Mycelium Quotes

It's important to empower localized problem-solving in the way mycelium networks do.

At Mayflower-Plymouth, we are trying to mimic the intelligence of fungi and mycelium to add value in service to businesses.

When we get business networks to function similarly to neural networks and mycelium networks, we'll have a better world.

I believe that mycelium is the neurological network of nature. Interlacing mosaics of mycelium infuse habitats with information-sharing membranes. These membranes are aware, react to change, and collectively have the long-term health of the host environment in mind. The mycelium stays in constant molecular communication with its environment, devising diverse enzymatic and chemical responses to complex challenges.

I see the mycelium as the Earth's natural Internet, a consciousness with which we might be able to communicate. Through cross-species interfacing, we may one day exchange information with these sentient cellular networks. Because these externalized neurological nets sense any impression upon them, from footsteps to falling tree branches, they could relay enormous amounts of data regarding the movements of all organisms through the landscape.

In Oregon, a far larger honey mushroom (Armillaria ostoyae) mycelial mat found on a mountaintop covers more than 2,400 acres and is possibly more than 2,200 years old

The way fungi and mycorrhizae direct nutrients in biological ecosystems is a case study for how we can direct resources within human economic systems. And in doing this, we cultivate a multitude of business opportunities.

When we bring businesses together in symbiotic relationships, we end up with a system that is much greater than the sum of its parts.

Mayflower-Plymouth is to businesses what mycorrhizae is to trees.

Self organizing systems tend to be more resilient than bureaucratic systems.

In our design of business and economic systems, there's a lot to learn from mycorrhizae and fungi.

Fungi broker resources between species via mycelium networks and in doing so they cultivate health and resilience for the entire ecosystem. In the same way, each business should cultivate health and resilience for the entire business ecosystem.

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.

Nejdůležitější věci se odehrají v skrytu, protože tím, jak zůstávají utajeny naší mysli, nad námi získávají moc.

The way mycelium produces enzymes to break down complex organic polymers into simpler compounds is a case study for how we can upcycle products and materials in our economy.

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.

Cryptographic tokens can be used as tools of stigmergy to incentivize good behavior and decentivize bad behavior in the context of business systems.

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.

Examples of fractals are everywhere in nature. They can be found in the patterns of trees, branches, and ferns, in which each part appears to be a smaller image of the whole. They are found in the branch-like patterns of river systems, lightning, and blood vessels. They can be seen in snowflakes, seashells, crystals, and mountain ranges. We can even see the holographic and fractal-like nature of reality in the structure of the Universe itself, as the clusters of galaxies and dark matter resemble the neurons in our brain, the mycelium network of fungi, as well as the network of the man-made Internet.

When we apply IP licensing at scale in an exclusive system and in alignment with permaculture principles, we give businesses in the network a strategic advantage while helping the world transition to a better state of being.

I wonder what would happen if there were a United Organization of Organisms (UOO, pronounced “uh-oh”), where each species gets one vote. Would we be voted off the planet? The answer is pretty clear.

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.

One of the Big Ideas in this book is that fungi, especially fungi from old-growth forests, may be sources of new medicines that are active against a range of germs, including HIV/AIDS and the causative agents of smallpox and anthrax, potential bioterrorist threats.

Game theory has a lot of practical applications in terms of business networks.

The real potential of Web3 is in allowing businesses and people to collectively function more similarly to biological ecosystems.

In natural ecosystems, the primary role of the mycelium network is the allocation of capital. That's how the mycelium network helps facilitate the success of all other participants in the ecosystem. At Mayflower-Plymouth, we're doing the same thing in business ecosystems.

NASA considered the possibility of using fungi for interplanetary colonization. Now that we have landed rovers on Mars, NASA takes seriously the unknown consequences that our microbes will have on seeding other planets. Spores have no borders.

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

Capital allocation is about getting resources where they need to be so that they can have the opportunity to be productive. If capital isn't wisely allocated, it can't be productive. And if capital isn't productive, civilization collapses.

Logistics management and supply chain management are just different ways of saying capital allocation.

Look at how nature does distribution. Not through big shipments of bulk mass, but through many micro shipments of small source material. You will not see nature transporting whole logs from a forest in Canada to a forest in Texas. But nature will break the log down to it's core nutrients, and the mycelium network could transport the nutrients from Canada to Texas.

When we talk about capital allocation, we're talking about all kinds of capital - financial capital, social capital, biological capital, human capital, intellectual capital, etc. Capital just means resources, or things capable of producing value.

