Arts of Inclusion, or, How to Love a Mushroom

Abstract

Next time you walk through a forest, look down. A city lies under your feet. If you were somehow to descend into the earth, you would find yourself surrounded by the city’s architecture of webs and filaments. Fungi make those webs as they interact with the roots of trees, forming joint structures of fungus and root called ‘mycorrhiza’. Mycorrhizal webs connect not just root and fungus, but, by way of fungal filaments, tree and tree, connecting up the forest in entanglements. This city is a lively scene of action and interaction. There are many ways to eat here and to share food. There is recognizable hunting in the city: for example, some fungi lasso little soil worms called nematodes for dinner. But this is just the crudest way to attune one’s digestion. Mycorrhizal fungi siphon energy-giving sugars from trees for their use. Some of those sugars are re-distributed through the fungal network from tree to tree. Others support dependent plants, such as mushroom-loving ‘mycophiles’ that tap the network to send out pale or colourful stems of flowers (e.g., Indian pipes, coral-root orchids). Meanwhile, like an inside-out stomach, fungi secrete enzymes into the soil around them, digesting organic material and even rocks, and absorbing nutrients released in the process. These nutrients are also available then for the trees and other plants, which use them to produce more sugar for themselves— and the network. In this process, too, there is a whole lot of smelling going on, as plants and animals and fungi sniff out not just good meals but also good partners. And what wonderful smells, even for an animal nose, like mine. (Some fungi, such as truffles, depend on animals to smell out their reproductive bodies, to spread around their spores.) Reach down and smell a clot of forest earth: it smells like the underground city of fungi.1