The Secret Life of Fungi E-Book

Aliya Whiteley

• Herausgeber: Elliott & Thompson
• Kategorie: Wissenschaft und neue Technologien
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 159

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2020

Beschreibung

_____ Fungi are not like us - they are entirely, magically, something else. 'A lyrical, fascinating exploration of this weird organism'Scottish Field 'A memoir oozing with wonder' Waterstones.com Welcome to the astonishing secret world of fungi _____ Fungi can appear anywhere, from desert dunes to frozen tundra. They can invade our bodies and thoughts; live between our toes or our floorboards; they are unwelcome intruders or vastly expensive treats; symbols of both death and eternal life. But despite their familiar presence, there's still much to learn about the eruption, growth and decay of their interconnected world. Aliya Whiteley has always been in love with fungi - from a childhood taking blurry photographs of strange fungal eruptions on Exmoor to a career as a writer inspired by their surreal and alien beauty. This love for fungi is a love for life, from single-cell spores to the largest living organism on the planet; a story stretching from Aliya's lawn into orbit and back again via every continent. From fields, feasts and fairy rings to death caps, puffballs and ambrosia beetles, this is an intoxicating journey into the life of extraordinary organism, one that we have barely begun to understand. _____ 'A short charming guide to all things shroomy, stretching from the author's lawn, into orbit and back again, via every continent'Gardens Illustrated 'Utterly delightful'Plantlife 'Accessible, inviting and revelatory... Aliya Whiteley animates the hidden world of fungi in prose as rich and beautiful as the strange organisms she turns her attention to.' Alice Tarbuck, author of A Spell in the Wild

Leseprobe

For my father

Contents

Introduction

Erupt

1  To Name, To Know

2  A Small Field

3  The Common Mushroom

4  Forays and Feasts

5  Learn, Carry, Collect

6  Saviours

7  Fruiting Cities

8  Weak Seeds Need Strong Friends

9  Cryptic Clues

10 Blanket Coverage

11 Slow Dancers, Thrown High

Spread

1  Nosing

2  Spire

3  The Giant

4  Walking the Floor

5  Old Stones

6  Under Alice

7  Expansions

8  Once Upon a Beetle

9  Seven Ways to Survive

10 Stowaways of the Space Age

Decay

1  Gathering the Dead

2  The Big Stick

3  Fire, Faith and Gangrene

4  Where the Rule Bends

5  Killer Club

6  Underground Visions

7  To Live and Die in Fungi

8  Grasp

9  Onwards, Downwards, Upwards

Afterword

Dramatis Fungi

Bibliography

A Reading List of Fungal Fiction

Acknowledgements

Index

Introduction

We were always walking.

We walked along the Devon coast, or in the woods, as soon as my legs were long and strong enough to take me. My father always had his camera. He wanted to capture something of the bright sights we saw: painted fishing boats jostling in the harbour; the vivid, flashing feathers of the robin or the blue tit; or the tall wildflowers of the open fields, campion pink and poppy red, and the buttercup’s shining face turned up to the sun.

I preferred Exmoor after the rain: damp, dank browns, slabs of stone, and old, twisted tree trunks. The strange shapes that sprang on them, around them, between them.

When I was first given my own camera I was delighted, but I soon discovered I had no skill for it. I hadn’t yet developed a sense of what makes a good photograph. I wasn’t drawn to the things that adults learn to appreciate as beautiful, or eye-catching. Instead I tried to capture the essence of the moor, snapping the rocks, the trees, the tough grasses and the suspicious sheep. And I remember I took photos of fungi, small and slimy, or scattered over rotting wood. I had been given one inviolable command – don’t touch – but I loved to look at them.

They were not a pretty view. They were something else. They could be flat and smooth, almost shiny, or creased in texture, like folded paper. They could look bold, defiant, in the way their caps reared up from their stems, or they could be a mess of rotting material from which insects crawled and snails oozed.

I posted my first rolls of film at the local shop and waited for the photographs to be developed and returned. I remember my excitement, and my disappointment, when I opened the envelope and discovered I’d captured only blurred, indistinguishable images. There was some secret to that world that could not be caught on camera – at least, not by me. Still, I kept trying. I wanted to understand it.

