred meters to ten kilometers.
• Coal miners in nineteenth-century England reported that bioluminescent fungi growing on wooden pit props were bright enough to “see their hands by,” and Benjamin Franklin proposed the use of the bioluminescent fungi known as “foxfire” to illuminate the compass and depth gauge of the first submarine (the Turtle—developed in 1775 during the American Revolutionary War).
• Fungi have a different strategy. They digest the world where it is and then absorb it into their bodies. Their hyphae are long and branched, and only a single cell thick—between two and twenty micrometers in diameter, more than five times thinner than an average human hair. The more of their surroundings that hyphae can touch, the more they can consume. The difference between animals and fungi is simple: Animals put food in their bodies, whereas fungi put their bodies in the food... <> But to embed oneself in an irregular and unpredictable food supply as mycelium does, one must be able to shape-shift. Mycelium is a living, growing, opportunistic investigation—speculation in bodily form.
• where mycelium has to break through particularly tough barriers, as disease-causing fungi do when infecting plants, they develop special penetrative hyphae that can reach pressures of fifty to eighty atmospheres and exert enough force to penetrate the tough plastics Mylar and Kevlar.
• At a molecular level, all cellular activity, whether fungal or not, is a blur of rapid activity. Even by these standards, hyphal tips are a commotion, busier than a court of ten thousand self-dribbling basketballs. The hyphae of some species grow so fast that one can watch them extend in real time.
• Mycelium is polyphony in bodily form. Each of the women’s voices is a hyphal tip, exploring a soundscape for itself.
• When Olsson inserted the microelectrodes into Armillaria’s hyphal strands, he detected regular action potential–like impulses, firing at a rate very close to that of animals’ sensory neurons—around four impulses per second, which traveled along hyphae at a speed of at least half a millimeter per second, some ten times faster than the fastest rate of fluid flow measured in a fungal hypha.
• Three years later, in 1869, the Swiss botanist Simon Schwendener published a paper advancing the “dual hypothesis of lichens.” In it, he presented the radical notion that lichens were not a single organism, as had long been assumed. Instead, he argued that they were composed of two quite different entities: a fungus and an alga.
• Several years later, when viruses were first observed within bacteria, their discoverer described them as “microlichens.”
  Lichens, in other words, quickly grew into a biological principle. They were a gateway organism to the idea of symbiosis, an idea that ran against the prevailing currents in evolutionary thought in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries, best summed up in Thomas Henry Huxley’s portrayal of life as a “gladiator’s show
• LICHENS ENCRUST AS much as eight percent of the planet’s surface, an area larger than that covered by tropical rainforests.
• Lichens mine minerals from rock in a twofold process known as “weathering.” First, they physically break up surfaces by the force of their growth. Second, they deploy an arsenal of powerful acids and mineral-binding compounds to dissolve and digest the rock. Lichens’ ability to weather makes them a geological force, yet they do more than dissolve the physical features of the world. When lichens die and decompose, they give rise to the first soils in new ecosystems. Lichens are how the inanimate mineral mass within rocks is able to cross over into the metabolic cycles of the living... lichens are go-betweens that inhabit the boundary dividing life and nonlife.
• Lederberg was a prodigy. He enrolled at Columbia University at the age of fifteen and in his early twenties made a discovery that helped transform our understanding of the history of life. He found that bacteria could trade genes with each other. One bacterium could acquire a trait from another bacterium “horizontally.”
• For bacteria, horizontal gene transfer is the norm—most of the genes in any given bacterium do not share an evolutionary history but are acquired piecemeal, just as objects accumulate in a home.
• In 1967, the visionary American biologist Lynn Margulis became a vocal proponent of a controversial theory that gave symbiosis a central role in the evolution of early life. Margulis argued that some of the most significant moments in evolution had resulted from the coming together—and staying together—of different organisms. Eukaryotes arose when a single-celled organism engulfed a bacterium, which continued to live symbiotically inside it... All complex life that followed, human life included, was a story of the long-lasting “intimacy of strangers.”
