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Entangled Life

Jun 15, 2021 06:24 pm | John Stepper


When you think of yourself as an individual, where does your self begin and where does it end? Who decides?

These questions came to me as I was reading Entangled Life by Merlin Sheldrake, one of the best books I’ve come across in a long time. On the surface, it’s about fungi: mushrooms, yeasts, lichens. But it’s also about people and networks and the illusion of boundaries.

The humble fungus

Page after page I was surprised at my ignorance. Did you know, for example, that fungi are among the largest organisms in the world? “The current record holder [Armillaria, a honey fungi], in Oregon, weighs hundreds of tons, spills across ten square kilometers, and is somewhere between two thousand and eight thousand years old.”

Or that a mushroom can generate enough force to break through pavement? “When a stinkhorn mushroom crunches through an asphalt road, it produces enough force to lift an object weighing 130 kilograms.”

Who’s in control?

As remarkable as fungi can be for what they do on their own, even more incredible is how they can change behavior of other species, both for better and worse.

In one study cited in the endnotes, researchers swapped the microorganisms in the guts of different strains of mice, one bred to be “timid” and another to be “normal.” After the swap of microbes, “the ‘timid’ mouse strains lose their caution…and the ‘normal’ strains acquire ‘exaggerate caution and hesitancy.’”

In a more bizarre example, “zombie fungi” (Ophiocordyceps) live within the bodies of ants and manipulate the ants’ behavior to help the fungus disperse its spores and pass on its genes. 

“Once infected by the fungus, ants are stripped of their instinctive fear of heights, and climb up the nearest plant—a syndrome known as “summit disease.” In due course the fungus forces the ant to clamps its jaws around the plant in a “death grip.” Mycelium [a kind of fungal network] grows from the ant’s feet and stitches them to the plant’s surface. The fungus then digests the ant’s body and sprouts a stalk out of its head, from which spores shower down on ants passing below.” 

Hard to believe? With almost surgical precision, the fungus “compels ants to perform the death grip in a zone with just the right temperature and humidity to allow the fungus to fruit: a height of 25 centimeters above the forest floor.”

Cooperation and competition

The bulk of the book, though, is about the networks that fungi form called mycelium, and how these networks interact with other organisms such as trees, exchanging nutrients and capabilities. It’s a kind of “multi-organism symbiosis” for mutual advantage that, until fairly recently, was thought to be impossible. 

Evolution is often depicted as brutally competitive, and it can be. But it can also be the case that different organisms come together to take advantage of opportunities that none of them could access on their own. 

Algae and fungi, for example, have different capabilities which, when combined, create new composite life-forms “capable of entirely new possibilities.” The biologist Lynn Margulis “rewrote the history of life” when she proposed that a partnership between algae and fungi are what enabled life to make the first transition from the sea. “Symbiosis,” Margulis said, is “the moon that pulled the tide of life from its oceanic depths to dry land and up into the air.” 

A purposeful network

Now that we know what to look for, we see these kinds of relationships everywhere: among microbes, plants, insects, and, of course, people.

The mycelium of a fungus is a network, actively searching for resources as well as partners that will help it survive. The giving and receiving between fungi and trees, for example, isn’t always beneficial to both parties, but it often is, and the exchange can shape the fortunes and futures of all parties involved. 

Our human networks are like that too. We are the sum of our interactions with everyone we’ve ever come into contact with. But, far from random, our networking can be a purposeful search. As St. Francis of Assisi wrote almost a millennium ago, “Our hands imbibe like roots, so I place them on what is beautiful in this world.”

Do your roots ground you and fill you with what you need to thrive? Do your limbs reach for the light?

Francis of Assisi quote.001.jpeg


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