I wonder, now, how much understanding springs from connection. It’s not possible to know a subject truly without seeing where it touches other fields of knowledge. Back then, I hadn’t even realised that what I was photographing, searching out, were often mushrooms. Mushrooms, to me, came in punnets and could be found on 1970s supermarket shelves. They were called buttons: small, neat, in their place. The stems held specks of dirt. They had erupted from the soil; I knew that much. But I made no link between them and the bulbous growths on the trunks, or the pointed caps amid the dead leaves.

But then, we live in a world of connections we don’t quite make. The roads cover the continents and plane trails criss-cross the sky. The internet creates incredible opportunities for communication, for togetherness, and yet there is such loneliness in the 7 billion of us. But we are all intimately linked, part of this one world, and fungi is one of the strongest glues that binds us. They can appear anywhere, from desert dunes to frozen tundra, and create anew from rotting matter. They can invade bodies and thoughts, and they can live under our feet or on them, between our toes or between our floorboards. They are unwelcome intruders or vastly expensive treats. Fungi are a diverse and difficult group to classify. At first naturalists thought they were sponges, or some other form of animal, possibly even worms. Often they were categorised as strange, unsettling plants. It has taken hundreds of years to reach the modern scientific definition, and study continues to bring new information to light. There’s still so much to learn about these secretive forms of life, including the tantalising question of how much they communicate with each other, and with many other organisms. Perhaps they are even trying to communicate with us.

The mushrooms I used to find on the moor were part of fungi that grew in darkness. They wound their way through the soil and found, in the earth, roots and bulbs and larvae and bacteria and life and death in many forms. I’ve been fascinated by this for many years, and I’m still taking my snapshots and trying to find out more than a handful of their secrets. I keep making small connections across fields of knowledge: geography, history, myth and fiction, science and culture. For each one I’ve written about in this book there could be so many more; there are countless connections to make.

Fungi are not like us – they are entirely, magically, something else. This is a glimpse into their incredible, surprising and dark secrets, and an insight into the secret fungal world: the eruption, growth and decay overhead, inside us and under our feet.

ERUPT

1

To Name, To Know

It’s the size of a saucer, with a pale, brownish cap, and an earthy smell that wafts up from where it sits in its soil-filled cardboard box. My friend and I, side by side, peek over the lip of the box and stare at it.

There’s a sense of the forbidden about being in this corner of the science classroom before the bell has even gone, but when we heard there was a poisonous killer thing placed next to the fume cupboard we had to come and see for ourselves. This doesn’t look like a killer. It’s not an object I can identify from theory, although I know what it is in a general fashion, of course. I ask the question anyway: What is it?

It’s just a mushroom.

Biology is not my best subject. I can never seem to make the leap from the page to the body. We don’t get to do many practical lessons in my school, but watching the teacher slice up an eye, earlier that term, has confused me. The leaking fluids obscured the textbook view, and the spongy quality of the eye under the knife left me squirming.

This mushroom is a corporeal object too, reminding me of that eye. It has a coarse, almost scaly texture to its flat cap, and the smell of it is strong, emanating from the box as if it is growing as we watch – an active aroma of climbing damp and shifting soil. I tell my friend she’s wrong. It can’t be just a mushroom. It’s something else. There should be a giant, impressive word for this squatting beast. I try on ‘toadstool’, but that doesn’t seem right either. I’m reaching at the limits of my language; I can’t explain it to her, and we fall out over this semantic difference, and don’t speak for weeks.

We were both wrong, and we were both right.

It was just a mushroom. Looking back at it now, I’m fairly certain it was Agaricus campestris – a Field Mushroom. I don’t know what it was doing in the corner of the classroom. Perhaps it had been brought in as a project, or found by the teacher, and the size and smell of it worked its magic on a class of bored and impressionable students looking for an element of interest, maybe even danger. Stories about it spread as quickly and easily as spores: mushrooms can commandeer our imaginations. Maybe it’s just as wise to say: a mushroom is never just a mushroom, and it is never wise to take any of them for granted.