• The endosymbiotic theory, as it came to be known, rewrote the history of life. It was one of the twentieth century’s most dramatic shifts in biological consensus.
• Dormancy appears to be the most important survival strategy for lichens, but they have others. The hardiest lichen species have thick layers of tissue that block damaging rays. Lichens also produce more than a thousand chemicals that are not found in any other life-form, some of which act as sunscreens. A product of their innovative metabolisms, these chemicals have led lichens into all sorts of relationships with humans over the years: from medicines (antibiotics), to perfumes (oak moss), to dyes (tweeds, tartan, the pH indicator litmus), to foods—a lichen is one of the principal ingredients in the spice mix garam masala.
• Recent findings from the Deep Carbon Observatory report that more than half of all Earth’s bacteria and archaea—so called “infra-terrestrials”—exist kilometers below the planet’s surface, where they live under intense pressure and extreme heat. These subsurface worlds are as diverse as the Amazon rainforest and contain billions of tons of microbes, hundreds of times the collective weight of all the humans on the planet. Some specimens are thousands of years old.
• LICHENS ARE PLACES where an organism unravels into an ecosystem and where an ecosystem congeals into an organism. They flicker between “wholes” and “collections of parts.”
• Its author argues that lichens are queer beings that present ways for humans to think beyond a rigid binary framework: The identity of lichens is a question rather than an answer known in advance... We ask questions from the perspective of our cultural context. And this makes it extremely difficult to ask questions about complex symbioses like lichens because we think of ourselves as autonomous individuals and so find it hard to relate.”
• Our bodies, like those of all other organisms, are dwelling places. Life is nested biomes all the way down...  Neither can we be defined developmentally, as the organism that proceeds from the fertilization of an animal egg, because we depend, like all mammals, on our symbiotic partners to direct parts of our developmental programs.
• The fungus then digests the ant’s body and sprouts a stalk out of its head, from which spores shower down on ants passing below. If the spores miss their targets, they produce secondary sticky spores that extend outward on threads that act like trip wires.
  Zombie fungi control the behavior of their insect hosts with exquisite precision. Ophiocordyceps compels ants to perform the death grip in a zone with just the right temperature and humidity to allow the fungus to fruit: a height of twenty-five centimeters above the forest floor. The fungus orients ants according to the direction of the sun, and infected ants bite in synchrony, at noon. They don’t bite any old spot on the leaf’s underside. Ninety-eight percent of the time, the ants clamp onto a major vein.
• To be fair, Ophiocordyceps, like many zombie fungi, have had a long time to fine-tune their methods. The behaviors of infected ants don’t pass without a trace. Ants’ death grips leave distinctive scars on leaf veins, and fossilized scars push the origins of this behavior back into the Eocene epoch, forty-eight million years ago.
• For McKenna, it was psilocybin mushrooms that had ignited the first flickerings of human self-reflection, language, and spirituality, somewhere in the proto-cultural fog of the Paleolithic. Mushrooms were the original tree of knowledge.
• The researchers were surprised to find that the Entomophthora fungus carries around a type of virus that infects insects, not fungi. ..One such virus is injected by parasitic wasps into ladybirds, which tremble, remain rooted to the spot, and become guardians for the wasp’s eggs. Another similar virus makes honeybees more aggressive. By harnessing a mind-manipulating virus, the fungus wouldn’t have to evolve the ability to modify the mind of its insect host.
• Infected male cicadas—“flying saltshakers of death,” in Kasson’s words—become hyperactive and hypersexual despite the fact that their genitals have long since crumbled away, a testament to how expertly the fungus is able to arrange their deterioration.
• but with psilocybin as a chemical messenger, they could borrow a human body and use its brain and senses to think and speak through. McKenna thought fungi could wear our minds, occupy our senses, and, most important, impart knowledge about the world out there. Among other things, fungi could use psilocybin to influence humans in an attempt to deflect our destructive habits as a species.
