mushroom power

We make up stories to help us understand the world around us.

We are part of nature. But if we are to keep our human identities we need to see ourselves as apart from nonhuman life.   In the case of werewolves, what is supposed to be separate - animal and human nature - becomes hybridized.  Animals, especially mammals, are sufficiently like us for this strange idea to be plausible. A human - plant hybrid is harder to imagine, weirder.

Shriek: An Afterword by Jeff VanderMeer is a highly recommended book if, like me,  you like sci fi / fantasy / horror genres.

Nature grows around us, upon us and within us in the form of microbes, bacteria and funghi. In this book, funghi are depicted as scary, malevolent and sinister.

A long time ago a city was razed to the ground and its people massacred. The city of Ambergris was built over the ruins. The survivors of the original city, the Gray Caps, were driven underground. Some people believe that they are in the process of reclaiming the city, using fungal spores and fruiting bodies to control the minds of the human inhabitants and forcing them to do their will. Others deny this as weird, crazy and impossible fantasy. 


Historian Duncan Shriek is driven to explore the underground territory of the Gray Caps.  In the process he is changed, transformed.


' The paleness that had taken over his features had blanched away any expression, any life, in his limbs, in his movements ... Beard like the tendrils of finely threaded spores ... Clothes stained everywhere with spores, reduced to a fine, metallic dust that glittered blackly all around him... trailed tiny obsidian mushrooms, trembling off of him at every turn ... Eyes embedded with black flecks, staring at some nameless vision just beyond me ...  A dark green smell brought from deep underground. A subtle interweaving of minerals and flesh and fungus... The smell of lichen and moss ...flesh penetrated by fungus ... every pore cross-pollinated, supersaturated ... the flesh alive and prickly.'

In the real world, funghi are everywhere and scientists are learning more and more about them. I have often noticed a network of fine white threads growing on the roots of plants. They are mycorrhizae. They benefit plants by taking in water and minerals from the soil and sharing these nutrients with the plants on which they grow. These mycorrhizae networks can be vast, linking vast forests of trees of different species.

A scientist called Ren Sen Zeng at South China Agricultural College believes that the mycorrhizae also enable communication between plants, calling them the 'internet of plant communities'.  It's still a theory unproven outside the lab, but maybe the story of Ambergris is not as fanciful as it seems. Certainly after reading this book, getting a fungal infection will never be the same again.

This mycorrhiza includes a fungus in the genus Amanita (Wikipedia)