It sparked something in me. I wanted to have the language to name it, to know it. Still, it took a while for that desire to erupt, to find its way to the surface. I was studying at university (not biology – that eye put paid to any such ambitions for me) when I got around to buying a book on the subject. It was called Field Guide to Mushrooms of Britain and Europe and it described the Field Mushroom as edible, and fairly common. The book also informed me that it can be mistaken for Amanita phalloides, the Death Cap, which contains over twenty poisonous compounds and is famously fatal to humans. Another reason never to take a mushroom for granted.

The Field Guide to Mushrooms of Britain and Europe, written by H. and R. Grünert, contained wonderfully vivid, intense photographs that revealed how different mushrooms could be. They ranged from the morels, with their scrunched, spongy textures, to the domed, comforting pillows of the boletes. There were puffballs: fleshy, swollen lumps as big as a cow’s head in one picture, and their apparent opposites, growing outwards in firm yet delicate flat discs: the brackets. Gill fungi looked fanned and velvety, rich ruffled material beneath their caps, and who could fail to be intrigued by the phalloids, tall and sticky, or curling over into strange, almost floral growths? And yet these photographs came with a warning in the introduction: never become complacent about identification. No number of pictures, illustrated or photographed, can capture every aspect of a mushroom. Even the most experienced foragers need to double-check, to be certain. The book told me not to rely on the visual, but to read the descriptions carefully and take my time.

Even the most standardised description of a mushroom contains an element of stylistic evocation that’s difficult to describe. They are such potent, sarcous objects that bringing them into sharp focus with words takes skill: a level of skill that could be found in my new field guide. Along with the descriptions came the English language names, beyond the drier, scientific Latin. They had a resonance of their own, from Bog Bell to Fairy Sparkler, passing through Rubber Ear and Dead Man’s Fingers along the way.

Who gave mushrooms these wonderful titles? Many come from traditional British folk names, which means some mushrooms have had many different ones over the years. Identification guides published over the last three centuries or so have added their own, often without much success in getting them to stick. The process of streamlining to one accepted name has yet to end. My 1992 edition of the field guide had many as-yet-unnamed entries. But there has been a more recent push to give each Latin name an English counterpart. The British Mycological Society formed a working party in 2005 to give us more common names for fungi; their website lists them, as currently agreed on, and also includes a list of protocols to follow to suggest new ones. Could all mushrooms get their own names? That seems unlikely – there are over 15,000 species of wild mushrooms in the UK alone. But it would be good to have more words, if only to keep up with the more generously named wild flowers of Britain.

The word ‘toadstool’ came to me when I looked at that large flat mushroom, but my instinct that it was not a good fit was both correct and incorrect. The words ‘mushroom’ and ‘toadstool’ are pretty much interchangeable, although some of us tend to think of toadstools as the poisonous varieties of mushroom. It’s a great word though, conjuring images of a warty toad squatting atop a slimy, dank growth. Perhaps the venomous nature of toads led to the association – there’s no evidence to suggest toads do like hopping about in highly fungal areas, although both like the damp, I suppose. The word dates back to the Middle Ages.

That one unnamed, indescribable mushroom-notmushroom started me thinking, and challenged my language. I’m still trying to come up with new ways to bring them to life on the page today, as my chances to spot them in the wild diminish. The Field Mushroom, then: let’s start there. When’s the last time you saw one, erupted from the earth and swelling to the size of a saucer? I might phone my old friend and ask her if she wants to go looking for one with me. Let’s all go on a long walk and replace words with experience. Let’s go now.

2

A Small Field

I could start the business of describing a mushroom with talk of gills, flesh and cap. Or I could mention the way it springs up from underground, or the spores it creates that get taken on the breeze. The smell, the texture, the environment in which it can be found: all of these are ways to get to know these fruiting bodies a little better.

I’ll start with an easy mushroom to picture: something like the Shaggy Inkcap (Coprinus comatus), squatting happily amid the blades of grass in a small green field not far from here. The Inkcap is a friendly sight: a whitish woolly cylinder that opens into a bell-shaped cap to look so like our shared idea of what a mushroom is that describing it feels a little redundant. So how will I delineate it from all the other mushrooms of this book, and the world?

I need professional help – the services of a taxonomist.