Fungi, like plants, are decentralized organisms. There are no operational centers, no capital cities, no seats of government. Control is dispersed: Mycelial coordination takes place both everywhere at once and nowhere in particular. A fragment of mycelium can regenerate an entire network, meaning that a single mycelial individual—if you’re brave enough to use that word—is potentially immortal.

If bacteria can be pictured as teeming black ants under the microscope, imagine fungi as gossamer spider webs. These organisms form long threads called hyphae that stretch between plant roots. Some form into even larger masses called mycelium that can span an entire backyard.

If you were a tiny organism in a forest’s soil, you would be enmeshed in a carnival of activity, with mycelium constantly moving through subterranean landscapes like cellular waves, through dancing bacteria and swimming protozoa with nematodes racing like whales through a microcosmic sea of life.

Everything we do at Mayflower-Plymouth is viewed through the lens of capital allocation. Whether it's Blockchain or Quantum Computing or DeFi or Additive Manufacturing or Logistics, we channel that toward helping businesses fulfill solutions and solve problems concerning the allocation of capital.

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.

Fungi marched onto land more than a billion years ago. Many fungi partnered with plants, which largely lacked these digestive juices. Mycologists believe that this alliance allowed plants to inhabit land around 700 million years ago. Many millions of years later, one evolutionary branch of fungi led to the development of animals

The branch of fungi leading to animals evolved to capture nutrients by surrounding their food with cellular sacs, essentially primitive stomachs. As species emerged from aquatic habitats, organisms adapted means to prevent moisture loss. In terrestrial creatures, skin composed of many layers of cells emerged as a barrier against infection. Taking a different evolutionary path, the mycelium retained its netlike form of interweaving chains of cells and went underground, forming a vast food web upon which life flourished.

Toxic fungicides like methyl bromide, once touted, not only harm targeted species but also nontargeted organisms and their food chains and threaten the ozone layer.

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.

The cascade of toxins and debris generated by humans destabilizes nutrient return cycles, causing crop failure, global warming, climate change and, in a worst-case scenario, quickening the pace towards ecocatastrophes of our own making. As ecological disrupters, humans challenge the immune systems of our environment beyond their limits. The rule of nature is that when a species exceeds the carrying capacity of its host environment, its food chains collapse and diseases emerge to devastate the population of the threatening organism. I believe we can come into balance with nature using mycelium to regulate the flow of nutrients. The age of mycological medicine is upon us. Now is the time to ensure the future of our planet and our species by partnering, or running, with mycelium.

I believe that the mycelium operates at a level of complexity that exceeds the computational powers of our most advanced supercomputers. I see the myce-lium as the Earth’s natural Internet, a consciousness with which we might be able to communicate. Through cross-species interfacing, we may one day exchange information with these sentient cellular networks. Because these externalized neurological nets sense any impression upon them, from footsteps to falling tree branches, they could relay enormous amounts of data regarding the movements of all organisms through the landscape. A new bioneering science could be born, dedicated to programming myconeurological networks to monitor and respond to threats to environments. Mycelial webs could be used as information platforms for mycoengineered ecosystems.

No matter where fungi grow, they must be able to insinuate themselves within their source of food. To do so, they use pressure. In cases 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.

The Latin root of the word extravagant means “to wander outside or beyond.” It is a good word for mycelium, which ceaselessly wanders outside and beyond its limits, none of which are present as they are in most animal bodies. Mycelium is a body without a body plan.

We face the possibility of being rejected by the biosphere as a virulent organism. But

Some mycelium will actually insinuate itself into the grain of trees, taking up residence and forming a symbiotic relationship with the tree. Stamets believes the mycelium functions as a kind of immune system for its arboreal host, secreting antibacterial, antiviral, and insecticidal compounds that protect the trees from diseases and pests, in exchange for nourishment and habitat.

There are more species of fungi, bacteria, and protozoa in a single scoop of soil than there are species of plants and vertebrate animals in all of North America. And of these, fungi are the grand recyclers of our planet, the mycomagicians disassembling large organic molecules into simpler forms, which in turn nourish other members of the ecological community. Fungi are the interface organisms between life and death.

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.

The cascade of toxins and debris generated by humans destabilizes nutrient return cycles, causing crop failure, global warming, climate change and, in a worst-case scenario, quickening the pace towards ecocatastrophes of our own making. As ecological disrupters, humans challenge the immune systems of our environment beyond their limits. The rule of nature is that when a species exceeds the carrying capacity of its host environment, its food chains collapse and diseases emerge to devastate the population of the threatening organism.

I wonder what would happen if there were a United Organization of Organisms (UOO, pronounced “uh-oh”), where each species gets one vote. Would we be voted off the planet? The answer is pretty clear. When we irresponsibly exploit the Earth, disease, famine, and ecological collapse result. We face the possibility of being rejected by the biosphere as a virulent organism. But if we act as a responsible species, nature will not evict us.

