Are you interested in some serious science? Evolutionary
biology, horizontal gene transfer, symbiosis, extinction events. Do you care
whether fungi use trees to supply them with hydrocarbons, or if it is the other
way around, the trees use fungi to supply them with phosphorus? Do you care that mycologist
Nicholas Money wrote a paper, “Against the naming of fungi?” Author Sheldon Drake of Entangled Life sees no reason to water down his enthusiasm for mushrooms
or the science behind it.
Some interesting discoveries.
Truffles differ from humans in that either + or - mating types can be maternal or paternal—it is as if all humans were both male and female and equally able to play the part of a mother or a father, provided we could have sex with a partner of the opposite mating type. How the sexual attraction between truffle fungi plays out remains unknown.
Three years later, in 1869, the Swiss botanist Simon Schwendener published a paper advancing the “dual hypothesis of lichens.” In it, he presented the radical notion that lichens were not a single organism, as had long been assumed. Instead, he argued that they were composed of two quite different entities: a fungus and an alga.
Even though Schwendener turned out to be correct, he was initially not believed.
“You see,” wrote the English mycologist Beatrix Potter, best known for her children’s books, “we do not believe in Schwendener’s theory.”
Lichen samples exposed to six kilograys of gamma irradiation—six times the standard dose for food sterilization in the United States and twelve thousand times the lethal dose for humans—were entirely untroubled.
Fungi have persisted through Earth’s five major extinction events, each of which eliminated between seventy-five and ninety-five percent of species on the planet.
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