Taxonomy is a branch of science that, at first, sounds as if it lacks the scope of the great big umbrella subjects of biology or chemistry. But the science of naming and categorising organisms encompasses all of our understanding; it attempts to make sense of everything we think we know so far. Without it there’s no order. Taxonomic systems exist for arts and sciences, the law and for the military, for computing and economics, education, health . . . and mushrooms, of course. Not just mushrooms. All fungi.

The father of modern taxonomy: that’s an impressive label, and it belongs to Carl Linnaeus, the eighteenth-century botanist and zoologist who spent decades finding and examining plants, animals and minerals in his efforts to understand how they all fit together. He invented the system of classification the scientific community still uses today by creating a nested hierarchy based on the shared characteristics of groups. So much of our information has changed, grown, since Linnaeus first set up his system. Still the approach, in essence, remains the same, as does the business of naming each sample. The two-part Latin name you find next to any common name (they are scattered throughout this book from Agaricus campestris onwards) comes from Linnaeus: a formal system known as binomial nomenclature. Our Shaggy Inkcap’s Latin name, when translated, tells us quite a bit of handy information about it: Coprinus means ‘living on dung’ and comatus means ‘hairy’. It certainly makes it easier to picture this particular mushroom.

A good place to start trying to make sense of what fungus is might be with Linnaeus – what did he make of it? I can feel better about my own problems in this area when it comes to understanding this strange form of life; Linnaeus didn’t know what it was either. He thought fungi might be a type of plant, or that they might even belong to the animal kingdom after he observed ‘thousands of little worms’ in dried fungi placed under a microscope. It turns out that fungi belong in neither category, but to a different kind of life altogether – a third kingdom, that can live in symbiosis with, or parasitically on, both plants and animals in ways we are still uncovering.

We may make our own boundaries around our knowledge, but it will continue to expand. As we’ll learn later, it’s in the nature of fungi to be intimately connected with every other form of life and our understanding of how that works might change again. But, at least for now, here are some basic definitions that give the study of mycology some kind of shape.

Fungi are organisms that digest animal and plant material through a process called osmotrophy – invading the material and sending out enzymes to break down substances into sugars, fatty acids, amino acids and so on. The cell walls of fungi are made of glucans and chitin: glucans can be found in plants, and chitin is a hard, semitransparent material (otherwise found in the exoskeletons of insects, crustaceans and spiders) but only fungi combine them. Many types of fungi produce spores, and they can reproduce sexually or asexually. They are more closely related to animals than plants.

What types of organism might we expect to find in the field of fungi? Mushrooms, of course. They are the fruiting bodies that grow from mycelia, which is the collection of threadlike matter called hyphae. Mushrooms dominate our idea of what fungus looks like, swelling up in the right conditions to take us by surprise with their vivid colours and varied shapes. They can be tiny or enormous, fleshy or firm or gelatinous. Or as perfectly photogenic as our Shaggy Inkcap.

And there are yeasts, being put to work by humanity for thousands of years in breweries and bakeries to make bread rise and sugar ferment – although there are many more types of yeast in the wild, living on fruits and plants, even on and inside animals. Including humans, of course.

We see moulds regularly too, often with displeasure registering in our expressions. Although yeasts are single-celled organisms, moulds are formed by hyphae creating a fuzzy network that can feed on, say, rotting fruit. Think of the thick, dusty blue-green coating that thrives on the orange you forgot in your fruit bowl. That’s probably Penicillium digitatum, a mould that is ruthlessly effective at colonising small cuts and bruises on harvested fruit.

Smut fungi are probably less in our thoughts on a daily basis, but they are multicellular organisms that live alongside us in a different way, on our agricultural crops such as oats, sugarcane, wheat and maize, sometimes destroying the plants in the process. And parasitic rust fungi infect plants too, often leaving a powdery coating on their victims. A rose infected by a common rust, say, such as Phragmidium, can be marred by the orange spots on its withering leaves.

Lichen are a little different, and fascinating for it – composite organisms that include algae or bacteria alongside fungi, living mutually, growing in practically every environment around the world. And beyond that there are the mind-blowing amounts of fungi that we can’t even see, from chytrids to microsporidia, often evolved to live in incredibly specific host environments. For instance, Loma salmonae is a fungal parasite that infects only the Pacific salmon, causing disease in the gills and shortened lifespans.