• In 1952, Gordon Wasson, an amateur mycologist and a vice president of the bank J. P. Morgan, received a letter from the poet and scholar Robert Graves describing Schultes’s report. Wasson was fascinated by Graves’s news of the mind-altering “flesh of the gods” and traveled to Oaxaca in search of the mushrooms. .. In 1957, he published an account of his experience in Life magazine. The article was titled “Seeking the Magic Mushroom: A New York Banker Goes to Mexico’s Mountains to Participate in the Age-Old Rituals of Indians Who Chew Strange Growths that Produce Visions.”
• Mycorrhizal fungi are so prolific that their mycelium makes up between a third and a half of the living mass of soils. The numbers are astronomical... In their relationship, plants and mycorrhizal fungi enact a polarity: Plant shoots engage with the light and air, while the fungi and plant roots engage with the solid ground. Plants pack up light and carbon dioxide into sugars and lipids. Mycorrhizal fungi unpack nutrients bound up in rock and decomposing material... What we call “plants” are in fact fungi that have evolved to farm algae, and algae that have evolved to farm fungi.
• Frank’s findings caught the eye of J.R.R. Tolkien, who had a well-known fondness for plants, and trees in particular. Mycorrhizal fungi soon found their way into The Lord of the Rings.
• Mycorrhizal fungi can provide up to eighty percent of a plant’s nitrogen and as much as a hundred percent of its phosphorus. Fungi supply other crucial nutrients to plants, such as zinc and copper. They also provide plants with water, and help them to survive drought as they’ve done since the earliest days of life on land. In return, plants allocate up to thirty percent of the carbon they harvest to their mycorrhizal partners.
• Strawberries aren’t alone in being sensitive to the identity of their fungal partners. Most plants—from a potted snapdragon to a giant sequoia—will develop differently when grown with different communities of mycorrhizal fungus.
• In parts of a mycelial network where phosphorus was scarce, the plant paid a higher “price,” supplying more carbon to the fungus for every unit of phosphorus it received... Most surprising was the way that the fungus coordinated its trading behavior across the network. Kiers identified a strategy of “buy low, sell high.”
• “ON THE EFFICIENCY of this mycorrhizal association the health and well-being of mankind must depend.” So wrote Albert Howard, a founding figure in the modern organic farming movement and a passionate spokesman for mycorrhizal fungi. In the 1940s, Howard argued that the widespread application of chemical fertilizers would disrupt mycorrhizal associations, the means by which “the marriage of a fertile soil and the tree it nourishes…is arranged.” The consequences of such a breakdown would be far-reaching.
• Global agricultural yields have plateaued, despite a seven-hundred-fold increase in fertilizer use over the second half of the twentieth century.
• Disrupt the ecology of microbes that live in your gut, and your health will suffer—a growing number of human diseases are known to arise because of efforts to rid ourselves of “germs.” Disrupt the rich ecology of microbes that live in the soil—the guts of the planet—and the health of plants, too, will suffer.
• We’ve bred strains of wheat to grow fast when they are given lots of fertilizer, and ended up with “spoiled” plants that have almost lost the ability to cooperate with fungi.
• For microbial interventions to be effective, more profound changes to agricultural practices are required, analogous to the changes in diet or lifestyle we might make in an effort to restore health to damaged gut flora.
• A few key principles appeared to govern the behavior of a wide range of networks, from human sexual relationships to biochemical interactions within organisms. The World Wide Web, Barabási remarked, appeared to have “more in common with a cell or an ecological system than with a Swiss watch." ... Pick any field of study—from neuroscience, to biochemistry, to economic systems, disease epidemics, web search engines, machine learning algorithms that underpin much of AI, to astronomy and the very structure of the universe itself, a cosmic web crisscrossed with filaments of gas and clusters of galaxies—and chances are that it makes sense of the phenomenon using a network model.
