In <\/em>In\u00a0Search of Mycotopia<\/a>, Doug Bierend introduces readers to an incredible and oft-overlooked kingdom of life and the potential it holds for our future, by way of the weird and wonderful communities of citizen scientists and microbe devotees working on the fungal frontier.<\/em><\/p>\n The following is an excerpt from <\/em>In Search of Mycotopia by Doug Bierend. It has been adapted for the web.<\/em><\/p>\n Earth teems with fungi. Throughout forests, jungles, grasslands, and deserts; in puddles, at lakeshores, and on the ocean floor; between cracks in stone and on the peaks of mountains; in all climates and on every continent. Fungi can be found as easily during a walk in rain-soaked woods as in the produce aisle, or simply by jabbing a finger into healthy soil. They are essential and ubiquitous<\/strong>. Turn over a rock, dig under the roots of a tree, scoop up a handful of water, open your mouth: there be the fungi. Stop reading for a moment and take a deep breath\u2014you\u2019ve just inhaled their spores.<\/p>\n Whether we know it or not, our daily life is rife with fungal encounters: in the beer and wine we drink; the bread, cheese, yogurt, tempeh, and soy sauce we eat; thousands of the medicines and chemicals on which we rely; and the fuzzy splotches that turn our tomatoes to mush.1 But more than providing conveniences, inconveniences, or culinary experiences, in a meaningful, even literal sense, quietly and largely unseen, fungi bind the living world together<\/strong>. Their exquisitely fine fibers aerate soils, enhancing water retention and bracing against erosion.2<\/sub>Meanwhile, fungi churn endlessly underfoot, mobilizing the makings of new life. They are called primary decomposers because they\u2019re often first in line to dine on dead or dying trees, leaf litter, and other organic detritus, unlocking nutrients and kicking off the chains of succession that power our planet\u2019s ecosystems.3<\/sub><\/p>\n Mycological innovator Tradd Cotter uses the term molecular keys to describe their ability to unlock a wide range of chemical bonds, such as those that constitute plants, bugs, bacteria, and anything else that lands on a mushroom\u2019s<\/a> menu.4<\/sub><\/p>\n In these capacities, fungi connect all living things in essential relational webs; without them, entire ecosystems would collapse.<\/p>\n And yet, while fundamental, fungi are not at the center of things; rather, they exemplify the interconnectedness and interdependence of all life. Our own health relies on dizzyingly diverse communities of microscopic organisms, in what we have come to call our micro- and mycobiomes. Scientists have found that only 43 percent of the cells that make up our corporeal form are actually human; the majority of what counts as \u201cus\u201d comprises bacteria, fungi, and other microbes<\/strong>.5<\/sub> For every human gene in our bodies, there are 360 microbial genes.6<\/sub> It\u2019s enough to inspire an identity crisis.7<\/sub> As professor Ruth Ley, director of Microbiome Science at the Max Planck Institute for Developmental Biology, put it, \u201cYour body isn\u2019t just you.\u201d8<\/sub><\/p>\n Even as microbes have gained prominence in science\u2019s view of the world, fungi have remained marginal figures. Fungi were regarded as a funky subset of plants until the latter half of the twentieth century; not until 1969 were they formally recognized as a completely distinct kingdom of life, on par with any other\u2014animals, plants, bacteria\u2014in terms of their scale, variety, and ecological importance. The point is often made that animals, amoeba, and fungi are more closely related to one another than to plants, which may explain something of why they can seem at once strange and uncannily familiar<\/strong>. Many do look like something squarely between animal and vegetable, with an ostensibly rootlike structure underground and mushrooms above that are often described as \u201cfleshy.