This is more than mere chemical reaction. The tips circulate “information”, and, in response, the mycelium makes advantageous changes to its behaviour. New filaments appear and set out in the right direction. Scientists have tried removing the food source and severing all the connections.
Other filaments nearby that receive these messages turn towards the nourishment. In some species, scientists have also detected electrical waves. Each exploring tip is looking for water and nutrients, which it will begin to absorb, sending chemical signals to other parts of the network. The filaments thread through the soil, and through living and decomposing bodies, plant or animal. Mycelium, Sheldrake says, is the tissue that holds together much of the world. Spores concentrate in the atmosphere, sometimes changing the weather: a droplet forms on one, which then traps more moisture, becoming the nucleus of a raindrop or hailstone.īioluminescent ghost mushrooms. The fungi we see, the mushrooms, brackets and moulds, are the fruiting bodies that sprout from the mycelia to release spores: 50 megatonnes each year. Most, he explains, take the form of multi-cellular filaments called hyphae, which grow at their tips, branch in all directions, mate, fuse, entwine and tangle, creating the networks known as mycelia. There are more than 2 million species of fungi. He moves smoothly between stories, scientific descriptions and philosophical issues. Entangled Life is a book about how life-forms interpenetrate and change each other continuously. He loves their colours, strange shapes, intense odours and astonishing abilities, and is proud of the way this once unfashionable academic field is challenging some of our deepest assumptions. His fascination with fungi began in childhood. Merlin Sheldrake, a mycologist who studies underground fungal networks, carries us easily into these questions with ebullience and precision. And when we look closely, we meet large, unsettling questions. We can use them in numerous ways (drugs, cooking, even furniture building). Fungi can eat most rubbish, and even oil spills. Ninety per cent of all plants depend on fungi for minerals. The symbiotic merging of algae and fungi to form lichens enabled the rootless ancestors of all our plants to emerge from water. Their interaction with other matter has played an essential role in making the world we inhabit. In these places, fungi are not merely present. Mostly, they come to our notice as mushrooms, moulds, wood-rot, infections and antibiotics but, invisibly, they are inside us and all around us.įungi live in all kinds of organisms, on surfaces, in and below the soil, in the air, in water, in deep ocean floors and inside solid rock. His statement is spectacularly true of fungi. “W hen we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the universe.” So said the nature writer John Muir.
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