Fungal Quotes

There are more life forms in a handful of forest soil than there are people on the planet. A mere teaspoonful contains many miles of fungal filaments. All these work the soil, transform it, and make it so valuable for the trees.

I don’t think that’s it. I think everybody’s got that special someone that gets under their skin and doesn’t go away. I think maybe you have that particular fungal property for him.

We found that trees could communicate, over the air and through their roots. Common sense hooted us down. We found that trees take care of each other. Collective science dismissed the idea. Outsiders discovered how seeds remember the seasons of their childhood and set buds accordingly. Outsiders discovered that trees sense the presence of other nearby life. That a tree learns to save water. That trees feed their young and synchronize their masts and bank resources and warn kin and send out signals to wasps to come and save them from attacks. “Here’s a little outsider information, and you can wait for it to be confirmed. A forest knows things. They wire themselves up underground. There are brains down there, ones our own brains aren’t shaped to see. Root plasticity, solving problems and making decisions. Fungal synapses. What else do you want to call it? Link enough trees together, and a forest grows aware.

The mycorrhizae may form fungal bridges between individual trees, so that all the trees in a forest are connected. These fungal networks appear to redistribute the wealth of carbohydrates from tree to tree. A kind of Robin Hood, they take from the rich and give to the poor so that all the trees arrive at the same carbon surplus at the same time. They weave a web of reciprocity, of giving and taking. In this way, the trees all act as one because the fungi have connected them. Through unity, survival. All flourishing is mutual. Soil, fungus, tree, squirrel, boy—all are the beneficiaries of reciprocity.

Todd? Are you still there?" "Yeah. I'm just trying to think of a good reason to continue our friendship." I grinned. "Jealousy is so unattractive Todd." "It would help if you could tell me one thing that's wrong. One flaw. Bad breath? Warts? Some condition that requires anti fungal spray?" "Would chest hair be a flaw?" "Oh, yeah." Todd sounded relieved." I can't stand a chest rug. You can't see the chest cut.

Yeah, but I thought mushrooms were a kind of fungus!' Teddy says. 'You know, like mould. You can't get mould growing on mould, can you? It'd be like a weird incestuous fungal party.

Our ports wouldn't have backlogs if our supply chains, distribution systems and transportation systems mimicked fungal networks.

Some fungi have tens of thousands of mating types, approximately equivalent to our sexes (the record holder is the split gill fungus, Schizophyllum commune, which has more than twenty-three thousand mating types, each of which is sexually compatible with nearly every one of the others). The mycelium of many fungi can fuse with other mycelial networks if they are genetically similar enough, even if they aren’t sexually compatible. Fungal self-identity matters, but it is not always a binary world. Self can shade off into otherness gradually.

He stretched, ate his last bite of fungal curds, drank the dregs of something not entirely unlike coffee, and headed out to keep peace in wartime.

Without this fungal web my tree would not exist. Without similar fungal webs no plant would exist anywhere. All life on land, including my own, depended on these networks.

At Mayflower-Plymouth, our purpose is to help businesses fulfill solutions and solve problems concerning the allocation of capital. And we do that by modelling mycelium fungal networks.

When trying to understand the interactions of nonhuman organisms, it is easy to flip between these two perspectives: that of the inanimate behavior of preprogrammed robots on the one hand, and that of rich, lived human experience on the other. Framed as brainless organisms, lacking the basic apparatus required to have even a simple kind of “experience,” fungal interactions are no more than automatic responses to a series of biochemical triggers. Yet the mycelium of truffle fungi, like that of most fungal species, actively senses and responds to its surroundings in unpredictable ways.

It was a fungal party hellscape.

Fungi are equipped with different kinds of bodies. They don’t have noses or brains. Instead, their entire surface behaves like an olfactory epithelium. A mycelial network is one large chemically sensitive membrane: A molecule can bind to a receptor anywhere on its surface and trigger a signaling cascade that alters fungal behavior.

For Adamatzky, the point of fungal computers is not to replace silicon chips. Fungal reactions are too slow for that. Rather, he thinks humans could use mycelium growing in an ecosystem as a “large-scale environmental sensor.” Fungal networks, he reasons, are monitoring a large number of data streams as part of their everyday existence. If we could plug into mycelial networks and interpret the signals they use to process information, we could learn more about what was happening in an ecosystem.

How in the name of ash and talon did that fucking Vidona fit a fucking fungal canister on a fucking bannermoth?

Through the genius of evolution, the Earth has selected fungal networks as a governing force managing ecosystems.

fungal networks form physical connections between plants. It is the difference between having twenty acquaintances and having twenty acquaintances with whom one shares a circulatory system.

Fungi constitute the most poorly understood and underappreciated kingdom of life on earth. Though indispensable to the health of the planet (as recyclers of organic matter and builders of soil), they are the victims not only of our disregard but of a deep-seated ill will, a mycophobia that Stamets deems a form of “biological racism.” Leaving aside their reputation for poisoning us, this is surprising in that we are closer, genetically speaking, to the fungal kingdom than to that of the plants. Like us, they live off the energy that plants harvest from the sun. Stamets has made it his life’s work to right this wrong, by speaking out on their behalf and by demonstrating the potential of mushrooms to solve a great many of the world’s problems.

Fungi are veteran survivors of ecological disruption. Their ability to cling on—and often flourish—through periods of catastrophic change is one of their defining characteristics. They are inventive, flexible, and collaborative. With much of life on Earth threatened by human activity, are there ways we can partner with fungi to help us adapt? These may sound like the delirious musings of someone buried up to their neck in decomposing wood chips, but a growing number of radical mycologists think exactly this. Many symbioses have formed in times of crisis. The algal partner in a lichen can’t make a living on bare rock without striking up a relationship with a fungus. Might it be that we can’t adjust to life on a damaged planet without cultivating new fungal relationships

Mycelium is ecological connective tissue, the living seam by which much of the world is stitched into relation. In school classrooms children are shown anatomical charts, each depicting different aspects of the human body. One chart reveals the body as a skeleton, another the body as a network of blood vessels, another the nerves, another the muscles. If we made equivalent sets of diagrams to portray ecosystems, one of the layers would show the fungal mycelium that runs through them. We would see sprawling, interlaced webs strung through the soil, through sulfurous sediments hundreds of meters below the surface of the ocean, along coral reefs, through plant and animal bodies both alive and dead, in

n the wake of catastrophes, fungal diversity helps restore devastated habitats. Evolutionary trends generally lead to increased bio-diversity. However, due to human activities we are losing many species before we can even identify them. In effect, as we lose species, we are experiencing devolution--turning back the clock on biodiversity, which is a slippery slope toward massive ecological collapse. The interconnectedness of life is an obvious truth that we ignore at our peril.