In the underland of the hardwood forests of Oregon’s Blue Mountains there exists a honey fungus, Armillaria solidipes, that is two and a half miles in extent at its widest point, and covers a total lateral area of almost four square miles. The blue whale is to this honey fungus as an ant is to us. It is a deeply mysterious organism: the largest in the world that we know of, and one of the oldest. The best guess that US Forest Service scientists have been able to offer for the honey fungus’s age is between 1,900 and 8,650 years old. The fungus expresses itself above ground as mushrooms with white-flecked stems rising to tawny, gill-frilled cups. Below ground, where its true extent lies, Armillaria solidipes moves as rhizomorphs resembling black bootlaces, out of which reach the hyphal fingers of its mycelium, spreading in search both of new hosts which they might kill, and the mycelia of other parts of the colony with which they might fuse.

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. Globally, the total length of mycorrhizal hyphae in the top ten centimeters of soil is around half the width of our galaxy (4.5 × 1017 kilometers of hyphae, versus 9.5 × 1017 kilometers of space). If these hyphae were ironed into a flat sheet, their combined surface area would cover every inch of dry land on Earth two and a half times over. However, fungi don’t stay still. Mycorrhizal hyphae die back and regrow so rapidly—between ten and sixty times per year—that over a million years their cumulative length would exceed the diameter of the known universe (4.8 × 1010 light years of hyphae, versus 9.1 × 109 light years in the known universe). Given that mycorrhizal fungi have been around for some five hundred million years and aren’t restricted to the top ten centimeters of soil, these figures are certainly underestimates.

Je dobrodiním smrti, že z lidí strhne faleš... a ty, co se opájeli vlastní slávou, přivede k pokoře... ať už dobrovolně, nebo po boji. Nechť je pohltí marnost a stravuje lítost... nechť pykají ne za svoji pýchu, nýbrž... za zločin proti času.

Ten, kdo se snaží uchránit někoho před jeho osudem, na sebe bere zodpovědnost za škody, ktoré kvůli tomu nastanou. To je můj případ. A naopak ten, kdo o pomoc žádá, se zavazuje, že je přijme v té podobě, v jaké ji obdrží.

Když nemáš dost informací - a to v případě Astuaneru nikdy nemáš, jak plyne ze samé podstaty věcí -, není rozumné cokoliv si přát.

Měl by sis přestat brát plnými hrstmi věci, které ve skutečnosti nechceš... protože nakonec by ti taky mohly zůstat napořád.

Práve to dostane lidi do neštěstí - že ignorují všechny náznaky a zuby nehty se drží svých omylů.

Lucas se celý život setkával se stále stejnou inherentní nespravedlností: ten, kdo si připustí zodpovědnost, vždycky platí víc, A naopak - její nedostatek lidem zaručuje úžasné pohodlí. Bezmocnost přinese odpuštění trestu, neschopnost zajistí laskavé porozumění, zbabělost vynutí soucit.

In an instant, the internet resembled the tangled mycelium of fungi bursting open like umbrellas opened in quick succession and swelling to fill computer windows and brains.

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.

By the time they had reached the woods, it was starting to get light. She led him to where, in the long, lush grass at the edge of the trees, a darker green circle twenty feet across stained the lighter green of the pasture. "Gambe secche. A fairy ring. This one is quite old---it gets a little bigger each year as the mycelium spreads out." "It's edible?" "No, but once the fairy ring's established, the prugnolo comes and shares the circle." As she spoke, she was rummaging in the wet grass, pushing it apart gently with her fingers. "See? This is the prugnolo---what the people here call San Giorgio." "Why's that?" "Because it first appears on the feast day of San Giorgio, of course." She twisted the mushroom deftly off its stalk and put it into her basket. "There'll be more, if you take a look.

Go outside. Frequently. Step outside anywhere and find a leaf and permit it to blow your mind. Check out its delta of veins. Run your finger on its underside. Taste it. Check if it has hair. Crumple it and smell it. Go further, to a forest of any size, a forest clearing, a clump of trees, or even a spot under a single specimen—someplace where, even though you may hear cars and dogs in the distance, you can sit on soft, uneven ground, unseen. Consider the unspooling ribbon of human affairs that the surrounding trees have witnessed and with what interest or indifference they may have watched. Inspect the ground and picture the interlaced fingers of mycelium and roots that swap sugar and water and carbon and data, a mushroom-assisted conversation that betrays care among trees. Notice the mosaic of leaves catching light or the weave of needles on the ground. Be still and birds will invade your copse. Trees, even in small groups, exhale monoterpenes that reduce stress, lower blood pressure and heart rate, and perhaps even trigger dopamine. So stay long enough to feel your mood change, watch shadows shorten or stretch. Get caught by rain or snow or nightfall. Get a little lost.

