Entangled Life by Merlin Sheldrake
I would never have thought that a book about fungi could be a page-turner, I honestly couldn’t put it down. Entangled Life: How Fungi Make our Worlds, Change our Minds, and Shape our Futures is just a phenomenal, truly remarkable book.
For most of us fungus is a drug, a pizza topping, or perhaps an infection. For Merlin Sheldrake, a biologist who worked on underground fungal networks in tropical forests in Panama, fungus is an entire kingdom of life as diverse as plants and animals. Fungi are indeed the largest and oldest group of living organisms.
What I couldn’t imagine and it was of the things that blew my mind is the fundamental role that fungus plays in life on earth. Fungi mine minerals from rocks and use these minerals to build compounds within their own bodies and then transfer them to the plants in exchange for sugars and lipids that the plants are making in photosynthesis. This ancient alliance between plants and fungi has given rise to life on Earth as we know it.
Fungi are also major symbiotic players. Take lichens, for example. They are an important part of nature, so mysterious, complex and interesting organisms, and a perfect example of symbiosis. Lichens are not one organism; they are actually two organisms, a fungus and a cyanobacterium or green alga, working together to produce what appears to be one organism. Fungi don’t contain chlorophyll and can’t produce their own food. So, the alga in a lichen uses the light to make carbohydrate from carbon dioxide and water. The fungus, in return, helps the alga by protecting it from microbes and predators.
When the evolutionary theory was being developed in the nineteenth century, people conceived the interactions between organisms as a process of unmitigated conflict and competition, and that mirrored the views of human social progress within industrial capitalist systems. The idea that two organisms live in mutualistic beneficial relationships was radical, but in time it was accepted and changed the direction of biological thought.
And then there is the mycelium network. A network of fungal threads connects the trees in a forest. They are everywhere, hundreds of thousands of kilometres of densely packed fungal threads. It is called the wood-wide web. The fungus forms mycorrhiza with plants’ roots and though these connections pass substances that both organisms need to grow. Plants provide carbon-rich sugars made by photosynthesis, and in return they get nutrients, such as phosphorus and nitrogen, that the fungi scavenge from the soil. It’s a fascinated underground world, whose concept illustrated in the movie Avatar.
Fungi use waves of electrical activity to transmit around the network. Using this electrical signalling as a basis for rapid communication has not been lost on Andrew Adamatzky, the director of the Unconventional Computing Lab, who in 2018 inserted electrodes into whole oyster mushrooms sprouting in clusters from blocks of mycelium and detected spontaneous waves of electrical activity. Shortly afterwards he publishes a paper called “Towards fungal computer,” where he argues that we could treat the mycelium network like a living circuit board. By stimulating it, using for example a flame or a chemical, we could input data into a fungal computer. Fungi sense light, chemicals, gases, gravity and electric fields, so fungal computers can be made an essential part of distributed large-scale environmental sensor networks to collect information about the soil and, possibly air and to assess the overall health of the ecosystems.
I am a huge of fun of Star trek but I didn’t know that the brilliant astromycologist in the Star Trek: Discovery, Lieutenant Paul Stamets, is an actual person. The real Paul Stamets is an American mycologist who believes that mushrooms can save our lives, restore our ecosystems, and transform other worlds. The fictional Paul Stamets uses fungi to develop powerful technologies, like the spore drive, an organic propulsion system that allows a starship to instantaneous travel anywhere in the universe. The propulsion system accesses the mycelial network via mycelium spores from the Prototaxites stellaviatori fungal species to make “jumps.” Ok, the Star Trek team have taken plenty of licence, though they hardly needed to. The possibilities for what we might use mycelium for are endless.
Following his first mycelial immersion, the fictional Paul Stamets comes to dazed and transformed. “I’ve spent my whole life trying to grasp the essence of the mycelium. And now I do. I saw the network. An entire universe of possibilities I never dreamed existed.”