Trees don't rely exclusively on dispersal in the air, for if they did, some neighbors would not get wind of the danger. Dr. Suzanne Simard of the University of British Columbia in Vancouver has discovered that they also warn each other using chemical signals sent through the fungal networks around their root tips, which operate no matter what the weather. Surprisingly, news bulletins are sent via the roots not only by means of chemical compounds but also by means of electrical impulses that travel at the speed of a third of an inch per second. In comparison with our bodies, it is, admittedly, extremely slow. However there are species in the animal kingdom, such as jellyfish and worms, whose nervous systems conduct impulses at similar speed. Once the latest news has been broadcast, all oaks int he area promptly pump tannins through their veins.

Is it odd to see a book within a book? It shouldn’t be. Books like each other. We understand each other. You could even say we are all related, enjoying a kinship that stretches like a rhizomatic network beneath human consciousness and knits the world of thought together. Think of us as a mycelium, a vast, subconscious fungal mat beneath a forest floor, and each book a fruiting body. Like mushrooms, we are a collectivity. Our pronouns are we, our, us.

Being a tree, affirmation would feel different. Love would feel different. We would be happiest if our soil was full of microbes chatting. We would be happiest if the soil was rich enough to contain a complex fungal network that would allow us to sort of blur into it and talk to or just sort of be each other.

This is ridiculous, she thought. I’m possessed of terrifying powers. Why am I relying on a ridiculous little gun that I picked because I thought it was cute? I don’t need this thing. She threw it contemptuously over her shoulder. Damn right! I took out a house of weird fungal cultists that had devoured three teams of supernatural SWAT teams. I am a badass. She paused and expanded her senses outward, searching for any kind of life. Okay, nothing. At least, she thought uneasily, nothing that I can detect. But then why does it smell so bad down here? There’s something foul wandering the underground tunnels beneath my

It’s dirty and wormholed, colonized with mold, as though fungal hyphae, time, and water have collaborated to make an erasure poem.

Patience is the blue vitriol to control the fungal emotions of life

Like a bad fungal infection that you just couldn't get rid of no matter how hard you tried, he came back.

Fungal infections were being seen during COVID-19.

from a different fungal species. More than a million exist on earth, about six times the number of plant species, with only about 10 percent of fungal species identified

There is a plant called the ghost pipe, because it is ghostly white, almost blue. Were you to cut open this flower and study it, you'd find no chlorophyll inside. It can grow in the dark, under the cover of fallen leaves and undergrowth in forests, under soil. It doesn't need to photosynthesize, because it is a parasite. It uses fungal networks to suck energy from photosynthesizing trees. Its roots look like clusters of tiny fingers that grope toward and connect with huge white webs of fungus that in turn connect with the thick roots of trees.

Envisioning fungi as nanoconductors in mycocomputers, Gorman (2003) and his fellow researchers at Northwestern University have manipulated mycelia of Aspergillus niger to organize gold into its DNA, in effect creating mycelial conductors of electrical potentials. NASA reports that microbiologists at the University of Tennessee, led by Gary Sayler, have developed a rugged biological computer chip housing bacteria that glow upon sensing pollutants, from heavy metals to PCBs (Miller 2004). Such innovations hint at new microbiotechnologies on the near horizon. Working together, fungal networks and environmentally responsive bacteria could provide us with data about pH, detect nutrients and toxic waste, and even measure biological populations.

As he ran through the dense understory, he could read the signs of arboreal intrigue, the drama and power struggles as species vied for control over a patch of sunlight, or giant firs and fungal spores opted to work together for their mutual benefit. He could see time unfolding here, and history, embedded in the whorls and fractal forms of nature, and he would come home, sweating and breathless, and tell her what he’d seen.

This Mother Tree was the central hub that the saplings and seedlings nested around, with threads of different fungal species, of different colors and weights, linking them, layer upon layer, in a strong, complex web

Frank went on to tell me that much of the premise of Dune—the magic spice (spores) that allowed the bending of space (tripping), the giant worms (maggots digesting mushrooms), the eyes of the Freman (the cerulean blue of Psilocybe mushrooms), the mysticism of the female spiritual warriors, the Bene Gesserits (influenced by tales of Maria Sabina and the sacred mushroom cults of Mexico)—came from his perception of the fungal life cycle, and his imagination was stimulated through his experiences with the use of magic mushrooms.

Nature, too, seems increasingly better understood in fungal terms: not as a single gleaming snow-peak or tumbling river in which we might find redemption, nor as a diorama that we deplore or adore from a distance – but rather as an assemblage of entanglements of which we are messily part.

Tshepo reckons that it is inevitable that one’s circle of friends will become smaller as one grows older. He reasons that when we begin we are similar, like two glasses of water sitting side by side on a clean tray. There is very little that differentiates us. We are simple beings whose interests do not extend beyond playing touch and kicking balls. However, like the two glasses of water forgotten on a tray in the reading room, we start to collect bits. Bits of fluff, bits of a broken beetle wing, bits of bread, bits of pollen, bits of shed epithelial cells, bits of hair, bits of toilet paper, bits of airborne fungal organisms, bits of bits. All sorts of bits. No two combinations the same. Just like with the glasses of water, Environment, jealous of our fundamentality, bombards our basic minds with complexity. So we become frighteningly dissimilar, until there is very little that holds us together.

