Perched here, in a still life, with the mycelium bowl I built with my daughter, holding the yummy Lion’s Mane dinner shrooms. The bowl was a DIY kit from Ecovative, featured in the book as a leader in using mycelium as a structural material. They grow more than four hundred tons of mycelium per year, for furniture and packaging for companies like Dell.
Merlin Sheldrake’s 2020 tome reveals many mycelial mysteries. Here are some tasty teasers:
“Plants only made it out of the water around 500 million years ago because of their collaboration with fungi, which served as their root systems for tens of millions of years until plants could evolve their own. Today, more than 90% of plants depend on mycorrhizal fungi which can link them in shared networks. This ancient association gave rise to all recognizable life on land” (4)
-“Mycelium makes up between a third and a half of all the living mass of soils. The numbers are astronomical. Globally, the total length of mycorrhizal hyphae in the top 10cm of soil is around half the width of our galaxy” (127)
-Back in the Devonian period, 400mya, Prototaxites (big fungi spires) “were taller than a two-story building. Nothing else got anywhere close to this size: plants were no more than a meter tall, and no animal with a backbone had yet moved out of the water. These enormous fungi were the largest living structures on dry land for at least 40 million years, 20x longer than the genus Homo has existed.” (4)
The Romans prayed to Robigus, the god of mildew, to avert fungal diseases leading to famine. And 5,000 years ago, the Sumerians who brewed beer using fungal yeast, worshipped a goddess of fermentation, Ninkasi. (205)
“Although fungi have long been lumped together with plants, they are actually more closely related to animals [e.g., respire oxygen, tastes like chicken]. At a molecular level, fungi and humans are similar enough to benefit from many of the same biochemical innovations. We use drugs produced by fungi – fungi are pharmaceutically prolific.” (9)
-Penicillin, a chemical from mold that kills bacteria, is the famous one. But there’s cyclosporine (immunosuppressant), statins (lowers cholesterol), antivirals and anti-cancer meds (like Taxol), alcohol (yeast fermentation), and psilocybin (psychedelic medicine), even LSD came from the ergot fungus.
-“60% of the enzymes used in industry are generated by fungi” (9)
-There are over 6x as many fungi species as plant species.
-“Truffles are the underground fruiting bodies of several types of mycorrhizal fungi.” (25)
MAKING MYCELIUM:
-“The overwhelming majority of fungal species release spores without producing mushrooms at all.” (5) Mycelia release 50 million tons of spore/year, affecting the weather.
-Common cells called hyphae branch out and then fuse to form a mycelial network. They fuse with self and with sexually compatible mates. “Some fungi have tens of thousands of mating types, approximately equivalent to our sexes.” (36) (Taking non-binary to a new level.)
-“Mycelium is how fungi feed. 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 2 and 20 micrometers in diameter” (51)
-“One way to think about mycelial networks is as swarms of hyphal tips. Swarms are patterns of collective behavior.” (47)
-“Mycelial coordination is difficult to understand because there is no center of control. Control is dispersed. A fragment of mycelium can regenerate the entire network” (50)
-Like our brain in early development, mycelium overproduces links for foraging, and then reinforces some into dense transport networks for the tips that discover food.
-“No matter where fungi grown, they must be able to insinuate themselves within their source of food. To do so, they use pressure. They develop special penetrative hyphae that can reach pressures of 50 to 80 atmospheres and exert enough force to penetrate Kevlar.” (52)
-“Hyphal tips must lay down new material as they advance. Small bladders filled with cellular building materials arrive at the tip from within and fuse with it at a rate of up to 600 a second.” (53)
-“When hyphae felt together to make mushrooms, they rapidly inflate with water, which they must absorb from their surroundings — the reason mushrooms tend to appear after rain.” (54)
-Mushroom and mycelium are made of the same hyphae cells. They also form cords — large pipes made of many small tubes that transport nutrients long distances “on a river of cellular fluid.” (56)
-Several species of fungus are bioluminescent and were used to provide interior lighting in the first U.S. submarine in 1775.
