Neither vegetable nor animal?
No, mushrooms are a realm of life, a very broad category; but we know little.
They are amazing.
Yes. They are found in the air, in our body and under our feet, throughout the earth. The fungus may be microscopic while being the largest organism on the planet.
Are we your children?
Its ability to digest rock and produce soil enabled the first life on the planet. They can also survive in space and under nuclear radiation.
Without fungi, plants would not exist?
No, and everything they break down releases new nutrients that keep life going. Fungi maintain the activity and composition of the earth and atmosphere that creates the conditions for life on the planet.
The largest organism on Earth, you say?
Mycorrhizal fungi are networks that branch in all directions underground. They communicate trees and plants in shared networks through which water, nutrients and chemical signals can pass. Our lives and our future depend on those relationships being healthy.
How is this underground network reproduced?
Mushrooms are their visible part, where about 50 million tons of spores are produced per year, they are the largest source of live particles in the air. We breathe mushrooms.
Are mushrooms intelligent?
I think that all living organisms show intelligent behaviors, but traditionally cognitive sciences have placed the mind and human intelligence at the center, so that the measure of intelligence of other species and kingdoms was obtained by comparing it with ours.
Navelism.
But in recent years it has been seen that there are many ways in which organisms can display intelligent behaviors to solve problems, adapt to the environment and communicate. Fungi are capable of solving very complex problems without the need for a brain.
Surprise me.
If we have a fungal network in a maze, it will know how to find the shortest path between the entrance and the exit. And they are capable of manipulating other animals.
As?
Zombie fungi live inside the bodies of insects and modify their behavior. The fungus Ophiocordyceps unilateralis lives inside carpenter ants, and once they infect it, they strip it of its instinctive fear of heights.
How curious.
The ant climbs the plant without fear and at a certain height the fungus forces it to bite a leaf and anchor itself with its jaws; Then it devours it from the inside and makes a stem sprout from its head from which spores fall on the ants that pass underneath.
What have mushrooms taught you?
That the entire living world is a network of intimate and reciprocal dependence and it is very difficult to isolate an individual from a biological perspective. And they teach us that we can reimagine our dysfunctional philosophy on waste and see it as part of a cycle.
There are fungi that digest plastic.
And explosives, pesticides, crude oil... Cutting-edge technology is in it.
His life is strange.
Yes, and it challenges the categories we have established, and therefore can make us think differently about what it means to be alive.
Interesting.
They can teach us to understand the living world in a completely different way than when we place ourselves, humans, at the center of history.
Show me that other perspective.
They teach us that life is symbiotic; They challenge the rigid limits we set. They teach us that death is not the end of life, but rather it is the beginning of a transformation and the possibility of a new life.
Do they decompose life to create life?
Yes, life is a process. The growth of fungal networks is unpredictable, they are never complete; They remind us that life always offers new possibilities.
Bravo.
Fungi break down matter which releases new nutrients that allow life to continue. Fungi change the way life happens, as they have for over a billion years.
Is a felled tree dead?
The tree becomes a source of new life, this is a basic truth of the living world that mushrooms remind us of.
Do you include humans?
Thinking of the living world as something made up of large cycles of nutrients passing through bodies is a different view that changes the understanding of the entire living world and is absolutely true.