So, let's get back to why the roots are the most important part of a tree. Conceivably, this is where the tree equivalent of a brain is located. Brain? you ask. Isn't that a bit farfetched? Possibly, but now we know that trees can learn. This means they must store experiences somewhere, and therefore, there must be some kind of a storage mechanism inside the organism. Just where it is, no one knows, but the roots are the part of the tree best suited to the task. The old spruce in Sweden also shows that what grows underground is the most permanent part of the tree-and where else would it store important information over a long period of time? Moreover, current research shows that a tree's delicate root networks is full of surprises. It is now an accepted fact that the root network is in charge of all chemical activity in the tree. And there's nothing earth shattering about that. Many of our internal processes are also regulated by chemical messengers. Roots absorb substances and bring them into the tree. In the other direction, they deliver the products of photosynthesis to the tree's fungal partners and even route warning signals to neighboring trees. But a brain? For there to be something we would recognize as a brain, neurological processes must be involved, and for these, in addition to chemical messages, you need electrical impulses. And these are precisely what we can measure in the tree, and we've been able to do so since as far back as the nineteenth century. For some years now, a heated controversy has flared up among scientists. Can plants think? Are they intelligent?

But even if you do not have SIBO or SIFO, it is likely—virtually guaranteed—that you have, at the very least, dysbiosis. Substantial disruptions of the bacterial and perhaps fungal species inhabiting your colon still pose implications for health, whether or not you are regular or require a stack of magazines for bowel habit success.

He says I was around five and crying and was vividly red in the cold spring air. I was saying something over and over; he couldn’t make it out until our mother saw me and shut down the tiller, ears ringing, and came over to see what I was holding out. This turned out to have been a large patch of mold—Orin posits from some dark corner of the Weston home’s basement, which was warm from the furnace and flooded every spring. The patch itself he describes as horrific: darkly green, glossy, vaguely hirsute, speckled with parasitic fungal points of yellow, orange, red. Worse, they could see that the patch looked oddly incomplete, gnawed-on; and some of the nauseous stuff was smeared around my open mouth. ‘I ate this,

Using a holistic, Eastern philosophy, leaky gut can be classified into four categories: candida gut, a fungal condition caused by too much fluid buildup in the body; stressed gut, caused by overwhelming presence of stress hormones; immune gut, caused by emotional pain and grief; and gastric gut, caused by overeating, bad chewing habits, and emotional turmoil.

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.

Aminotriazole (herbicide used on cranberry crops, causing the “cranberry scare’” of 1959) DDT (widely known after Rachel Carson’s book, Silent Spring) Nitrites (a meat preservative and color and flavor enhancer used in hot dogs and bacon) Red Dye Number 2 Artificial sweeteners (including cyclamates and saccharin) Dioxin (a contaminant of industrial processes and of Agent Orange, a defoliant used during the Vietnam War) Aflatoxin (a fungal toxin found on moldy peanuts and corn)

Living cells must have food in the form of sugar, they must breathe, and they must grow, at least a little. But without leaves-and therefore without photosynthesis-that's impossible. No being on the planet can maintain a centuries-long fast, not even the remains of a tree, and certainly not a stump that has had to survive on its own. It was clear that something else was happening with this stump. It must be getting assistance from neighboring trees, specifically from their roots. Scientists investigating similar situations have discovered that assistance may either be delivered remotely by fungal networks around the root tips-which facilitate nutrient exchange between trees-or the roots themselves may be interconnected. In the case of the stump I had stumbled upon, I couldn't find out what was going on, because I didn't want to injure the old stump by digging around it, but one thing was clear: the surrounding beeches were pumping sugar to the stump to keep it alive.

Mushrooms are only a small part of fungal anatomy. A mushroom is just how a fungus has sex.” Maisie’s slim eyebrows arched high. “Oh, really,” she said. “It’s true. A single fungus in a forest like this can go on for miles, underground, wrapping itself around tree roots. The mushrooms are just its reproductive parts. Fungi are some of the largest living things on Earth. Each tendril is nearly microscopic, but put together they can weigh far more than any California redwood or blue whale.

According to one estimate, the average urban dweller inhales some twenty billion foreign particles every day. Dust, industrial pollutants, pollen, fungal spores, whatever is adrift on the day's air. A lot of this stuff can make you very ill, but it doesn't by and large because your body is normally adept at challenging intruders. If an invading particle is big or especially irritating, you will almost certainly cough or sneeze it straight back out again, often in the process making it someone else's problem.

The plant roots enter into symbiotic relationships with bacteria, fungi, and other plants that are highly sophisticated. Bacteria form colonies on roots systems and produce nitrogen nodules, which the plant can then use as a nitrogen source, something the plants cannot do on their own. And in exchange the bacteria gain nutrients they need to survive. Roots also form close attachments with fungal mycelia. In fact, most plant roots are part of a sophisticated root/fungus communal network that can extend over miles.

Long-range missiles with hybrid thermonuclear and necromantic payloads. Grafted and crossbred infantry divisions. Strategic alliances with folkloric, extraplanar, and subterranean entities. Field deployment of weaponized paleofauna. Large-scale saturation of target areas with invasive fungal and floral xeno organisms. Megadeaths and mega-undeaths. This is the Cold War now. An American president must be found who, whatever his other qualifications, is prepared to maintain our competitiveness in this area. I’m afraid that that person is you.

Elms are dying all over the place, it's Dutch elm disease. [...] It came from America on a load of logs, and it's a fungal disease. That makes it sound even more as if it might be possible to do something. The elms are all one elm, they are clones, that's why they are all succumbing. No natural resistance among the population, because no variation. Twins are clones, too. If you looked at an elm tree you'd never think it was part of all the others. You'd see an elm tree. Same when people look at me now: they see a person, not half a set of twins.

The impact of fungal diseases is increasing across the world: Unsustainable agricultural practices reduce the ability of plants to form relationships with the beneficial fungi on which they depend. The widespread use of antifungal chemicals has led to an unprecedented rise in new fungal superbugs that threaten both human and plant health. As humans disperse disease-causing fungi, we create new opportunities for their evolution. Over the last fifty years, the most deadly disease ever recorded—a fungus that infects amphibians—has been spread around the world by human trade.