MAKING SENSE:
-“Fungi don’t have noses or brains. Instead, their entire surface behaves like an olfactory epithelium. A mycelial network is one large chemically sensitive membrane. Fungi live their lives bathed in a rich field of chemical information.” (28)
-“The methods fungi use to hunt nematode worms are grisly and diverse. Some fungi grow adhesive nets. Some use hyphal nooses that inflate in a tenth of a second, ensnaring their prey. Some — like the commonly cultivated oyster mushroom — produce hyphal stalks capped with a single toxic droplet that paralyzes nematodes giving the hypha enough time to grow through their mouth and digest the worm from inside. Others produce spores that can swim through the soil, chemically drawn to nematodes, to which they harpoon the worm with specialized hyphae known as ‘gun cells.’” (40). These are all manifestations of the same hypha cell in mycelium.
-“Phycomyces has remarkable perceptual abilities. Its fruiting structures — essentially giant vertical hyphae — adapt to bright or light as our eyes do and can detect light at levels as low as that provided by a single star.” (57) It has exquisite sensitivity to touch and “is able to detect the presence of nearby objects without ever making contact” (58)
-“Most fungi can detect and respond to light (direction, intensity, and color), temperature, moisture, nutrients, toxins, and gravitational and electrical fields. Hyphae can also sense the texture of surfaces, to a half-micrometer deep in artificial surfaces, three times shallower than the gap between laser tracks on a CD.” (58)
-“When Olsson inserted microelectrodes into Armaillaria’s hyphal strands, he detected regular action-potential-like impulses, firing at a rate very close to that of an animal’s sensory neurons — around 4 impulses per second. When wood came in contact with the mycelium, the firing rate of the impulses doubled. When he removed the block of wood, the firing rate returned to normal.” (61)
LICHEN:
-There’s a tendency for fungi to lichenize (combine into a symbiotic dependency with algae), and 20% of all known fungal species have lichenized. “Both make life in places where neither could survive alone.” (72)
-They cover 8% of Earth, more than all tropical rainforests. Some are thousands of years old (one in Lapland is over 9,000 years old).
-They turn rock to soil by mining minerals from bare rock, with physical pressure, acids, and binders to dissolve and digest rock. “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.” (75)
-They survive outer space the best of any organism studied. Untroubled by being frozen and dehydrated for a decade, and radiation at 12x the lethal human dose, 50 gigpascals of shock… They could survive the ejecta events that catapult meteorites from the surface of Mars.
-Polyamory: “Grow many types of free-living fungus and algae together, and they’ll develop into a mutually beneficial symbiosis in a matter of days. Different species of fungus, different species of algae—it doesn’t seem to matter. Completely new symbiotic relationships emerge in less time than it takes a scab to heal.” (86)
-Extremophiles: “Lichens arise in conditions too severe for either partner to survive alone. Viewed in this way, extremophilia, their ability to live life on the edge, is a direct consequence of their symbiotic way of life.” (87)
-Often the first organism to grow on new volcanic islands or the ruins of Chernobyl and Hiroshima. Radiotrophic fungi harvest the energy emitted by radioactive particles.
-Mycelial fossils 2.4 billion years old “makes mycelium one of the earliest known gestures toward complex multicellular life, 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 global transformations.” (67)
-“Fungi have persisted through Earth’s five major extinction events, each of which eliminated between 75 and 95% of species on the planet.” (181)
-“They can degrade pesticides, synthetic dyes, the explosives TNT and RDX, crude oil, some plastics, heavy metals, and a range of drugs from antibiotics to synthetic hormones. In principle, fungi are some of the best qualified organisms for environmental remediation.” (185)
MANIPULATING MINDS:
-The Ophiocordyceps zombie-takeover of ants may be the most famous, thanks to the BBC coverage. The fungus’ “hyphae wind through their body cavities, from heads to legs, enmesh their muscle fibers, and coordinate their activity via an interconnected mycelial network.” (97)
-The fungus takes over the ant’s volition, causing it to climb up 25cm from the forest floor, and orienting by the sun, all of the infected ants bite a major leaf vein in synchrony, at noon.
