T ry ​ to imagine what it is like to be a fungus. Not a mushroom, pushing up through damp soil overnight or delicately forcing itself out throug

From Its Myriad Tips

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2021-05-25 11:00:16

T ry ​ to imagine what it is like to be a fungus. Not a mushroom, pushing up through damp soil overnight or delicately forcing itself out through the bark of a rotting log: that would be like imagining the grape rather than the vine. Instead try to think your way into the main part of a fungus, the mycelium, a proliferating network of tiny white threads known as hyphae. Decentralised, inquisitive, exploratory and voracious, a mycelial network ranges through soil in search of food. It tangles itself in an intimate scrawl with the roots of plants, exchanging nutrients and sugars with them; it meets with the hyphae of other networks and has mycelial sex; messages from its myriad tips are reported rapidly across the whole network by mysterious means, perhaps chemical, perhaps electrical. For food, it prefers wood, but with practice it can learn to eat novel substances, including toxic chemicals, plastics and oil. Is it somehow sentient? As its thousands of hyphae simultaneously but independently rove through the soil, is the mycelium behaving as an individual or a swarm? What is it like to be this way?

I found myself underground, surrounded by growing tips surging across one another. Schools of globular animals grazing – plant roots and their hustle – the Wild West of the soil – all those bandits, brigands, loners, crap shooters. The soil was a horizonless external gut – digestion and salvage everywhere – flocks of bacteria surfing on waves of electrical charge – chemical weather systems – subterranean highways – slimy infective embrace – seething intimate contact on all sides.

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