The corollary is that a book is not finished until it is read. The writing is not complete until what is said has passed from the physical volume which gives it sensory reality into another mind where it kindles thoughts and impressions: a whole understanding of what it means to be, ignited on foreign soil in an act that is either erotic or imperialistic, but in either case miraculous. We become one another. Ink on paper is the frozen matter of a person, a snapshot of selfhood in fungal spores waiting to be quickened in our borrowed mentation, thought shaping itself in us, of us, to emerge from us.

Even in a forest, there are loners, would-be hermits who want little to do with others. Can such antisocial trees block alarm calls simply by not participating? Luckily, they can't. For usually there are fungi present that act as intermediaries to guarantee quick dissemination of news. These fungi operate like fiber-optic Internet cables. Their thin filaments penetrate the ground, weaving through it in almost unbelievable density. One teaspoon of forest soil contains many miles of these "hyphae." Over centuries, a single fungus can cover many square miles and network an entire forest. The fungal connections transmit signals from one tree to the next, helping the trees exchange news about insects, drought, and other dangers. Science has adopted a term first coined by the journal Nature for Dr. Simard's discovery of the "wood wide web" pervading our forests. What and how much information is exchanged are subjects we have only just begun to research. For instance, Simard discovered that different tree species are in contact with one another, even when they regard each other as competitors. And the fungi are pursuing their own agendas and appear to be very much in favor of conciliation and equitable distribution of information and resources.

A crude map revealed, stunningly, that the biggest, oldest timbers are the sources of fungal connections to regenerating seedlings. Not only that, they connect to all neighbors, young and old, serving as the linchpins for a jungle of threads and synapses and nodes. I’ll take you through the journey that revealed the most shocking aspect of this pattern—that it has similarities with our own human brains. In it, the old and young are perceiving, communicating, and responding to one another by emitting chemical signals. Chemicals identical to our own neurotransmitters. Signals created by ions cascading across fungal membranes.

The main medicinal species that most people use, Prefix-or-not-cordyceps sinensis, is a parasite on caterpillars, specifically the larvae of the ghost moth (which is why it is sometimes called the caterpillar fungus). The fungal spores invade the caterpillar (which lives underground), and they sprout into active mycelia (which spread throughout the caterpillar body via the circulatory system), eventually killing the caterpillar (which then mummifies). The mycelia ultimately fill the corpse, leaving the exoskeleton intact, and the mushroom sprouts from the body (via the head) the next summer, and, hey, we got medicine. (Yum!)

A fungal computer may sound fantastical, but biocomputing is a fast-growing field. Adamatzky has spent years developing ways to use slime molds as sensors and computers. These prototype biocomputers use slime molds to solve a range of geometrical problems. The slime mold networks can be modified—for instance, by cutting a connection—to alter the set of “logical functions” implemented by the network. Adamatzky’s idea of a “fungal computer” is just an application of slime-mold computing to another type of network-based organism. As Adamatzky observes, the mycelial networks of some species of fungus are more convenient for computing than slime molds.

The fungus Shenidioides had originated in Shenzhen, then spread to nearby regions of China. The reigning theory, first disseminated by a prominent doctor in the Huffington Post, was that the new strain of fungal spores had inadvertently developed within factory conditions of manufacturing areas, the SEZs in China, where spores fed off the highly specific mixture of chemicals. To predict the transmission of the fever, the blogger claimed, wind patterns may be analyzed. Not only that, but the holiday traffic surrounding the mass commute of migrant factory workers back to their home villages, such as during Chinese New Year, should also be limited. Traffic carries spores.

As long as we frame a worldview with language that refers to the wild as a commodity, it will be treated as one. It is likewise damaging to invoke technology-based metaphors to explain nature: the brain a computer, the earth a spaceship, the rooted and fungal soil beneath our feet a kind of internet. Such mechanistic phrasing unwittingly invites us to see the natural world as other-than-alive and reparable by human skill in ways that it simply is not. If we are seeking a relationship within the earthen community that is meaningful, genuine, and impactful, then the words we use to describe that relationship, and the beings in its purview, must be chosen with intention, with specificity, with intelligence, and with love.

Lignin is a linkage of three aromatic alcohols—coumaryl, coniferyl, and sinapyl—which fill the spaces in cell walls that are not already occupied by other substances, even ousting water molecules to do so. It thus forms a very strong hydrophobic net, cementing all the cell-wall elements in place and providing strength and rigidity to the xylem. It also provides an important barrier to fungal and bacterial infections. When a tree is invaded by disease, it seals off the infected section with a wall of lignin so that the disease cannot spread. Lignin is so tough that getting rid of it is a costly process in pulp-and-paper plants. The acids needed to break down lignin in pulpwood are the chief pollutants such mills contribute to the environment.

The older trees are able to discern which seedlings are their own kin. The old trees nurture the young ones and provide them food and water just as we do with our own children. It is enough to make one pause, take a deep breath, and contemplate the social nature of the forest and how this is critical for evolution. The fungal network appears to wire the trees for fitness. And more. These old trees are mothering their children. The Mother Trees. When Mother Trees—the majestic hubs at the center of forest communication, protection, and sentience—die, they pass their wisdom to their kin, generation after generation, sharing the knowledge of what helps and what harms, who is friend or foe, and how to adapt and survive in an ever-changing landscape. It’s what all parents do.

The second or third time I watched Stamets show a video of a Cordyceps doing its diabolical thing to an ant—commandeering its body, making it do its bidding, and then exploding a mushroom from its brain in order to disseminate its genes—it occurred to me that Stamets and that poor ant had rather a lot in common. Fungi haven’t killed him, it’s true, and he probably knows enough about their wiles to head off that fate. But it’s also true that this man’s life—his brain!—has been utterly taken over by fungi; he has dedicated himself to their cause, speaking for the mushrooms in the same way that Dr. Seuss’s Lorax speaks for the trees. He disseminates fungal spores far and wide, helping them, whether by mail order or sheer dint of his enthusiasm, to vastly expand their range and spread their message.