All Factory Age ruins looked the same. Hulking towers of boxes, bolts, and tubes. Brutal. Utilitarian. Visually at odds with the thriving flora now laying claim to the rusted corpse. But corpse was not an apt word for this sort of building, because a corpse was a rich resource—a bounty of nutrients ready to be divided and reclaimed. The buildings Dex was most used to fit this description. Decay was a built-in function of the City’s towers, crafted from translucent casein and mycelium masonry. Those walls would, in time, begin to decompose, at which point they’d either be repaired by materials grown for that express purpose, or, if the building was no longer in use, be reabsorbed into the landscape that had hosted it for a time. But a Factory Age building, a metal building—that was of no benefit to anything beyond the small creatures that enjoyed some temporary shelter in its remains. It would corrode until it collapsed. That was the most it would achieve. Its only legacy was to persist where it did not belong.

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.

decorating all the parts in my mycelium build; there was just

Don't trip over the mycelium unless you've gotten over the branches

The original timeline for finishing the colony was ten years, but that was when we thought we would have materials, and didn’t account for the homicidal fugus outside our gates.

The grasping fingers of the gravity well reached for him.

mycelium leather

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.

Biological systems are influenced by the laws of physics, and it may be that mycelium exploits the natural momentum of matter, just like salmon take advantage of the tides.

Mycelium steers the course of ecosystems by favoring successions of species. Ultimately, mycelium prepares its immediate environment for its benefit by growing ecosystems that fuel its food chains.

Fungi create mycelium, which is the neural network of nature; it does the same in our system. We need vitamin B12; which is found in fungi.

Fungi might make mushrooms, but first they must unmake something else. Now that this book is made, I can hand it over to fungi to unmake. I’ll dampen a copy and seed it with Pleurotus mycelium. When it has eaten its way through the words and pages and endpapers and sprouted oyster mushrooms from the covers, I’ll eat them. From another copy I will remove the pages, mash them up, and using a weak acid break the cellulose of the paper into sugars. To the sugar solution I’ll add a yeast. Once it’s fermented into a beer, I’ll drink it and close the circuit.

Fungi might make mushrooms, but first they must unmake something else. Now that this book is made, I can hand it over to fungi to unmake. I’ll dampen a copy and seed it with Pleurotus mycelium. When it has eaten its way through the words and pages and endpapers and sprouted oyster mushrooms from the covers, I’ll eat them.

most fungi live most of their lives as tubular cells known as hyphae (HY-fee), which branch and fuse to form networks, known as mycelium. Mycelial networks have no fixed shape. By ceaselessly remodelling themselves they can navigate mazes, solve complex routing problems and expertly explore their surroundings.

HOW DOES AN OBSESSION grow? Slowly, like a mold? The spores settle unseen and then blooms form, devouring any open brainscape. The genitals become infected quickly. I’m not sure how this process works exactly. A feedback loop. Mycelium reaches out, ridge by beating ridge, a thought, a heart rate rises, a feeling like sex or love, then another thought. Each pulse a quickening like river beneath the soil.

According to Freddie, mycelium was the network of fine hyphae (little living threads) that coursed through the soil and stitched the plants and the trees of the forest into a united and communicating whole, a fabric that featured the beavers and the mole crickets and the moose--- in short, it was the basis for the forest. Trees could share nutrients with one another through mycelium. On rare occasions, trees even poisoned plants via mycelium, if they posed some threat to them. But primarily the trees and plants received through the hyphae the minerals and water they needed from the soil, and in return, they offered the fungus the sugar that they, with their leaves, had the ability to produce through photosynthesis.

For many generations, we've suffered from the myth that individuals work better alone. But when it comes to mycelium, there is no such thing as alone.

Mushrooms are the fruiting bodies of the overall organism of fungi, which have an entire underground web of mycelium which can sometimes stretch for miles and interact and communicate with plant and animal life across the expanse of their bodies.

Mycelium has been fine-tuned over a billion years of evolution for one primary purpose: to consume.

