Neither vegetable nor animal?
No, fungi are a kingdom of life, a very broad category; but we know little about it.
They are amazing.
Yes. They are in the air, in our bodies and under our feet, all over the earth. The fungus can be microscopic while being the largest organism on the planet.
Are we his children?
Their ability to digest rock and produce soil allowed for the first life on the planet. They can also survive in space and under nuclear radiation.
Without fungi wouldn’t plants exist?
No, and everything they break down releases new nutrients that keep life going. Fungi maintain the activity and composition of the earth and the atmosphere that creates the conditions for life on the planet.
The largest organism on Earth, you say?
Mycorrhizal fungi are networks that branch out in all directions below ground. Trees and plants communicate in shared networks through which water, nutrients and chemical signals can pass. Our lives and our future depend on these relationships being healthy.
How does this network play?
Mushrooms are the visible part, where about 50 million tons of spores are produced a year, they are the largest source of living particles in the air. We breathe fungi.
Are fungi intelligent?
I think that all living organisms exhibit intelligent behaviors, but cognitive science has traditionally placed the human mind and intelligence at the center, so that measuring the intelligence of other species and kingdoms is obtained by comparing it with ours.
We think we are the center of the universe.
But in recent years it has been seen that there are many ways in which organisms can display intelligent behavior to solve problems, adapt to the environment and communicate. Fungi are able to solve 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 able to manipulate other animals.
Like now what?
Zombie fungi live inside the body of insects and modify their behavior. The fungus Ophiocordyceps unilateralis lives inside worker ants, and when they infect them they strip them of their instinctive phobia of high places.
How curious
The ant climbs up the plant without fear and at a certain height the fungus forces it to bite a leaf and anchor to it with its jaws; then it devours it from the inside and causes a stem to sprout from its head, from which spores fall on the ants that pass below.
What have the fungi taught him?
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 about 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 the case.
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 humans are at the center of history.
Show me that other perspective.
They teach us that life is symbiotic; they defy the rigid boundaries we set. They teach us that death is not the end of life, but rather the beginning of a transformation and the possibility of a new life.
Do they break down 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 occurs, as they have done for more than 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 fungi remind us of.
Do you include humans?
To think of the living world as something composed of great cycles of nutrients passing through bodies is a different view that changes the understanding of the whole living world and is absolutely true.
