Entangled Life
About the book
Book author: Merlin Sheldrake
Sheldrake is an expert in mycorrhizal fungi. This book is about all about mushrooms! We explore the the wood wide web - a.k.a the mycelium, how trees and plants trade in these networks, how decomposition works, mind-controlling fungi, space fungi, lichens, truffles and more. It’s all in there. Read it if you want to get your mind blown.
Reflection and takeaways
I started reading this book during this mushroom season in Sweden.
Overview
The Mycelium what is actually the “organism”. It’s a network of thread-like hyphae (thread-like root structure) that lives underground. The “mushroom” you see above ground and eat is just “the sex organ” that sprouts above the surface to spread spores. The actual mushroom is the mycelium and it grows by sending out hyphae in different directions to find “food” (things it can decompose). The exploration mechanism isn’t exactly understood, but it’s very efficient. In fact, it is so efficient, that it looks like there’s some sort of “algorithm” it explores by – the hyphae can explore mazes. To me it looks like some kind of depth-first algorithm controlled by some sort of sensory heuristic. It can communicate “internally” when exploring, but noone knows how it works. What’s really cool is that the mycelium can also transport nutrients through itself.
Because it can transport nutrients so well and build in redundancy, they built fungi models of the UK where “nutrient drops” represented the size of cities. The network eventually became something that looked quite similar to the UK railroad system. The unique part was that the fungi had also built “smaller” paths between what seemed like quite random nodes. It turns out these smaller paths created an extreme resilience should any of the “larger” nutrient paths be interrupted or destroyed. This organism is somewhat highly intelligent because it can built better infrastructure than us.
The hyphae are so thin that they can grow into roots of trees and attach themselves to them. That really connects the tree to the fungi. Because the fungi can transfer nutrients efficiently, they can trade minerals with the tree (which the mushroom is great at extracting) for sugars (which the tree has plenty of due to photosynthesis). This forms a sort of “wood-wide web” – in fact, one experiment showed that a fungi was connected to 47 trees. Fungi can also connect to each other and trade nutrients, although not all fungi are friends. This wood-wide web really works like the movie Avatar. Plants, trees and fungi live in symbiosis. Interestingly, there are some wood-wide web “hacker” plants that steal nutrients from this network and don’t do any photosynthesis on their own. It could grow in the dark as long as there’s mycelium, but that’s a dependency that makes propagation hard.
Truffles
One chapter is about truffles, the super-pricy mushrooms that live beneath the soil. They have a very distinct smell (and taste) – and that is no accident, it is 100% on purpose. At a certain point, this mushroom wants to be found and dug out of the earth. The smell contains pheromones that male pigs release when they mount a sow, which is why truffle sows are really good at finding them.
Lichens
Lichens are literally everywhere. They are a symbiosis between algae & fungi. It’s not always a 1:1 relationship – sometimes they are composed of many fungi and algae. But these fungi or algae can barely exist on their own – they need a partner in crime.
Lichens are ridiculously resilient. They can survive space, as was proven on the ISS. When they encounter stress, they just pause what they are doing. This has given rise to the panspermic theory, that life could have been seeded here, or that fungi literally are from another world and survived on an asteroid.
Literally every mineral in soil is the work of a lichen that has decomposed rock. They are the only thing that can really decompose rock. That takes a long time so lichens grow really slowly.
Lichens are always the first life to appear on new islands. :-)
Lichens are a real cool form of life - it’s like a jazz band. They do their own thing and riff together.
What’s really interesting is that lichens can employ horizontal spreading. What this means is that they don’t need to evolve a particular trait. They can just partner up with an organism that has what they need, and it doesn’t need to evolve it on it’s own. That process actually works kind of similar in mammals. Our cells partnered up with mitochondria to harness energy. If you “zoom out” one level from the cell, cow’s can’t actually eat grass without their microorganism bro’s in their gut. This process is called endosymbiotic theory. It really evokes the question of what an organism really is. A cow wouldn’t be able to live without it’s gut biome, so is that then part of it, except it’s not?
Mind control fungi
There is a species of fungi called Cordyceps which specializes in controlling it’s host. There are many species of these targeting particular insects, most commonly ants. It makes them climb up grass strands to gain altitude (useful for spreading) and bite down hard so that it stays in position. Then the cordyceps erupts from the body. This can lay waste to ant colonies. Ants sacrifice themselves to carry the infected ants away. What’s important to know is that the cordyceps doesn’t mind-control the ant. It literally grows in it’s skeleton and takes over the signal system and builds its own “hydrualics” inside the ant.
Not unsurprisingly, psilocybin mushrooms are featured in this book, and Merlin has eaten them. His theory is that the mushrooms want to communicate with us. They, and some plants, interact with our minds in an extraordinary way. Perhaps they want to “control” us by teaching us lessons about harmony in nature.
Some “hella lit” facts
There are fungi that are super high in melanin. They thrive in Chernobyl! Actually, some fungi from the Chernobyl disasters show hyphae growing towards radioactive graphite, literally powering their metabolism from nuclear radiation. These things are TOUGH!
After Hiroshima, the first living thing to grow in the blast zone was a matsutake mushroom.
Fungi can learn to decompose almost anything, it just takes time. In the book there is a picture of perfectly healthy and eatable oyster mushrooms growing out of a glass of cigarette butts.
They literally employ “trading algorithms” based on supply/demand when world wide webbing with trees. If there is high demand for minerals, they increase the sugar price. Sometimes the trees then go to a different customer.
Fungi are super-good at threading through rock with their hyphae. The hyphae are much thinner than roots (50x thinner) so they are a lot more agile.
The composition of the fungi/mycorrhizal network affect the taste, shape and the number of visiting bumblebees of strawberry plants. It’s very complex.
Why did I pick it
- Best friend tip
- Mushroom season in Sweden peaked interest
Verdict
4.6 / 5. Mind blowing, but occasionally it was a bit long-winded and explained the same things in different words.