She leans back again against the pine’s trunk. Some slight change in the atmosphere, the humidity, and her mind becomes a greener thing. At midnight, on this hillside, perched in the dark above this city with her pine standing in for a Bo, Mimi gets enlightened. The fear of suffering that is her birthright—the frantic need to steer—blows away on the wind, and something else wings down to replace it. Messages hum from out of the bark she leans against. Chemical semaphores home in over the air. Currents rise from the soil-gripping roots, relayed over great distances through fungal synapses linked up in a network the size of the planet. The signals say: A good answer is worth reinventing from scratch, again and again. They say: The air is a mix we must keep making. They say: There’s as much belowground as above. They tell her: Do not hope or despair or predict or be caught surprised. Never capitulate, but divide, multiply, transform, conjoin, do, and endure as you have all the long day of life. There are seeds that need fire. Seeds that need freezing. Seeds that need to be swallowed, etched in digestive acid, expelled as waste. Seeds that must be smashed open before they’ll germinate. A thing can travel everywhere, just by holding still. The next day dawns. The sun rises so slowly that even the birds forget there was ever anything else but dawn. People drift back through the park on their way to jobs, appointments, and other urgencies. Making a living. Some pass within a few feet of the altered woman. Mimi comes to, and speaks her very first Buddha’s words. “I’m hungry.” The answer comes from right above her head. Be hungry. “I’m thirsty.” Be thirsty. “I hurt.” Be still and feel.

A good upbringing is necessary for a long life, but sometimes the patience of the young trees is sorely tested. As I mentioned in chapter 5, "Tree Lottery," acorns and beechnuts fall at the feet of large "mother trees." Dr. Suzanne Simard, who helped discover maternal instincts in trees, describes mother trees as dominant trees widely linked to other trees in the forest through their fungal-root connections. These trees pass their legacy on to the next generation and exert their influence in the upbringing of the youngsters. "My" small beech trees, which have by now been waiting for at least eighty years, are standing under mother trees that are about two hundred years old -- the equivalent of forty-year-olds in human terms. The stunted trees can probably expect another two hundred years of twiddling their thumbs before it is finally their turn. The wait time is, however, made bearable. Their mothers are in contact with them through their root systems, and they pass along sugar and other nutrients. You might even say they are nursing their babies.

Chemical fertilizers, pesticides, insecticides, and fungicides affect the soil food web, toxic to some members, warding off others, and changing the environment. Important fungal and bacterial relationships don’t form when a plant can get free nutrients. When chemically fed, plants bypass the microbial-assisted method of obtaining nutrients, and microbial populations adjust accordingly. Trouble is, you have to keep adding chemical fertilizers and using “-icides,” because the right mix and diversity—the very foundation of the soil food web—has been altered. It makes sense that once the bacteria, fungi, nematodes, and protozoa are gone, other members of the food web disappear as well. Earthworms, for example, lacking food and irritated by the synthetic nitrates in soluble nitrogen fertilizers, move out. Since they are major shredders of organic material, their absence is a great loss. Without the activity and diversity of a healthy food web, you not only impact the nutrient system but all the other things a healthy soil food web brings. Soil structure deteriorates, watering can become problematic, pathogens and pests establish themselves and, worst of all, gardening becomes a lot more work than it needs to be.

Fish at breakfast is sometimes himono (semi-dried fish, intensely flavored and chewy, the Japanese equivalent of a breakfast of kippered herring or smoked salmon) and sometimes a small fillet of rich, well-salted broiled fish. Japanese cooks are expert at cutting and preparing fish with nothing but salt and high heat to produce deep flavor and a variety of textures: a little crispy over here, melting and juicy there. Some of this is technique and some is the result of a turbo-charged supply chain that scoops small, flavorful fish out of the ocean and deposits them on breakfast tables with only the briefest pause at Tsukiji fish market and a salt cure in the kitchen. By now, I've finished my fish and am drinking miso soup. Where you find a bowl of rice, miso shiru is likely lurking somewhere nearby. It is most often just like the soup you've had at the beginning of a sushi meal in the West, with wakame seaweed and bits of tofu, but Iris and I were always excited when our soup bowls were filled with the shells of tiny shijimi clams. Clams and miso are one of those predestined culinary combos- what clams and chorizo are to Spain, clams and miso are to Japan. Shijimi clams are fingernail-sized, and they are eaten for the briny essence they release into the broth, not for what Mario Batali has called "the little bit of snot" in the shell. Miso-clam broth is among the most complex soup bases you'll ever taste, but it comes together in minutes, not the hours of simmering and skimming involved in making European stocks. As Tadashi Ono and Harris Salat explain in their book Japanese Hot Pots, this is because so many fermented Japanese ingredients are, in a sense, already "cooked" through beneficial bacterial and fungal actions. Japanese food has a reputation for crossing the line from subtlety into blandness, but a good miso-clam soup is an umami bomb that begins with dashi made from kombu (kelp) and katsuobushi (bonito flakes) or niboshi (a school of tiny dried sardines), adds rich miso pressed through a strainer for smoothness, and is then enriched with the salty clam essence.

That very afternoon, Taft fell seriously ill with what doctors mistakenly diagnosed as dengue fever. He remained bedridden for ten days, and when he returned to work, severe rectal pain prevented him from sitting. At the same time, a fungal infection developed in his groin.

Fungi cell walls are not full of cellulose like plant cell walls, and fungal walls contain the polysaccharide chitin, a main constituent in the exoskeletons of arthropods such as insects, lobsters, and crabs.

Foliar (leaf) feeding is another way to supplement your roses’ fertilizing program. Use any water soluble fertilizer, mix it up in a tank sprayer or sprinkling can, and apply so that it just drips from the foliage. This form of fertilizing is seldom sufficient for all the nutrient needs of roses, but it’s a nice pick-me- up in addition to your regular fertilizing program. Fertilize early enough in the day so the water has time to evaporate — wet leaves can invite fungal disease.