-“Ophiocordyceps is closely related to the ergot fungi, from which the Swiss chemist Albert Hoffman originally isolated the compounds used to make LSD.” (97)
-From fossil records 48 mya, “fungi have been manipulating animal minds for much of the time there have been minds to manipulate.”(98) “And it is likely that we have been using mind-altering drugs for longer than we have been human.” (99)
-“Massospora infects cicadas and causes the rear third of their bodies to disintegrate, allowing it to discharge its spores out of their ruptured back ends. Infected male cicadas — ‘flying saltshakers of death’ — become hyperactive and hypersexual despite the fact that their genitals have long since crumbled away. Kasson and his team analyzed the plugs of fungus that sprout from the cicadas broken bodies. They were amazed to find that the fungus produced cathinone, an amphetamine in the same class as the recreational drug mephedrone. Cathinone had never before been found outside of plants. More astonishing was the presence of psilocybin, one of the most abundant chemicals in the fungal plugs.” (104). (✌️piece out man!)
-In humans, the psilocybin “studies are considered to be some of the most effective psychiatric interventions in the history of modern medicine.” (108)
-Psilocybin-producing mushrooms go back at least 75 million years, and so 90% of their evolutionary history predate humans. Over 200 species of psilocybin-producing fungi and lichen.
BEFORE ROOTS:
-“Roots followed fungi into being. It was only by striking up a new relationship with fungi that algae were able to make it onto land.” (124)
-“Mycorrhizal hyphae are 50x finer than the finest roots and can exceed the length of a plant’s roots by 100x.” (127)
-“Fungi release chemicals that suspend their plant partners’ immune responses, without which they can’t get close enough to form symbiotic structures.” (38)
-“Fungi can provide up to 80% of a plant’s nitrogen and as much as 100% of its phosphorous…. Zinc and copper. In return, plants allocate up to 30% of the carbon they harvest from the air to their mycorrhizal partners.” (132)
-Some plants, like Monotropa, have evolved to be so dependent on soil fungus for nutrients that they’ve given up the ability to photosynthesize altogether, getting all of their nutrition from soil fungi. That’s why these plants are white (not green).
WOOD WIDE WEBS
-“Fungi actively transport phosphorous — using its dynamic microtubule motors — from areas of abundance to areas of scarcity.” (137)
-“The speed of tree migration may depend on their mycorrhizal proclivity. Some species of tree are more promiscuous than others and can enter into relationships with many different fungal species.” (140) “Fungi can determine which plants gro where; they can even drive the evolution of new species by isolating populations from one another.” (141)
-“Researchers observed phosphorous to pass from the roots of dying plants to the nearby healthy plants that shared a fungal network.” (158)
-Kin selection: “in some cases, more carbon passed between siblings than between strangers.” (159)
-“Fungal networks provide highways for bacteria to migrate around the obstacle course of the soil. Some bacteria enhance fungal growth, stimulate their metabolisms and produce key vitamins. The thick-footed morel farms the bacteria that live within its networks. The fungus plants bacterial populations, then cultivates, harvests and consumes them.” (164)
-Similar scale-free networks as Barabasi used to describe the Internet in his book Linked.
-“The amino acids glutamate and glycine, the most common neurotransmitters in animal brains and spinal cords, are known to pass between plants and fungi at their junctions.” (173)
RADICAL CHEMISTRY
-To digest the haphazard matrix of lignin, fungi perform enzymatic combustion with peroxidases, highly reactive non-specific enzymes.
-“Today, fungal decomposition — much of it woody plant matter — is one of the largest sources of carbon emissions, about 85 Gt/y.” (177)
-In the Carbiniferous period, fungi had not yet evolved to digest lignin. That became coal. “When we burn coal, we physically combust the material that fungi were unable to combust enzymatically. We thermally decompose what fungi were unable to decompose chemically.” (178)
-“Fermentation is domesticated decomposition — rot rehoused.” (206)
-Whether beer or bread, “yeasts were the primary beneficiaries of human’s earliest agricultural efforts. In the preparation of either, humans feed yeast before they feed themselves. In many ways, you might argue, yeasts have domesticated us.” (203)
More on the kit, in this 
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