• As Read pointed out to me, all twenty-five thousand species of orchid—“the largest and arguably the most successful plant family on the surface of the Earth”—are mycohets at some stage in their development, whether they take now and pay later, or take now and continue to take later. That mycohets have repeatedly learned to hack the web for their benefit suggests it isn’t such a hard trick to pull off... Mycohets are striking. Conspicuous, contrarian, they stand out from the ambient vegetation. With no reason to be green or to have leaves, they are free for evolution to carry them off in new aesthetic directions. There is a species of Voyria that is entirely yellow.
• The same goes for many other types of network—from routes of global air travel, to neuronal networks in the brain. In each case, well-connected hubs make it possible to traverse the network in a small number of steps. It is in part these properties of a network—known as “scale-free” properties—that allow diseases, news, and fashions to cascade rapidly through populations. It is the same scale-free properties of a shared 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. ..It is the same scale-free properties that make a wood wide web vulnerable to targeted attacks...  Selectively remove large hub trees—as many commercial logging operations do in an effort to extract the most valuable timber—and serious disruption will ensue
• But severing the connections in a network to study the network felt unusually absurd. The physicists Ilya Prigogine and Isabelle Stengers remarked that attempts to break down complex systems into their components often fail to provide satisfying explanations; we rarely know how to put the pieces back together again.
• Wood is a hybrid material. Cellulose—a feature of all plant cells, whether woody or not—is one of the ingredients and the most abundant polymer on earth. Lignin is another ingredient, and the second most abundant. Lignin is what makes wood wood. It is stronger than cellulose and more complex. Whereas cellulose is made up of orderly chains of glucose molecules, lignin is a haphazard matrix of molecular rings.
• Today, fungal decomposition—much of it of woody plant matter—is one of the largest sources of carbon emissions, emitting about eighty-five gigatons of carbon to the atmosphere every year. In 2018, the combustion of fossil fuels by humans emitted around ten gigatons. <> How did tens of millions of years’ worth of forest go un-rotted over the Carboniferous period? Opinions differ. Some point to climatic factors: Tropical forests were stagnant, waterlogged places. When trees died, they were submerged in anoxic swamps, where white rot fungi were unable to follow. Others suggest that when lignin first evolved in the early Carboniferous period, white rot fungi weren’t yet able to decompose it and required several million more years to upgrade their apparatus of decay.
• The answer is coal. Human industrialization has been powered on these seams of un-rotted plant matter, somehow kept out of fungal reach... Coal provides a negative of fungal histories: It’s a record of fungal absence, of what fungi did not digest. Rarely since then has so much organic material escaped fungal attention.
• Today, seventy-five percent of the global production of mushrooms—almost forty million tons—occurs in China. In central and eastern Europe, too, fungi have long played important cultural roles. If deaths from mushroom poisoning are any metric of national fungal enthusiasm, compare the one or two deaths a year in the United States with the two hundred deaths in Russia and Ukraine in the year 2000.
• The inefficiency of many industries is a blessing to mushroom growers. Agriculture is particularly wasteful: Palm and coconut oil plantations discard ninety-five percent of the total biomass produced. Sugar plantations discard eighty-three percent. Urban life isn’t much better... Researchers have found that the omnivorous Pleurotus mycelium—a white rot fungus that fruits into edible oyster mushrooms—can grow happily on a diet of used diapers.
• Since his influential work on psilocybin mushrooms in the 1970s, Stamets has grown into an unlikely hybrid between fungal evangelist and tycoon. His TED Talk—“Six Ways that Mushrooms Can Save the World”—has been viewed millions of times.
