On one hand, I am a little hesitant to review this book because I feel very unqualified to even discuss let alone review a book on fungi; on the other hand, the title already pretty much tells you everything you need to know about this book!
The book was billed as mindblowing, dazzling, urgent, a revelation, and so on, not the usual types of accolades for books on plants! But it deserves all such accolades and more, because it has been a book which truly alters one’s whole understanding and perception of the world around us. ‘Vision changing’ was another of the blubs on the front cover, and entirely deserved.
Sheldrake’s book tells us not just about how fungi are near miraculous in their abilities and properties and activities, but how they actually underpin all life and everything we need and do on earth. More than that, the study of fungi have led scholars to rethink everything we thought we understood, even about our selves, and our individuality and autonomy.
Fungi, for example, don’t have to choose which of several paths to take at any given time, as we humans would have to do, they can take multiple paths at one and the same time (with their hyphae and microscopic labyrinths). We learn that slime is not some inert matter, but have problem solving skills, such as finding the quickest way through mazes, consistently. Sheldrake questions as to whether the tips of mycelial networks form a singular or plural organism, concludes it is “somehow, improbably, both” (p51). The mycelium can sprawl widely, yet somehow much be able to stay in touch (with itself) in order to ‘know’ what is happening in another part of the network. Fungus proliferates in many directions at once, laying down links, which they can prune back when they find other promising directions, and towards those promising directions, they can lay down and reinforce more links, withdrawing the less competitive links and laying down a few ‘mainline highways’, as Sheldrake puts it. They can migrate, wander beyond limits, and so “mycelium is a body without a body plan” (55). Even I am getting caught up by this point in the almost magical qualities of fungi.
The scale of mycelium (ecological connective tissue) is beyond imagination; it is interlaced webs strung through soil, strung hundreds of meters below the surface of the ocean, in coral reefs, plants, animal bodies dead and alive, in rubbish heaps, carpets, floorboards, old books in libraries, specks of house dust….and apparently in a single gram of soil, if we were to tease apart the mycelium and lay it end to end, it could be from a hundred meters to 10 kilometers. “In practise, it is impossible to measure the extent to which mycelium perfuses the Earth’s structures, systems and inhabitants – its weave is too tight. Mycelium is a way of life that challenges our animal imaginations”” (p52). Mycelium has no command centre, a fragment can regenerate an entire network, so in a sense, is immortal.
Unlike plants which photosynthesize to make their own food, or like animals which find food and put food inside their bodies to digest and absorb, fungi digest the world and then absorb it into their bodies. Mycelium have the power to penetrate very tough barriers – to help us understand just how tough, Sheldrake tells us the hyphae (the investigating tips that keep branching out and searching), if a hyphae was as wide as a human hand, it could lift an 8 tonne school bus. And indeed, most people are familiar with the ‘explosive force’ of mushrooms which can grow right through stones and asphalt roads.
This is just a tiny little bit of the amazing information this book contains. By this stage of the review, a reader can guess that the review will be enthusiastically endorsing everyone should read this amazing book!
There is a marvellous chapter on lichens, one of my favourite chapters, because who knew lichens were so astounding? I hadn’t given lichens much of a thought before, beyond thinking moss is a lovely thing, but not comprehending how truly spectacular an organism it is. It turns out lichens are an incredibly tough life form, and one of the oldest. Sheldrake calls them ‘living riddles, because they force us to debate what constitutes an autonomous individual. “To this day, lichens confuse our concepts of identity and force us to question where one organism stops and another begins” (p80). This is one of the things I love about this book: how to forces us to realise our understanding of the world is so peculiarly animal, and how we just cannot comprehend how others – like plant matter – may experience and understand the same world.
Darwin’s theory of evolution tells us about species arising by diverging; but lichens seem to be converging species. They are full of symbiosis, ‘inter-kingdom collaboration’ (p82), rather than the Darwinian idea of competition for survival. Apparently lichens encrust 8% of earth’s surface, an area larger than tropical rainforests, on rocks, trees, roofs, fences, everywhere, even the surface of deserts. Their earliest fossils date from over 400 million years ago, and evolved independently, between 9-12 times. Lichens can live as lichens or not, depending on circumstances. They come in all colours, and some look like smudges and stains while others look like shrubs and antlers. Lichens can mine minerals from rocks, literally digesting then, but also laying down the first soils in an ecosystem when they die and decompose; “lichens are go-betweens that inhabit the boundary dividing life and non-life” (p85). Lichens can not only survive extreme conditions, but Sheldrake says even in the world of extremophiles, lichens have 2 extraordinary properties: for one, they are multicellular organisms, and for another, they arise from symbiosis, which is much more sophisticated and enduring than most extremophiles.
“Lichens are places where an organism unravels into an ecosystem and where an ecosystem congeals into an organism. They flicker between ‘wholes’ and ‘collections of parts’. […] Is the whole lichen the individual? Or are its constituent members, the parts, the individuals? Is this even the right question to ask? Lichens are a product less of their parts than of the exchanges between the parts. Lichens are stabilised networks of relationships; they never stop lichenising; they are verbs as well as nouns” (p99).
I did say this book is mindblowing!
Fungi turns out to be not just mindblowing, but mindchanging. Literally. We all know about mushrooms having mind-altering properties and being used as drugs and to invoke certain mindstates and so on. However, I must include this example of mind-changing fungi into this review before concluding it, even at the risk of seeming sensationalistic: the fungus Ophiocordyceps unilateralis, which infects the carpenter ants. It is said to be a ‘zombie fungus’ which infects and hijacks the insect. Once infected, the ant seems to lose its instinctive fear of heights, and climbs up the nearest plant, a syndrome called ‘summit disease’. The fungus forces the any to clamp its jaws around a major vein of a leaf’s underside in a ‘death grip’. Mycelium grows out of the ant’s feet which stitches the feet to the plant’s surface. Then the fungus digests the ant’s body, and spouts a stalk out of the ant’s head (a stalk which can be as long as the whole body of the ant, or longer!), and this stalk then showers spores down on other ants passing below, reinfecting new insects. And even if those spores should happen to miss their targets below, they have secondary sticky spores which extend on threads that act like trip wires.
Apparently these zombie fungi control their hosts behaviour with ‘exquisite precision’. They can compel the host to perform the ‘death’ grip’ in a zone with just the right temperature, humidity, orient the host in the direction of the sun, and even get the infected host ants to bite in synchrony, at noon, and all at a good spot (a major vein) and not just bite at any old place on the leaf (98% of the time, the ants will clamp onto a major vein). Researchers have wanted to find out just how the fungus controls the ant’s mind; they discovered the fungus becomes to no small degree, a prosthetic organ of the ants’ bodies: as much as 40% of the biomass of an infected any is fungus. Hyhae wind through all body cavities, enmesh all muscle fibres, coordinate activity via a single interconnected mycelial network. But the fungus are not present in the ant’s brain, to the surprise of the researchers. They suspect the fungus puppeteer the ants by secreting chemicals which act on muscles and central nervous system, using a pharmacological approach, but we do not know if these fungal interventions cut an ant’s brain off from its body or not.
This book has left me reeling practically every page, with not just its spectacular facts, but the way it is able to interpret these facts into complete paradigms shifts and reshifts. Without even needing to chew on a single mushroom, I have felt as though the experience of reading has been like taking LSD (or what I imagine the experience may be like), sparks flashing and awe and amazement and peace. Bu then, I couldn’t really be sure, could I, that I have not been infected by fungi, since their spores are everywhere, on every surface, and constantly changing our world?
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