Work Reviewed: Sheldrake, Merlin. Entangled Life: How Fungi Make Our Worlds, Change Our Minds, and Shape Our Futures.* Random House, 2021.
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Introduction
Mycorrhizal fungi are everywhere: on our dinner plates, in the air, inside our bodies. Depending on the context, we might feel negatively or positively about that mycelial presence in our lives. A case of athlete’s foot, for example, prompts a very different reaction than a hearty portobello mushroom served straight off of the grill.
Merlin Sheldrake takes us beyond our own preconceived notions about these omnipresent life forms in his work Entangled Life, helping us understand the many complex abilities of mycorrhizal fungi, their importance to the development of life on earth as we know it, and their role in preserving the planet for the future.
Content Warnings*
Drug use
Insect harm
*This is not a comprehensive list of all potential triggers in the reviewed work. I encourage you to assess for yourself whether each of the works I discuss is appropriate for you and/or your audience.
Summary and Analysis
Introduction: What is it Like to Be a Fungus?
Sheldrake’s introduction lays out the central thesis of the work: mycorrhizal fungi are a key to understanding the world. Their interdependence with other species, their diversity, and their ability to make decisions and communicate form the crux of this argument, which Sheldrake supports with foreshadowings of the many phenomena to be discussed in more detail throughout. Highlights include a honey fungus up to 8,000 years old, and spanning ten square kilometers; Voyria, or “ghost-plants” who have lost their ability to photosynthesize, and rely instead on mycorrhizal fungi making a home in their root systems; and slime molds, whose efficiency at navigating labyrinths aided one researcher in finding the most direct route through the local Ikea.
My exploration of the fungal world has made me reexamine much of what I knew. Evolution, ecosystems, individuality, intelligence, life– none are quite what I thought they were.
Page 23.
Sheldrake asks us to let go of our expectations as we consider these examples, which challenge our understanding of what it means to think, learn, decide and communicate.
Chapter 1: A Lure
Chapter 1 focuses on truffles as a case study for the complexities not only of fungal life itself, but of the many relationships between mycorrhizal fungi and other life forms.
Truffles are an expensive delicacy that often cannot be cultivated successfully. Humans instead have to find truffles in the wild, typically with the help of a dog or pig, whose superior sense of smell is able to detect the chemicals that the truffle gives off underground. Yet these animals have nothing on the olfactory abilities of mycorrhizal fungi, whose whole surface can function as a kind of “nose.”
Strangely, the odor produced by truffles seems calculated specifically to attract animals to those underground fruiting bodies so that the truffles can disperse their spores. Their smell and taste are so highly valued by humans, in fact, that truffle hunters can be quite territorial, sometimes resorting to violence to maintain their truffle hunting grounds.
But truffles are not just fascinating because of their effect on humans and animals; they are also notable for having tens of thousands of sexes, all of which can take part in reproduction in different ways. Talk about disrupting the gender binary!
Chapter 2: Living Labyrinths
Imagine that you’ve reached a fork in the road. You have two choices: left, or right.
Now imagine that you could take both paths at the same time. That is the reality for mycorrhizal fungi, who are capable of branching not just in two, but a multitude of different directions.
This poses an interesting question for the author: how can a fungus continue to act as a single entity, given that it is capable of branching to this degree, while seeming to lack a central nervous system?
For example, when a fungus senses an edible block of wood in one direction of its growth, it can retract the other branches and focus its efforts on the block, like a plant growing in the direction of the sun. Other species, like phycomyces, show an avoidance response to certain substances, while still others have been detected transmitting light or chemical signals throughout their branches.
We are systems through which matter is continually passing.
Page 53.
Darwin and others have posited several theories about the mechanism behind these “root-brains”: pressure flow and electricity, for instance, or decision gates forming a “fungal computer” that stores information in binary through the opening and closing of pores. Yet some scientists cannot get past the use of the word “brain” as a point of comparison, given the lack of synapses and neurotransmitters.
Chapter 3: The Intimacy of Strangers
The most striking part for me about Sheldrake’s coverage of the relationship between fungus and algae in lichens is his historical analysis of biologists’ attitudes towards symbiosis. When such relationships were first observed in lichens, the language of researchers was tinged with colonialism and enslavement: the fungi were the “masters,” and the algae, the enslaved.
As time went on, researchers recognized that there was something mutual occurring, instead, and so the term “symbiosis,” was coined, from the Greek words for “with” and “life,” as in, two or more organisms living alongside each other in a mutually beneficial way. Yes, two or more— scientists have now discovered that bacteria and yeast are a crucial part of lichens, just as these microorganisms are also vital to the human biome.
There have never been individuals…We are all lichens.
Gilbert, S. F., Sapp, J., & Tauber, A. I. (2012). “A symbiotic view of life: We have never been individuals.” The Quarterly Review of Biology, 87, 325– 341.
So what results from the combination of life forms united in a lichen? Something near to superpowers, it would seem. Lichens are capable of mining minerals directly from rock through the sheer force of their growth, and through the use of digestive acids. They can survive in space, being resistant to radiation, and they can be rehydrated after long periods of time.