, like this: In healthy forests, which we might imagine to exist mostly above ground, and be wrong in our imagining, given as the bulk of the tree, the roots, are reaching through the earth below, there exists a constant communication between those roots and mycelium, where often the ill or weak or stressed are supported by the strong and surplused. By which I mean a tree over there needs nitrogen, and a nearby tree has extra, so the hyphae (so close to hyphen, the handshake of the punctuation world), the fungal ambulances, ferry it over. Constantly. This tree to that. That to this. And that in a tablespoon of rich fungal duff (a delight: the phrase fungal duff, meaning a healthy forest soil, swirling with the living the dead make) are miles and miles of hyphae, handshakes, who get a little sugar for their work. The pronoun who turned the mushrooms into people, yes it did. Evolved the people into mushrooms. Because in trying to articulate what, perhaps, joy is, it has occurred to me that among other things—the trees and the mushrooms have shown me this—joy is the mostly invisible, the underground union between us, you and me, which is, among other things, the great fact of our life and the lives of everyone and thing we love going away. If we sink a spoon into that fact, into the duff between us, we will find it teeming. It will look like all the books ever written. It will look like all the nerves in a body. We might call it sorrow, but we might call it a union, one that, once we notice it, once we bring it into the light, might become flower and food. Might be joy.

Mycelium is polyphony in bodily form.

Mycorrhizal fungi are so prolific that their mycelium makes up between a third and a half of the living mass of soils.

Trails spread through the woods like mycelium underground, like veins across a body, connecting everything in every direction to and away from the lake, running along the length of the water and sometimes, I swear, right up into the sky.

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.

appears we are dealing with a super-fungus with a hyper-accelerated spore germination cycle and an aggressive mycelium growth rate. It can live on any surface and consume almost anything for food. I’ve never seen anything

They were thinking of these big mycelial networks in the forest sending electric signals around themselves. They imagined that maybe they were just big brains lying there.” I admit that I hadn’t been able to ignore the superficial resemblance either. Olsson’s findings suggested that mycelium might form fantastically complex networks of electrically excitable cells. Brains, too, are fantastically complex networks of electrically excitable cells.

Insect infestation? A few years ago, Stamets won a patent for a “mycopesticide”—a mutant mycelium from a species of Cordyceps that, after being eaten by carpenter ants, colonizes their bodies and kills them, but not before chemically inducing the ant to climb to the highest point in its environment and then bursting a mushroom from the top of its head that releases its spores to the wind.

from other hyphae without ever touching. In more mature parts of the mycelium, hyphal inclinations pivot. Growing tips instead become attracted to each other and start to “home” (Hickey et al. [2002]). How hyphae attract and repel each other remains poorly understood. Work on the model organism, the bread mold Neurospora crassa, is starting to provide some clues. Each hyphal tip takes it in turn to release a pheromone that attracts and “excites” the other. Through this back-and-forthing—“as if throwing a ball,” write the authors of one study—hyphae are able to entrain and home in on each other by falling into rhythm. It is this oscillation—a chemical rally—that allows them to lure the other without stimulating themselves. When they are serving, they aren’t able to detect the pheromone. When the other serves, they are stimulated (Read et al. [2009] and Goryachev et al. [2012]).

metafora se změnila. Kolem už nebyla vlčí smečka, nýbrž tisícihlavé stádo rozzuřeného skotu, valící se krajinou. Ten skot měl rohy z ocele a oči krvavé… to přízraky táhnou tmou.

That fungi could use electrical signaling as a basis for rapid communication has not been lost on Andrew Adamatzky, the director of the Unconventional Computing Laboratory. In 2018, he inserted electrodes into whole oyster mushrooms sprouting in clusters from blocks of mycelium and detected spontaneous waves of electrical activity. When he held a flame up to a mushroom, different mushrooms within the cluster responded with a sharp electrical spike. Shortly afterward, he published a paper called “Towards fungal computer.

Fungi might make mushrooms, but first they must unmake something else. Now that this book is made, I can hand it over to fungi to unmake. I’ll dampen a copy and seed it with Pleurotus mycelium. When it has eaten its way through the words and pages and endpapers and sprouted oyster mushrooms from the covers, I’ll eat them. From another copy I will remove the pages, mash them up and using a weak acid break the cellulose of the paper into sugars. To the sugar solution I’ll add a yeast. Once it’s fermented into a beer, I’ll drink it and close the circuit. Fungi make worlds; they also unmake them. There are lots of ways to catch them in the act: when you cook mushroom soup, or just eat

Mycelium?” Joey asked. “What is that?”   Water explained, “It is a huge organism made up of very, very small fibres or filaments of fungus. The fungus grows underground, and it connects all the roots of the trees together. Its flower is a mushroom. Do you like to eat mushrooms?

It was Sunday evening when it finally stopped raining. He and his dad went into the forest, and it was super wet. There were pools of water everywhere. And sure enough, the stream had jumped its banks. It looked like a torrent because it was running so fast. Joey had never seen the stream like that.