Entangled Life: How Fungi Make Our Worlds, Change Our Minds and Shape Our Futures

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Among their myriad useful purposes, they can be ‘trained’ to decompose almost anything, even heavy metals. That is the case of Pleurotus, which can break down crude oil, cigarette butts or used diapers, among other pollutants. But it's not just plants whose lives are made possible by fungi. It is also our own. They live in our guts and help us get nutrients from food. Food that wouldn't even exist if it wasn't for fungi! They nourish us with their mushroom "fruit".... as long as we know which to avoid! Eat the wrong mushroom and it's bye bye to you. Psilocybin found in certain "magic mushrooms" help alleviate depression and break addiction. S02E12 Jill Purce on Overtone Chanting and Ancestral Healing". Medicine Path Podcast. Archived from the original on 23 September 2020 . Retrieved 31 August 2020. a b c Bone, Eugenia (22 May 2020). " 'Entangled Life' Review: Digging Into Enigmatic Organisms". The Wall Street Journal. Archived from the original on 17 July 2020 . Retrieved 31 August 2020.

Best Nature Book: Nature’s Treasures: Tales of More Than 100 Extraordinary Objects from Nature by Ben Hoare Books with amazing illustrations are always a great way for children to learn, and that’s why Humongous Fungus (Underground and All Around) by Lynne Boddy is the perfect choice.Solving mazes and complex routing problems are non-trivial exercises,’ Sheldrake writes. ‘This is why mazes have long been used to assess the problem-solving abilities of many organisms, from octopuses to bees to humans.’ Fungi ace these puzzles because ‘solving spatial and geometrical problems is what they have evolved to do.’ They are diffuse, plastic beings: they reform themselves around the problem at hand. ‘Mycelium’, says Sheldrake, is a body without limits: ‘a body without a plan’. Mr. Sheldrake discusses climate change as well as the effect intensive farming practices have on fungal species. "A combination of plowing and application of chemical fertilizers or fungicides—reduce the abundance of mycorrhizal fungi." This poses a worry to future food production because a plant seed that cannot find suitable fungi is unlikely to survive. Merlin is the author of Entangled Life: How Fungi Make Our Worlds, Change Our Minds, and Shape Our Futures. Merlin received a Ph.D. in tropical ecology from Cambridge University for his work on underground fungal networks in tropical forests in Panama, where he was a predoctoral research fellow of the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute. He is a research associate of the Vrije University, Amsterdam, and sits on the advisory board of the Fungi Foundation and the Society for the Protection of Underground Networks. While this book isn’t solely focused on fungi, it dedicates a great deal of attention to them. Not only that, but it also details every other walk of life on earth. I find this a horror, and want to assert our human need to do so, even if the ant experiences nothing that we should call suffering, and it is only as drama that the spectacle is appalling. The fact that Ophiocordyceps has evolved to do this and has no choice makes little difference. A creature’s perceptions and desires have turned into enemies steering it to its death. There is no symbiosis or negotiation. Even a farm animal, a free-range one anyway, has some agency while it lives, but this ant has none. It becomes purely a means to an end desired by another. Human beings sometimes do this, and other abominable things that they often succeed in regarding as right, or normal, or not worth noticing, yet humans alone, as far as we know, have a highly developed ability to see their own natural behaviour as wrong. Reading about the fate of these ants made me grab at the idea of a conscience, however imperfect, that makes us different from fungi, or from a male tiger killing a female’s cubs to bring her into season.

Some fungi can be taught to break down radioactive material, cigarette butts, and dirty diapers and use it for their energy.Identification: One of the most iconic toadstools depicted in fairy-tale illustrations. It has a shiny, scarlet red or orange cap with white wart-like spots dotted across. Cap is 8-20 cm across. The gills are white and free, and the stem is swollen with rings of scales. Geoffrey Kibby is one of Britain’s foremost experts on identifying mushrooms in the field and has published a range of excellent guides/handbooks to mushroom identification.