• Will mycoremediation take off? It’s too early to say. But it’s clear that now, as we fret at the edge of a toxic puddle of our own making, radical mycological solutions based on the ability of certain fungi to decompose wood offer some hope. Our favored method of accessing the energy in wood has been to burn it. This, too, is a radical solution. And it is this energy—the fossilized remnants of a wood boom in the Carboniferous—that has helped get us into trouble. Could the radical chemistry of white rot fungi—an evolutionary response to the very same wood boom—now help to pull us through?
• The most revolutionary innovation emerged in 2009. The founder of the magic mushroom-growing forum mycotopia.net, known only by the handle hippie3, devised a method to grow fungi without fear of contamination. This changed everything. Contamination is the menace of all fungal cultivators. Freshly sterilized material is a biological vacuum; if exposed to the busy world of the open air, life rushes in. Using hippie3’s “injection port” method, amateur mushroom cultivators can ditch the most expensive kit and fiddly procedures. All one needs is a syringe and a modified jam jar.
• By the late nineteenth century, in the limestone catacombs that riddle the subsurface of Paris, hundreds of mushroom farmers produced more than a thousand tons of “Paris” mushrooms every year.
• The fungus uses radical chemistry to decompose the wood. The termites consume the compost that remains. To house the fungus, Macrotermes build towering mounds that reach heights of nine meters, some of which are more than two thousand years old. Societies of Macrotermes termites, like those of leaf-cutter ants, are some of the most complex formed by any insect group.
• eating “private” property, as if they had some intentional anarchist or anticapitalist sentiment.) In 2011 termites found their way into a bank in India and ate ten million rupees in banknotes—around $225,000.
• AROUND THE WORLD, the idea that fungi can be used to build things as well as break them down is starting to catch on. A material made from the outer layers of portabello mushrooms shows promise in replacing graphite in lithium batteries. The mycelium of some species makes an effective skin substitute, used by surgeons to help wounds to heal.
• But the idea of using them to treat bees was a more recent brain wave. <> The effects of the fungal extracts on the bees’ viral infections were unambiguous.
• The transformational power of yeast has long been personified as a divine energy, spirit, or god. How could it escape this treatment? Alcohol and inebriation are some of the oldest magics. An invisible force conjures wine from fruit, beer from grain, mead from nectar. These liquids alter our minds and have been enfolded within human cultures in many ways: from ritual feasting and statecraft, to a means to pay for labor. For just as long, they have been responsible for dissolving our senses, for wildness and ecstasy. Yeasts are both makers and breakers of human social orders.
• Master and slave, cheater and cheated, humans and domesticated organisms, men and women, the diplomatic relationships between nations…The metaphors change over time, but attempts to dress up more-than-human relationships in human categories continue to the present day. <> As the historian Jan Sapp explained to me, the concept of symbiosis behaves like a prism through which our own social values are often dispersed.
• The strongest riposte to the dog-eat-dog vision of “Nature, red in tooth and claw” came from the Russian anarchist Peter Kropotkin in his bestselling book Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution, in 1902. In it, he stresses that “sociability” was as much a part of nature as the struggle for existence.
• It is well-established in the sciences that metaphors can help to generate new ways of thinking. The biochemist Joseph Needham described a working analogy as a “net of coordinates” that could be used to arrange an otherwise formless mass of information, much as a sculptor might use a wire frame to provide support for wet clay.
• In recent years the narratives surrounding symbiotic relationships have become more nuanced. Toby Spribille—the researcher who found that lichens consist of more than two players—makes the case that lichens have to be understood as systems. Lichens don’t seem to be the product of a fixed partnership, as had long been thought. Rather, they arise out of an array of possible relationships between a number of different players.
• One biologist in particular, Sapp relayed with amusement, “calls me the biological left, and himself the biological right.” They had been discussing the idea of biological individuals. In Sapp’s view, the developments in microbial sciences had made it hard to define the boundaries of an individual organism. For his detractor, who had positioned himself on the biological right, neat individuals had to exist. Modern capitalist thought is founded on the idea of rational individuals acting in their own interest.