This blog aims to share some of my learnings about the kingdom of fungi which may go some way to answer the question … “What’s so magic about mushrooms?”

I have learned that the kingdom of fungi has an intrinsic role with all of life on the earth, despite this, we have underestimated its importance to our lives, as we done with much of nature, and it is something we still have much to learn about.

I first learned of the benefits, potential and amazing history of mushrooms and more particularly mycelium, the root structure of mushrooms, at Womadelaide 2019 when I attended the planet talks session titled ‘The Magic of Mushrooms: A Mycelial path to saving the planet’.[1] This session was extremely enlightening and has been the catalyst to opening my mind to the amazing world of fungi and how they have influenced our evolution and how we can harness their many attributes to help us evolve into the future. Actually, on reflection, it was reading ‘The Blue Economy’ by Gunter Pauli when I first got an inkling of the potential role mushrooms can have in our future. He identified that instead of burning or disposing of the millions of tonnes of spent coffee biomass we create each year it could be used to grow mushrooms, potentially doubling profit whilst generating thousands of jobs and much needed food.[2] Anyway, before I get ahead of myself and get into some thoughts on the future of mushrooms, I’ll take a quick look back at their history and the influence they’ve had on us.

It may be that fungi on land had evolved hundreds of millions of years before trees had evolved on earth, so long before trees overtook the land the earth would have been covered in mushrooms. I guess as fungi had such a massive head start they are now ubiquitous in nature and are so widespread and numerous that they makes up a large proportion of the biomass in any given ecosystem, apparently the combined biomass of fungi exceeds that of all the animals on the planet put together. And they can grow very large too, the largest living organism in the world is a honey fungus (Armillaria solidipes) found in the Malheur National Forest in Oregon USA, it covers an area of approximately 9.6km2, weighs over 400 tonnes and is somewhere between 1,900 and 8650 years old.[3] This is pretty impressive.

Mushrooms do not reproduce by seed or gather energy by photosynthesis like plants do. They reproduce by means of spores. These spores germinate to produce a mass of interwoven single cell wide structures known as hyphae. Collectively, masses of hyphae are known as mycelium. The threads act like a kind of super highway or underground internet, affectionately referred to as the ‘wood wide web’ linking the roots of different plants. It’s an amazing thought to think that the trees and bushes in our gardens are likely to be connected via mycelium that enables the plants to communicate and share nutrients with each other.

Fungi are experts in symbiosis and it is argued that the most important fungi for humans are those living with the roots of the plants we eat. Mycorrhizal fungi are found in around 80% of modern plant species. The symbiotic relationship between plants and mycelium is called mycorrhizae which is the association between fungal hyphae and the roots of plants. The roots of trees are not great at getting nutrients themselves and the nutrients required by plants are seldom freely available as they are locked up in insoluble compounds. Fungi play an important role through the decomposition process as they can break down tough organic materials into soluble nutrients. Fungi digest food outside their ‘bodies’ and then absorb the nutrients into their cells. Plants rely on this decomposition process to provide them with soluble nutrients that can be taken up by their roots. This relationship is mutually beneficial because the fungi facilitate the transfer of nutrients from the soil into plant roots and in return receive carbon from the plant. Carbon is then stored by fungi in the soil.

This storage of carbon has also contributed to the ability of animals to evolve. Hundreds of millions of years ago carbon dioxide levels would have been much higher than today. High carbon dioxide levels for modern plants can mean greater productivity but for the rootless early plants growing on poor rocky soils the acquisition of minerals, particularly phosphorus would have limited their productivity. However the mycorrhizal symbiosis would have helped plants to obtain phosphorous enabling them to use more carbon dioxide to build more plant material leading to a drawdown of global carbon dioxide levels. Over deep time early plants and their fungal partners changed our atmosphere into a lower carbon dioxide, higher oxygen regime enabling the evolution of animals and mammals such as ourselves.

Some fungi are very well known to us and we have been harnessing their power for thousands of years. For example yeast, a form of fungi, has been used for over 10,000 years to enable fermentation. Liquid fermentation has been used to create beer to spirits and solid state fermentation has been used for making bread and cheese … there’s four of my favourite things right there! More recently, probably our most well-known antibiotic, penicillin, was discovered in a common type of mould that often grows on old bread.

The use of mushrooms has pervaded human society for thousands of years. A 45,000 year old man who was found frozen in the Tyrolean Alps was carrying ornately strung fungi with him when he died, scientists think these mushrooms were spiritual but they could also have been medicinal.[4] The earliest concrete evidence of murals depicting mushroom iconography can be found in Northern Australia and date back over 12,000 years. Ingesting psilocybe mushrooms may have allowed early humans to ‘think outside the box’ and share deeper connection and communication with those around them. The active compound in psilocybe mushrooms, psilocybin, creates a state of hyper connectivity between brain cells, fostering an increase in the creation of brain cells and drastically altering thought pathways. The theory linking mushrooms to expediting human evolution postulates that mushrooms, coupled with other factors such as cooking with fire, were the catalyst for the doubling of the size of the human brain in an extremely short time, well from an evolutionary perspective at least. Thus it is argued that the use of mushrooms facilitated technological advancement and the genesis of evolutionary advantageous ideas such as language, religion, spirituality and cultural traditions.[5]

It is evident that cultures all around the world have engaged in using psychedelic fungi and this is evident in some of the oldest art of the earliest religions. For example, the gnostics depiction of the fruit of knowledge as a red capped and white spotted mushroom, the Amanita Muscaria, one of the most potent psychedelic mushrooms in the world.[6]

However, whilst fungi has already played an amazing role in our evolution and existence there are many new and exciting uses of this ubiquitous life form that are currently being investigated and this is what inspires me the most.