\u201d Some even protect themselves with melanin; leave a shiitake mushroom out in the sun for a while, and its flesh will surge with vitamin D.9<\/sub><\/p>\n The oldest confirmed fungal fossil is dated at about 800 million years old,10<\/sub> though it\u2019s possible that fungi\u2014and if not fungi, then something quite similar\u2014were found in fossils from 2.4 billion years ago.11<\/sub> Regardless, most current views of the evolutionary tree show animals separating from fungi at around a billion years ago.12<\/sub> That\u2019s around the time when life on earth was still confined to the oceans, and indeed, fungi were at the fore in the move to shore, intimately tied up with the lives of the earliest land plants, in symbiotic relationships that persist to this day<\/strong>.13<\/sub> Fossils in Quebec and elsewhere paint the picture of a 400-million-year-old world in which the largest things living on land were the prototaxites, twenty-five-foot-tall spires of what appear to have been a kind of lichen\u2014themselves entanglements of fungi and photosynthesizing algae\u2014that loomed over Ordovician landscapes like blind watchtowers.14<\/sub><\/p>\n Nowadays, plants are the biomass heavyweights of the world, but fungi remain deeply enmeshed with them and their environments, moving nutrients and transmitting chemical information, a sort of circulatory and nervous system in one.15<\/sub><\/p>\n As old hands at symbiosis, fungi form networks in a literal sense, as weblike beings below the soil and inside other organisms, and also in a relational sense, serving as interfaces among organisms. All species of plants have been found to harbor what are called endophytic fungi, which live as hidden threads woven in and among their cells\u2014in the roots, stems, leaves, flowers, fruits\u2014serving to metabolize nutrients or dissuade foraging, essentially acting as adopted organs to their host, and vice versa.16<\/sub> Meanwhile, the vast majority of plants\u2014some 92 percent of known species\u2014extend their roots\u2019 reach thanks to intimate entanglement with mycorrhizae<\/strong>. Literally \u201croot fungi,\u201d mycorrhizae solubilize minerals from the soil in exchange for plant sugars produced by photosynthesis.17<\/sub><\/p>\n Yet despite fungi\u2019s ubiquity and importance, many people lack even a fundamental understanding of what they are or how they live. As mammals we can\u2019t help but have an intuitive sense for what animals are and what\u2019s required for our survival: water, food, oxygen, temperatures within certain ranges. Even without any botanical background, many will be familiar with the basics of plants: they soak up water and minerals from the soil through roots, convert sunlight into energy through photosynthesis, \u201cbreathe\u201d in carbon dioxide, \u201cexhale\u201d oxygen, and cast cooling shade. These are the barest basics, but it\u2019s more than many people know about fungi. Ask someone what a fungus eats and perhaps they\u2019ll guess manure, or rotting fruit, or houses, each of which counts as a correct answer. Considering what a vast variety of things fungi consume, though, or can consume, it\u2019s difficult to guess wrong; cigarette butts and cicada butts would be equally correct guesses. But ask a stranger how fungi eat, and it\u2019s a good bet you\u2019ll stump them<\/strong>. (Stumps, by the way, are also fixtures of the fungal diet.)<\/p>\n The average person can be forgiven for a lack of fungal literacy. After centuries preoccupied with plants and animals, the institutions of natural science have been slow to prioritize fungi, and few of us receive even a basic education in their biology or ecology. Nevertheless, a great deal is now known, thanks largely to the efforts of passionate mycologists both inside and outside those institutions<\/strong>. Yet many details of fungal biology, their evolutionary history, and their ecological roles in soils, among plants, and in human culture remain cloaked in mystery. For the curious, it offers a lifetime of inquiry and many opportunities to contribute to our understanding of a vital dimension of nature. Luckily for the nonscientists among us, it doesn\u2019t require a biology degree to learn about, or from, fungi.