Who wants what? The answer to what any given plant prefers is found in the next two soil food web gardening rules. Rule #2 holds that most vegetables, annuals, and grasses prefer their nitrogen in nitrate form and do best in bacterially dominated soils. Rule #3 points out that most trees, shrubs, and perennials prefer their nitrogen in ammonium form and do best in fungally dominated soils.

Ten minutes into the shift, the cheap polyester whites we all wore would be soaked through with sweat, clinging to chest and back. All the cooks' necks and wrists were pink and inflamed with awful heat rashes; the end-of-shift clothing change in the Room's fetid, septic locker-rooms was a gruesome panorama of dermatological curiosities. One saw boils, pimples, ingrown hair, rashes, buboes, lesions, and skin rot of a severity and variety you'd expect to see in some jungle backwater. And the smell of thirty not very fastidious cooks their sodden work boots and sneakers, armpits, cologne, fungal feet, rotten breath — and the ambient odor of moldering three-day-old uniforms, long-forgotten pilfered food stashes hidden in lockers to which the combination was unknown, all combined to form a noxious, penetrating cloud that followed you home, and made you smell as if you'd been rolling around in sheep guts.

In the Middle Ages it was a lot more fun to blame things like crop failure or redheads on witches, then set mouthy old women or cats on fire to try to fix the problem. The real reason for famine was in fact more complicated, and involved meteorology and low temperatures and fungal infections and whatnot. But an angry, starving mob didn’t understand explanations about wheat blights half as well as they understood “evil sorcerers” standing right across from them, ready to be skewered with pitchforks.

Tea tree oil and manuka oil contain antibacterial and anti fungal properties, along with anti-inflammatory properties.

13 Reasons to include Curry Leaves to your Diet Sambar. Upma. Dal. Poha. What do they all have in common? A tempering rich in curry leaves. But curry leaves – or Curry leaves, as they are commonly known in India – do more good than simply seasoning your food. Curry power benefits include weight loss and a drop in cholesterol levels. But there’s lots more that the Curry leaves can do. Here are 13 reasons to chew on those curry leaves that pop up on your plate. To keep anaemia away The humble Curry leaves is a rich source of iron and folic acid. Anaemia crops up when your body is unable to absorb iron and use it. “Folic acid is responsible for iron absorption and as Curry leaves is a rich source of both compounds, it’s the perfect choice if you’re looking to amp up your iron levels,” says Alpa Momaya, a Diet & Wellness consultant with Sunrise nutrition hub. To protect your liver If you are a heavy drinker, eating curry leaves can help quell liver damage. A study published in Asian Journal of Pharmaceutical and Clinical Research has revealed that curry leaves contain kaempferol, a potent antioxidant, and can protect the liver from oxidative stress and harmful toxins. To maintain blood sugar levels A study published in the Journal of Plant food for Nutrition has revealed that curry leaves can lower blood sugar levels by affecting the insulin activity. To keep your heart healthy A study published in the Journal of Chinese Medicine showed that “curry leaves can help increase the amount of good cholesterol (HDL) and protect you from heart disease and atherosclerosis,” Momaya says. To aid in digestion Curry leaves have a carminative nature, meaning that they prevent the formation of gas in the gastrointestinal tract and facilitate the expulsion of gas if formed. Ayurveda also suggests that Curry leaves has mild laxative properties and can balance the pitta levels in the body. Momaya’s advice: “A juice of curry leaves with a bit of lime juice or added to buttermilk can be consumed for indigestion.” To control diarrhoea Even though curry leaves have mild laxative properties, research has shown that the carbazole alkaloids in curry leaves can help control diarrhoea. To reduce congestion Curry leaves has long been a home remedy when it comes to dealing with a wet cough, sinusitis or chest congestion. Curry leaves, packed with vitamin C and A and rich in kaempferol, can help loosen up congested mucous. To help you lose weight Curry leaves is known to improve digestion by altering the way your body absorbs fat. This quality is particularly helpful to the obese. To combat the side effects of chemotherapy Curry leaves are said to protect the body from the side effects of chemotherapy and radiotherapy. They also help protect the bone marrow and halt the production of free radicals in the body. To improve your vision Curry leaves is high in vitamin A, which contains carotenoids that can protect the cornea. Eating a diet rich in curry leaves can help improve your vision over time. To prevent skin infections Curry leaves combines potent antioxidant properties with powerful anti-bacterial, anti-fungal and antiprotozoal properties. It is a common home remedy for common skin infections such as acne and fungal infections of the nail. To get better hair Curry leaves has long been used to prevent greying of the hair by our grandmothers. It also helps treat damaged hair, tackle hair fall and dandruff and add bounce to limp hair. To take care of skin Curry leaves can also be used to heal damaged skin. Apply a paste on burns, cuts, bruises, skin irritations and insect bites to ensure quick recovery and clean healing. Add more Curry leaves to your diet and enjoy the benefits of curry leaves.

A friend of mine who studies tropical insects showed me a video of orchid bees crowding around a crater in a rotting log. 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. Although he hadn’t yet tested the hypothesis, my friend had a strong hunch that the bees were harvesting fungal compounds to add to their bouquets.

When trying to understand the interactions of non-human organisms, it is easy to flip between these two perspectives: that of the inanimate behaviour of pre-programmed robots on the one hand, and that of rich, lived, human experience on the other. Framed as brainless organisms, lacking the basic apparatus required to have even a simple kind of ‘experience’, fungal interactions are no more than automatic responses to a series of biochemical triggers. Yet the mycelium of truffle fungi, like that of most fungal species, actively senses and responds to its surroundings in unpredictable ways. Their hyphae are chemically irritable, responsive, excitable. It is this ability to interpret the chemical emissions of others that allows fungi to negotiate a series of complex trading relationships with trees; to knead away at stores of nutrients in the soil; to have sex; to hunt; or to fend off attackers.

The trees in a forest are often interconnected by subterranean networks of mycorrhizae, fungal strands that inhabit tree roots. The mycorrhizal symbiosis enables the fungi to forage for mineral nutrients in the soil and deliver them to the tree in exchange for carbohydrates. The mycorrhizae may form fungal bridges between individual trees, so that all the trees in a forest are connected. These fungal networks appear to redistribute the wealth of carbohydrates from tree to tree.