Compounds produced by fungi can destroy viruses that cause diseases like flu, polio, mumps, measles and glandular fever. Researchers are investigating whether fungi can be the source of new antiviral agents as while fungi have been well researched as a source of antibiotics that act against bacteria, no antiviral drugs derived from fungi have been approved. Perhaps it is only a matter of time until this occurs.[7] Perhaps fungi may be part of the solution to provide the necessary compounds for a vaccine against coronavirus.

Amazingly, some types of mushrooms have an appetite for the pollution that we are contaminating our world with. Species have been discovered that can clean up oil pollution from soil, degrade harmful heavy metals, consume persistent pesticides and even assist with the rehabilitation of radioactive sites. A fungus found in Pakistan has been found to rapidly break down polyurethane plastic. Researchers are now investigating ways of harnessing this opportunity to use fungi on a large scale to combat the massive level of plastic waste currently polluting our oceans.[8]

Mushrooms can also be used to replace the use of plastics and many other materials. For example, companies and researchers around the world are now using a key feature of fungi, mycelium, to create a range of products that can replace plastic packaging.

A company doing just that is Ecovative Design who commenced their journey of using mycelium over ten years ago. They are developing new sustainable materials such as macrostructures from mycelium, by growing high-performance structures versus making individual components that need to be assembled into a functional material. Their bio-fabrication processes also enable them to adjust the structure of mycelium based on the desired performance characteristics of the material thereby controlling features such as porosity, texture, strength, resilience and fibre orientation. In addition, their mycelium materials will biodegrade over time after their intended product life cycle in contrast to plastic-based materials that will hang around for thousands of years.

Another company, Mycoworks are developing ways of turning mushrooms into building materials. They fuse wood together with mycelium creating bricks that are fire retardant and tougher than conventional concrete. In addition, biotechnologists at RMIT are also creating bricks by combining mycelium with rice husks and crushed waste glass to provide a cheap and environmentally friendly building material. It has an added benefit for Australian conditions as it can ward off termites as well.

I feel very optimistic about the opportunities the technologies around mycelium can bring to our world and may well be the catalyst for us to truly understand the magic of mushrooms. The use of mycelium is becoming a proven alternative resulting in new sustainable products that will reduce our waste and overall environmental impact on the earth. The possibilities for the use of mycelium are endless and enable us to change our current behaviours, packaging and building materials. It might also dramatically change our diets as well, Evocative Design have also created the world’s first meatless bacon that actually taste like bacon from mycelium! Hmmm, on reflection I’m not sure if this is a good thing or not? I guess I’ll need to taste it for myself before making any further judgement.

The use of these new products and technologies align with the following quote about the changes we need to make in the world.

“You never change things by fighting the existing reality.
To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.”[9]

Buckminster Fuller

I guess that is also the thinking behind my inspiration of my broader aim to find a new ‘ism’ or way we organise our society, politics and economy as our current paradigm is leading us to catastrophe.[10] The use of mycelium and other sustainable products such as kelp for tackling climate change would be part of the new model of living I wish to see.

Anyway, whilst we are learning so much about the amazing role and potentialities of fungi and mycelium, we should also note that more than 90% of the estimated 3.8 million fungi in the world are currently unknown, in 2017 alone there were 2,189 new species of fungi described by scientists.[11] We have only barely scratched the surface of what fungi can offer us and given the amazing array of benefits fungi can already bring us, this is an inspiring proposition and adds to my optimism for our future.

So let’s continue to broaden our focus and our observations and learnings from Nature as she is likely to have the answers for everything we need. From what I have learned so far about mushrooms and mycelium some of these answers for our future will evolve through us becoming a bio-based material world.

Photo Credit – The featured image at the title of this blog was taken by Sarah Hannaford-Meyers, it’s of some mushrooms growing in forests located in the Limestone Coast region of South Australia. 

[1] Here is a link to the planet talk session, ‘The Magic of Mushrooms: A Mycelial path to saving the planet’

[2] I wrote a blog in 2019 about ‘The Blue Economy’ by Gunter Pauli, here is a link to it.

[3] Fleming, N., 2014, ‘The Largest Living Thing on Earth is a Humongous Fungi’, here is a link

[4] Dart, C., 2018, ‘Fungi are responsible for life on earth as we know it’, here is a link

[5] Lebowe, J., 2020, ‘The Definitive History of Psilocybin Mushrooms’, here is a  link

[6] Al-Badri, D., 2018, ‘The Species with Amnesia Series – Episode #13 – The Fruit of Knowledge’, viewed on YouTube, here is a link.

[7] Gray, R., 2019, ‘The unexpected magic of mushrooms’, here is a link.

[8] Gray, R., 2019, ‘The unexpected magic of mushrooms’, here is a link.

[9] Quote found on the Evocative Design website at https://ecovativedesign.com

[10] For more about my thoughts on a new ‘ism’ please check out my blog, ‘Consciousness – the path to our new ‘ism’?’, here is a link to the blog

[11] Gray, R., 2019, ‘The unexpected magic of mushrooms’, here is a link.

Some other articles that contributed to my learning for this blog are below:

  • Bayer, E., 2019, ‘The Mycelium Revolution is Upon Us’, here is a link
  • Fleming, N, 2014, ‘Plants Talk to Each Other Through an Internet of Fungus’, here is a link
  • Lydon, S, 2018, ‘Strangest things; fossils reveal how fungus shaped life on Earth’, here is a link.
  • May, K., 2013, ‘9 Ways Mushrooms Could Drastically Change the World’, here is a link
  • The Green Temple, 2017, ‘Mycelium – The Future is Fungi’, here is a link

I am very keen to watch the documentary, ‘The Kingdom’, which is apparently the pre-eminent documentary on all things mushrooms.