<\/p>\n 1. Sixty percent of the enzymes used in industry come from fungi, 70 percent of which come from just seven species; see Willis, State of the World\u2019s Fungi 2018.<\/p>\n 2. Elaine R.Ingham, \u201cSoil Fungi,\u201dUSDA Natural Resources Conservation Service, accessed June 25, 2020<\/a>.<\/p>\n 3. Peter McCoy, Radical Mycology: A Treatise on Seeing and Working with Fungi (Portland, OR: Chthaeus Press, 2016), 53\u201355.<\/p>\n 4. Tradd Cotter, Organic Mushroom Farming and Mycoremediation: Simple to Advanced and Experimental Techniques for Indoor and Outdoor Cultivation (White River Junction, VT: Chelsea Green, 2014), 3.<\/p>\n 5. James Gallagher, \u201cMore Than Half Your Body Is Not Human,\u201d BBC News, April 10, 2018<\/a>.<\/p>\n 6. \u201cNIH Human Microbiome Project Defines Normal Bacterial Makeup of the Body,\u201d NIH News Release, June 13, 2012<\/a>.<\/p>\n 7. From a genetic perspective, the twenty thousand or so genes at the heart of our cells share our bodies with between two and twenty million microbial genes. Humans even share a fair amount of genetic code with fungi, perhaps due in part to our common heritage. In 2015, researchers at the University of Texas at Austin tested a yeast that could survive after any of its 176 genes was replaced with a human analogue. For an account of that discovery, see Marc Airhart, \u201cPartly Human Yeast Show a Common Ancestor\u2019s Lasting Legacy,\u201d UT Research Showcase, The University of Texas at Austin, May 21, 2015<\/a>.<\/p>\n 8. Gallagher, \u201cMore Than Half Your Body.\u201d<\/p>\n 9. Glenn Cardwell et al., \u201cA Review of Mushrooms as a Potential Source of Dietary Vitamin D,\u201d Nutrients 10, no. 10, (October 2018): 1498.<\/a><\/p>\n 10. Jason Arunn Murugesu, \u201cThe Oldest Fungi Fossils Have Been Identified in a Belgian Museum,\u201d New Scientist, January 22, 2020.<\/a><\/p>\n 11. Stefan Bengtson, \u201cFungus-Like Organisms in Deep Time and Deep Rock,\u201d Nature Research Ecology & Evolution Community, April 24, 2017<\/a>.<\/p>\n 12. David Moore, Geoffrey D. Robson, and Anthony P. J. Trinci, \u201cThe Fungal Phylogeny,\u201d 21st Century Guidebook to Fungi, 2nd ed., January 2020<\/a>.<\/p>\n 13. Bin Wang et al., \u201cPresence of Three Mycorrhizal Genes in the Common Ancestor of Land Plants Suggests a Key Role of Mycorrhizas in the Coloniza- tion of Land by Plants,\u201d New Phytologist 186, no. 2 (2010): 514\u201325<\/a>.<\/p>\n 14. David Moore, Fungal Biology in the Origin and Emergence of Life (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 157.<\/p>\n 15. Yinon M. Bar-On, Rob Phillips, and Ron Milo, \u201cThe Biomass Distribution on Earth,\u201d Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 115, no. 25 ( June 2018): 6506\u201311, Fig. 1<\/a>.<\/p>\n 16. Ekta Khare, Jitendra Mishra, and Naveen Kumar Arora, \u201cMultifaceted Interac- tions Between Endophytes and Plant: Developments and Prospects,\u201d Frontiers in Microbiology 15 (November 2018)<\/a>; Kusam Lata Rana et al., \u201cEndophytic Fungi: Biodiversity, Ecological Signifi- cance, and Potential Industrial Applications,\u201d in Recent Advancement in White Biotechnology Through Fungi, vol. 1, Diversity and Enzymes Perspectives (Cham, CH: Springer, 2019), 1\u201362<\/a>.<\/p>\n 17. Michael Phillips, Mycorrhizal Planet (White River Junction, VT: Chelsea Green, 2017), 6.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" In this excerpt from In\u00a0Search of Mycotopia<\/i>, Doug Bierend looks at the fungal world and citizen scientists and microbe devotees studying it.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":12007,"featured_media":85373,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[58,10458,10459,428],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-85367","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-crops-gardening","category-farm-garden","category-food","category-homesteading"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\n![\"fungal](\"https:\/\/img.hobbyfarms.com\/Mycotopia_excerpt.jpg\")
Fungi: Around and Among Us<\/h2>\n
![\"fungal](\"https:\/\/img.hobbyfarms.com\/MycoFest-1.jpg\")
Notes<\/h3>\n