The author compares the gradual collection of these traits and abilities with the horizontal transfer of genes in bacteria, which ultimately resulted in the creation of the mitochondria that are so vital for our own cells’ energy production. Long ago, a cell engulfed a bacteria, and two organisms became one; just as a strain of fungus might join with a strain of algae to form a lichen.
Chapter 4: Mycelial Minds
After raising some fascinating questions about the nature of fungal “minds,” Sheldrake moves on in this chapter to the effects that fungus can have on the minds of other beings.
The most haunting, and the inspiration for stories like The Last of Us, is ophiocordyceps, or the “zombie fungus.” Ants sick with this fungus develop “summit disease,” whose main symptom is an uncontrollable urge to climb to a high place. Once there, the fungus produces a sprout from the ant’s body that spreads the fungal spores. Another fungus, entomophthora, produces roughly the same effect in flies.
For Sheldrake, these phenomena continue to challenge the definition of the self. Once infected, the fungus becomes something like an organ inside of the host from one perspective. From another, the ant effectively becomes a fungus, behaving in ways that are detrimental to the insect’s body in service of the fungus’s drive to reproduce.
Not all of the effects of fungi on the minds of other beings are so chilling. Sheldrake also covers the use of LSD and psilocybin in this chapter, chemicals that have found use historically in inducing mystical or transcendent states by inhibiting the default mode network, or DMN. Interestingly, the effect of this inhibition is a dissolution of the self, prompting feelings of blissful connection with the universe. So, while someone taking LSD does not become a fungus in the same way as an ant infected with ophiocordyceps, they do experience a kind of ego death.
Chapter 5: Before Roots
Long ago, plants did not have roots, and the ancestors of today’s land animals still lived in the sea. What changed?
In short, plants like algae made the climate on land more hospitable. But in order to do so, they had to work alongside mycorrhizal fungi in what the author calls “mycorrhizal relationships,” because they did not have root systems of their own.
Interestingly, about 90% of plants continue to rely on fungi, even now, after the advent of the root. The plants photosynthesize; the fungi are fed; and in return, the fungi help feed nutrients into the root systems of the plants. If the plant contributes more to the fungus, the fungus will return more.
Depending on the fungi, the plant may gain or lose certain abilities, and become adapted to different climates. Differences in taste can even occur in tomatoes, strawberries, and basil, depending on the plant’s fungal partners. Yet when we breed plants, we sometimes destroy these relationships, with consequences that are not always clear at the outset.
Chapter 6: Wood Wide Webs
In 1997, Suzanne Simard proved the existence of “common mycorrhizal networks” by tracing the exchange of radioactive carbon dioxide through the “wood wide web.” This network is more than just a series of “cables” between plants; the fungi can transmit nutrients, chemical deterrents, and warning signals using what Sheldrake calls “microtubule motors.” Some bacteria even use the network as a high speed train that transports them from victim to victim.
Especially remarkable is the presence in these networks of “mycoheterotrophs,” such as ghost pipes and orchids, which get all or a large majority of their food from fungal partners. This begs the question– what does the fungus get, if the plant is incapable of even producing its own nutrition? Is this a case of parasitism on the plant’s part, altruism on the part of the fungus, or do the plants perhaps provide something else, like shelter, within their root systems?
Chapter 7: Radical Mycology
The “radical” fungal ability identified in chapter seven centers around white rot fungi, which is capable of breaking down the lignin in wood. It may not sound revolutionary, but during the Carboniferous period, when woody plants began to cover the earth, there was no good way to break down their remains. What resulted was a period of cooling due to the carbon trapped inside the forest floor, and the production of coal, the end product of so much unrotted material piling up over millions of years.
Enter fungi, some of which can break down the complex molecules that make wood so useful for building. Others go even farther into the territory of extreme eating, feasting on coal itself, plastic diapers, or cigarette butts.
Digestion all comes down to the types of enzymes the fungus produces, which can vary. Sheldrake compares the trial-and-error process of determining the necessary enzymes to figuring out which key unlocks a particular door. Humans are now taking advantage of the ability in “mycoremediation,” or the use of fungi to perform environmental remediation.
Fungi are also being used to create, not just break down. Ecovative is producing various materials from fungi, from construction materials to mycelial leather. There are countless other examples of fungi being put to use throughout this chapter, which I won’t enumerate here. Check this one out for yourself, from pages 175-201, if you are curious.
Chapter 8: Making Sense of Fungi
Sheldrake makes the case throughout this work that fungi challenge our understanding of ourselves and our world by disrupting our definitions of self/other, animate/inanimate, and many other false but often necessary dichotomies.
Fungi make worlds; they also unmake them.
Page 225.
I’ll leave you to consider some of those contradictions:
- Yeast both domesticates us and makes us wild (bread vs. beer)
- Mushrooms can kill or cure
- Symbiosis as cooperative and competitive, mutual and parasitic
- Fungi that can compose and decompose.
This review of Entangled Life is part of the January 2024 Shroom Trio. Follow me on Patreon for access to the monthly trio of selections, supporting materials, and community discussion. Or, join my email list for updates on new posts.
