Change Everything No 32: Fungi - a kingdom that deserves advancement

Finding some positives out of the mess that was the Biodiversity COP (COP16)

Book news

I’ll be in Ilkley on Tuesday evening at the wonderful The Grove bookshop talking Change Everything, the book - think there is still a few tickets available.

I also had a wonderful chat that became a podcast about Change Everything with the amazing Manda Scott at the Accidental Gods: do check it out.

A kingdom that deserves advancement

There’s a lot of focus this weekend in the UK about the (literally) medieval landownership structure at the foundation of the Royal family’s wealth, but there is one kingdom on this planet that deserves to advance: that of fungi. (Okay, I am stretching the comparison 😏)

COP16 - the biodiversity one - ended, very badly and ineffectively, this week. Only 29 countries out of 196 had submitted national biodiversity strategies to reflect their share of global efforts. And UK was not one of them. And no funding strategy was agreed. A lot to do - and not a great way to go into Climate COP29.

But this email is going to focus on a positive coming out of the talks, in which the UK is even, for once, being a leader (although I suspect Kew Gardens may have been more responsible for that than the government): a drive, working with Chile, to see fungi given the same level of recognition as flora and fauna. You can read a lot more about this from the IUCN Fungal Conservation Committee here. This is seeking an equality of recognition for the three macroscopic kingdoms of life. (We’ll probably get to the microscopic eventually.)

Photo by Phoenix Han on Unsplash

For the occasion of COP16, I have been reading Richard Fortey’s Close Encounters of a Fungal Kind: In Pursuit of Remarkable Mushrooms, an entertaining romp through the macroscopic fungal world. (Reviewed in the TLS and there’s an interview with the author here.)

The enthusiasm is gripping, and the stories myriad. I particularly like that of the puffball Pepper Pot (Myriostoma coliforme). Until this century, the last specimen collected in Britain was found in 1881, with a 1981 text noting, apparently hopelessly, “It is hoped that the publication of an illustration of this interesting fungi will lead to its rediscovery.” And viola, Fortey tells us, it was, in 2006, not far from where it was spotted in 1881 - although the exact location is being kept secret for obvious reasons. (P. 133)

Puffballs are easy to get excited about. Fortey tells us that a single Giant Puffball (“often much larger than a football”) could contain more than seven trillion spores, “each round and slightly spiky and about five thousandth of a millimetre across”. If you’re feeling brave, “can only be eaten when it is very young, while the interior is still as white as a cheap supermarket loaf. If sliced and fried in butter till it is golden on both sides, it makes an excellent companion for scrambled eggs.” (P. 120-121)

A giant puffball Source

Fortey, you can see, has both a gourmet’s enthusiasm, as well as a scientist’s. He reflects on finding a crop of Black Morels in the car park of a local supermarket. “Laid out with a number of beds containing young trees to divide one rank of cars from another. Dark-coloured mulch was thrown down in some quantity. The following spring Black Morels were dotted around the car park. They looked like little black protruding pixie hats. I filled my largest collecting basket with them. I could not suppress a smug feeling from harvesting a valuable crop for nothing outside such a temple to consumption, full of plastic-wrapped food that had travelled half-way around the planet.” (P174) But he warns, they usually only have a year of glory: a different successional fungi will follow them the next year.

The author also explores those fungi we do not like, and find hard to beat, like so called Dry Rot Fungus (misnamed, as he notes, since it actually requires damp conifer wood for its spores to successfully germinate). “Once established, its mycelium breaks down wood in such a way that it releases water molecules so then it becomes like an internal combustion engine capable of producing its own fuel… Its hyphae extract nutrients from plaster or brickwork to help it grow - oil in the engine, if you like.” Nature truly has developed amazing capacities over hundreds of millions of years of evolution. My father once owned an affected house; the results were extremely expensive, for as Fortey notes “When the pest is discovered there is no choice but to remove all the infected timber - with a wide safety zone around it to eliminate any that may have been infiltrated by the invader but not yet shown symptoms.” (P. 264-5)

As is sadly inevitable in any book about nature, there is also in this text stories of decline, one striking one being the fate of ectomycorrhizal fungi charted by a Dutch scientist last century. “Between 1972 and 1989 … species like chanterelles had drastically declined in controlled woodland plots to about a third of what they used to be - while the number of fruiting bodies per feet are had decreased even more dramatically. Atmospheric pollution (and particularly nitrate pollution) is fingered as the culprit, as even protected habitats have experienced comparable decline.” (P. 308)

And our own diet has also lost so much diversity. Fortey notes that the summer Truffle (Tuber aestivum) is a British native, and although not matching Continental version for flavour, is certainly pleasantly edible. “John Ramsbottom described how large estates in the 19th century employed specialist truffle hunters (and their dogs) to keep the table supplied… he records meeting the last professional British truffles, Alfred Collins, who died in 1953.” (P. 103)

But why do truffles have their distinctive odour, so attractive to mammals? Obvious really - they need the spores from their fruiting bodies to spread, and it is hard to achieve that underground. Why not use a handy, mobile, tough species to spread them for you - pigs being a notably obvious choice.