Mushrooms have taught me the interconnectedness of all life-forms and the molecular matrix that we share,” he explains in another one. “I no longer feel that I am in this envelope of a human life called Paul Stamets. I am part of the stream of molecules that are flowing through nature. I am given a voice, given consciousness for a time, but I feel that I am part of this continuum of stardust into which I am born and to which I will return at the end of this life.” Stamets sounded very much like the volunteers I met at Hopkins who had had full-blown mystical experiences, people whose sense of themselves as individuals had been subsumed into a larger whole—a form of “unitive consciousness,” which, in Stamets’s case, had folded him into the web of nature, as its not so humble servant. “I think Psilocybes have given me new insights that may allow me to help steer and speed fungal evolution so that we can find solutions to our problems.” Especially in a time of ecological crisis, he suggests, we can’t afford to wait for evolution, unfolding at its normal pace, to put forth these solutions in time. Let the depatterning begin. As

It did not take long for the mold to take over after hurricane Ian.

All winter she has struggled to describe the joy of her life’s work and the discoveries that have solidified in a few short years: how trees talk to one another, over the air and underground. How they care and feed each other, orchestrating shared behaviors through the networked soil. How they build immune systems as wide as a forest. She spends a chapter detailing how a dead log gives life to countless other species. Remove the snag and kill the woodpecker who keeps in check the weevils that would kill the other trees. She describes the drupes and racemes, panicles and involucres that a person could walk past for a lifetime and never notice. She tells how the woody-coned alders harvest gold. How an inch-high pecan might have six feet of root. How the inner bark of birches can feed the starving. How one hop hornbeam catkin holds several million grains of pollen. How indigenous fishermen use crushed walnut leaves to stun and catch fish. How poplars clean soils of chlorinated solvents and willows remove heavy metals. She lays out how fungal hyphae—countless miles of filaments folded up in every spoon of soil—coax open tree roots and tap into them. How the wired-up fungi feed the tree minerals. How the tree pays for these nutrients with sugars, which the fungi can’t make.

Bacteria are so small they need to stick to things or they will wash away; to attach themselves, they produce a slime, the secondary result of which is that individual soil particles are bound together. [...] Fungal hyphae, too, travel through soil, sticking to them and binding them together, thread-like, into aggregates. [...] The soil food web, then, in addition to providing nutrients to roots in the rhizosphere, also helps create soil structure: the activities of its members bind soil particles together even as they provide for the passage of air and water through the soil. [...] The nets or webs fungi form around roots act as physical barriers to invasion and protect plants from pathogenic fungi and bacteria. Bacteria coat surfaces so thoroughly, there is no room for others to attach themselves. If something impacts these fungi or bacteria and their numbers drop or they disappear, the plant can easily be attacked.

Yet fungal eating is often generous; it makes worlds for others.

As he considered the fungal universe the bathmat most certainly harboured, Mister Bob vowed to get a new one. There was something sinister about that bathmat anyway. It looked like it might start behaving erratically.

As he considered the fungal universe the bathmat most certainly harboured, Mister Bob vowed to get a new one. There was something sinister about that bathmat anyway. It looked like it might start crawling around erratically.

My favoured method is: 1. Create a cage with chicken wire or netting and a single wooden structure as the base (a pallet works just fine). 2. Cover the pallet with wire mesh or similar to avoid materials falling through. 3. Make an upright hoop of the mesh that will sit on the pallet and secure the ends with cable ties. 4. Fill the cage up with leaves. Make sure they are moist. If they are really dry, water them and check every few months, repeating the process if you find any dry spots. Remember that leaf mould takes a bit longer to decompose than most other organic substances as it’s primarily decomposed by fungal activity. To speed up the process you could add something nitrogen-rich like grass clippings or coffee grounds and it will help to get leaf mould quicker.

Picture the furry tendrils of fungal growth that must have been entwining his taint and scrotuscus. Close your eyes and imagine you smell the moist, spidery growths that might have been carpeting his armpits.

It has been well established that trees talk to each other through underground chains of fungus called Common Mycorrhizal Networks (CMNs). Affectionately called the Wood Wide Web, these networks allow networks of trees to locally communicate and organize the transfer of water, carbon, nitrogen, local gossip, and political pamphlets. Previous research suggested that these fungal networks only operated at a community level. Nutrient-transfer-back translation has shown this assumption is no longer valid. In the woods of Germany, England, Wyoming, and many more locations, accelerationist, international communist propaganda has been discovered in Douglas Firs, and a growing prevalence has been seen in Birch populations. This paper will discuss the methodology, results, and dangerous consequences of the dictatorship of a central, democratically elected, tree-based anarcho-communist syndicate of Fir collectives in your backyard and how the international communist organization has spread its radical message to the world’s forests.

Termites are reported to consume between $1.5 and $20 billion a year of property in the United States every year. (As Lisa Margonelli observes in Underbug, North American termites are most commonly described as eating ‘private’ property, as if they had some intentional anarchist or anti-capitalist sentiment.) In 2011 termites found their way into a bank in India and ate ten million rupees in banknotes – around $225,000. In a twist on the theme of radical fungal partnerships, one of Paul Stamets’ ‘six ways that fungi can save the world’ involves tweaking the biology of certain disease-causing fungi so they are able to bypass termites’ defences, and exterminate their colonies (this is the same fungus – the mould Metarhizium – that shows promise in eliminating populations of malarial mosquitoes).31

Our eyes can distinguish several million colours, our ears can distinguish half a million tones, but our noses can distinguish well over a trillion different odours. Humans can detect virtually all volatile chemicals ever tested. Smells feature in our choice of sexual partners and in our ability to detect fear, anxiety or aggression in others. Human noses can detect some compounds at as low a concentration as 34,000 molecules in one square centimetre, the equivalent of a single drop of water in 20,000 Olympic swimming pools. For an animal to experience a smell, a molecule must land on their olfactory epithelium. In humans, this is a membrane up and behind the nose. The molecule binds to a receptor, and nerves fire. The brain gets involved as chemicals are identified or trigger thoughts and emotional responses. Fungi are equipped with different kinds of bodies. They don’t have noses or brains. Instead, their entire surface behaves like an olfactory epithelium. A mycelial network is one large chemically sensitive membrane: a molecule can bind to a receptor anywhere on its surface and trigger a signalling cascade that alters fungal behaviour. Fungi live their lives bathed in a rich field of chemical information. Truffle fungi use chemicals to communicate to animals their readiness to be eaten; they also use chemicals to communicate with plants, animals, other fungi – and themselves. Through smell, we can participate in the molecular discourse fungi use to organise much of their existence.