Fortey also, of course, gets into the fungi that has started to rise in human consciousness, the species that form mutualistic partnerships with plants.

“Since hyphae are usually only a few thousandth of a millimetre in diameter, an active network can consist of many thousands, even millions, of tiny, questing, interconnected, threads…. A regular claim is that a gram of soil may contain a hundred metres of hyphae… in a fact are of forest soil there may be several tonnes of mycelium… the complex biochemistry of the processes involved has power many a PhD thesis in more recent years. It is not just a question of picking up useful elements as if they were lying in packets … the enzyme toolkit of the mushroom is adapted to work on complex molecules in the soil, cutting them down into smaller units that can eventually be absorbed by the plants.”

Photo by Ed van duijn on Unsplash

Moving away from Fortey to a wider scale research, our understanding of fungi is really only just getting started. Our limited cognition is just starting to come to grips with their possibilities: “They have memories, they learn, and they can make decisions. Quite frankly, the differences in how they solve problems compared to humans is mind-blowing.”

And while looking around for this email, I also found some wonderful artwork about the relationship between humans and fungi - people becoming fungi by Riitta Ikonen, photographed by Annie Collinge - in a wonderful forest setting. Lots more art like this please!

Apologies for lateness of this edition: blame “quasi-living” things outside the three kingdoms: I’m attributing a nasty rhinovirus followed by a norovirus for my past three weeks of struggling through weekdays then collapsing at weekends.

Picks of the week

Reading

Can fiction be both gripping, entertaining and scathing political commentary? Yes I think it can: Babel, by RF Kuaung, (about which the Guardian rightly raved, saying the use of the fantasy genre “does not soften real history but sharpens it”) and which (really quite astonishingly) was a Sunday Times bestseller a couple of years ago, testimony to its “good read” quality, even thought the politics are not at all hidden.

Ramy, born in India, comments to Robin, born in Canton, just before the start of the First Opium War: “The British are turning my homeland into a narco-military state to pump drugs into yours. That’s how this empire connects us.”
Robin saw a great spider’s web in his mind then. Cotton from India to Britain, opium from India to China, silver becoming tea and porcelain in China, and everything flowing back to Britain. It sounded so abstract - just categories of use, exchange, and value - until it wasn’t; until you realzed the web you lived in and the exploitations your lifestyle demanded, until you saw looming above it all the spectre of colonial labour and colonial pain.”
“It’s sick,” he whispered. “It’s sick, it’s so sick…
“But it is just trade, “ said Ramy. “Everyone benefits; everyone profits, even if it’s only one country that profits a good deal more. Continuous gains - that’s the logic, isn’t it. So, why would we ever try to break out? The point is, Birdie, I think I understand why you didn’t see. Almost no one does.”
Free trade. This was always the British line of argument - free trade, free competition and an equal playing field for all. Only it never ended up that way, did it. What ‘free trade’ really meant was British imperial dominance, for what was free about a trade that relied on a massive build-up of naval power, to secure maritime access. When mere trading companies could wage war, assess taxes and administer civil and criminal justice?” (p. 305-6)

Photo by Ricky LK on Unsplash

Timely that at the Commonwealth Summit reparations and climate change loss and damage were on the agenda, whether the UK liked it or not.

Listening

The wonderful Common Descent podcast has, slightly belatedly, got to its Rodents episode. And I’ve learnt a lot about the amazing African spiny mice, long known to be able to “deglove” their tails (shed the skin) to escape predators, only recently found to be a very rare mammal to have bony plates (Osteoderms) in its tail also (which probably help the skin hold together). If you are eating breakfast, stop now: the degloved tail is now a liability, and the mouse will usually subsequently chew it off. Unlike reptiles, this is a once-only performance. Once the tail is gone, it does not grow back. These mice do, however, have the capacity to regrow skin - and even organs - without scar tissue, unlike most mammals. Which means, I fear, many of them are now being horribly mistreated in laboratories.

The amazing African spiny mouse Source

Thinking

That the world has got far, far too complacent about the SARS-CoV2 virus is a statement of the obvious. But this reflection in Scientific American draws that out: “While uncertainty remains, long COVID symptoms appear to occur after about 10 percent to 20 percent of pediatric infections.” In the US alone, that is as many as 5.8 million children. Symptoms “affected almost every organ system.” Vaccination is one prescription, but far from a fully effective in stopping infection, but clean air works against Covid and many diseases: “Clean indoor air should be expected as a right, like clean water.”

Researching

Disturbing and puzzling, and a reminder of how little we understand. Researchers found, under experimental conditions (boxes of soil in a greenhouse) that bumblebee queens chose to nest in pesticide-contaminated soil rather than “clean” soil. No real idea why - it might even be that they have an inbuilt desire for “novelty” - but horrifying in its potential consequences in the real world.

Almost the end

The inimitable Zoe Williams at the Guardian has been using crow behaviour - the ability to hold a grudge (or at least in the crow case an understanding of who are bad actors) - to reflect on the human capacity to maintain a chip on their shoulder for a long time. Reminded me of my grandmother, who visibly carried the anger of not being allowed to go to grammar school because her parents didn’t have the funds for the tram fare for the whole of her life.

What did you think?

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