Humans wear perfumes produced by other organisms, and it is not uncommon for fungal aromas to be incorporated into our own sexual rituals. Agarwood, or oudh, is a fungal infection of Aquilaria trees found in India and south-east Asia and one of the most valuable raw materials in the world. It is used to make a scent – dank nuts, dark honey, rich wood – and has been coveted at least since the time of the ancient Greek physician Dioscorides. The best oudh is worth more, gram for gram, than gold or platinum – as much as $100,000 per kilogram – and the destructive harvest of Aquilaria trees has driven them to near extinction in the wild.

The rootlets branched like a small tree and their surface was covered with a filmy layer which appeared fresh and sticky. It was these delicate structures I wanted to examine. From these roots, a fungal network laced out into the soil and around the roots of nearby trees. Without this fungal web my tree would not exist. Without similar fungal webs no plant would exist anywhere. All life on land, including my own, depended on these networks. I tugged lightly on my root and felt the ground move.

Many of the most dramatic events on Earth have been – and continue to be – a result of fungal activity. 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 million years until plants could evolve their own. Today, more than 90 per cent of plants depend on these ‘mycorrhizal’ fungi. This ancient association gave rise to all recognisable life on land, the future of which depends on the continued ability of plants and fungi to form healthy relationships.

Radical fungal technologies can help us respond to some of the many problems that arise from ongoing environmental devastation. Antiviral compounds produced by fungal mycelium reduce colony collapse disorder in honeybees. Voracious fungal appetites can be deployed to break down pollutants, such as crude oil from oil spills, in a process known as mycoremediation. In mycofiltration, contaminated water is passed through mats of mycelium, which filter out heavy metals and break down toxins. In mycofabrication, building materials and textiles are grown out of mycelium and replace plastics and leather in many applications.

It should also be mentioned that since 2006, a relatively mysterious fungal disease known as White-nose syndrome has killed more than six million bats in North America. The cause and cure is currently being researched, but I believe as of now the decimated populations remain a sad mystery. Here’s to hoping these little dudes prosper in the face of terrible times.

I didn’t know either that trees trade via a fungal internet that connects them underground, allowing one tree species to store excess nutrients and swap them with nutrients that other tree species have a different superfluity of. No wonder similar species don’t like to grow too near each other. Too incestuous. Too little opportunity for trade in times of hardship.

In fact it seems hardly a stretch to ask whether a plant is itself without fungi. Some evidence suggests that plants-which initially came on to the evolutionary scene as amorphous greenish blobs of algae-developed their first leggy forms precisely to house beneficial fungi. "What we call 'plants' are in fact fungi that have evolved to farm algae, and algae that have evolved to farm fungi," Sheldrake argues. By the time the first plant roots appeared, the plants had already been associating with fungi for fifty million years. By some scholars' accounts, roots are literally the product of fungal influence, made to stitch plants and fungi into relation.

I’ve never met a man so utterly incompetent. Getting eaten out by him was like getting licked by a Saint Bernard. He kissed like an iguana catching lies. And his prick was about an inch long, and always stank. I think he had some sort of fungal issue, or something.” She tosses her hair back. “Quote me on that.

As perilous and complex as these times are, we are armed with a rare trio of tools that offers a rooted way forward: the joining of nature, spirit, and a uniquely modern science. The innate connection between humans and the natural world is coming to the fore in a new way, as academic research rises in support of truths that poets, writers, mystics, artists, naturalists, earth-based religions, and Indigenous cultures have always proclaimed. Multiple studies appear in the most respected journals, including Science, Nature, and The Journal of the National Academy of Sciences, detailing evidence that: trees are able to communicate with one another, both through the motions of their branches, spreading chemical messages aboveground, and through a web of intertwined roots and fungal mycelia belowground; all animals have distinct and complex consciousnesses and intelligences and languages beyond what we have ever scientifically acknowledged; humans are more creative, physically hale, and less depressed after walking in a forest; wandering barefoot upon the earth improves podiatric health and increases the physical intelligence of our whole being. Our bodies, minds, and spirits stand in ancient communion with the soil.

Many fungal diseases, like aspergillosis or coccidioidomycosis, start when you inhale a small fungal particle called a spore. The spore settles in the lung, where it begins to grow and divide. The ball of fungus grows larger and larger and can eventually make it difficult to breathe.

Zoopharmacognosy is the long-winded scientific label for studying animal self-medication. You may have seen your pet cat or dog chewing on grass when it's unwell. Chemicals in animal-chosen medicinal plants have been shown to have antibacterial, antiviral, antifungal, and antihelminthic (antiparasitic worm) properties. Wild chimps eat Vernonia amygdalina to rid themselves of intestinal parasites and aspilla leaves for rheumatism, viruses, and fungal infections. Other animals chew on charcoal and clay to neutralize food toxins and rub themselves wtih citrus, clematis, and piper for skin ailments. Pregnant elephants have been seen to walk miles to find a certain tree of the Boraginaceae family that brings on labor. There are undoubtedly many more remarkable opportunities to be understood and adapted.

If you make a ½ cup of baking soda and 1 cup of water solution and spray it over your plants, it will make them more resistant to fungus. This combines the gentle nature of baking soda with its anti-fungal properties.   This has the added benefit of protecting your plants from insects, because as covered before, insects will die when they ingest baking soda.     Improve