Fast forward several billions of years, and we come to fungi, wonderful, clever, sometimes evil, fungi. They can cause disease in the urinary tract, the mouth and the lungs.  So they are not an unmixed blessing.  But as we shall see, their amazing qualities will easily earn them plus points in our calculus.

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Firstly, what are fungi?  Are they plants or animals?  The short answer is neither.  They have their own kingdom, simply known as Fungi.  For years it was thought they were a kind of plant, but this is incorrect.  They have a completely different way of life, and perform different functions.

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Plants and fungi differ in many ways, including: .

Fungi have been around on the earth a long time – the best estimates, including those of Blair Hodges of Penn State University (2021) show that they had evolved on the land by 1300 million years ago.  Plant life is relatively recent, about 500 million years ago.  Plants only made it out of the water around 500m years ago because of their collaboration with fungi, which served as their root systems for tens of million years until they could evolve their own.

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Fungi can also cause disease in humans, animals, and plants. Fungal infections, or mycosis, can affect the skin, nails, mouth, throat, lungs.  Bacteria too can cause serious infections.  In 1928, Alexander Fleming was sorting through his petri dishes of Staphylococcus, a bacterium that causes boils, and noticed that in one area there was no Staphylococcus, only what he described as mould juice, which appeared to have inhibited the growth of the deadly bacterium.   He called it the fungus Penicillin.     By the 1940s production methods had improved so much that eventually millions of lives could be saved. The era of antibiotics had begun.  It was as if fungi had produced their solution to the harm that they and bacteria were doing.

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Fungi are amazing, as Merlin Sheldrake points out in his book, Entangled Life. (2020).  He recounts the experiment carried out by Lynn Boddy, on wood fungi.  She placed a culture of wood eating fungi on her desk, with a tempting block of wood at some distance on the same desk. The fungi put out mycelia in all directions.  Some eventually found the block of wood.  Amazingly, the mycelia travelling in the ‘wrong’ directions turned around until they too found the wood.  They clearly could communicate with each other.  Then Ms Boddy cut off all the mycelia.   An extraordinary thing happened.  They began to grow again, but only in the direction of the wood.  These organisms, having no brain, could not only communicate with each other, but had a memory as well.

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But the most important function that fungi perform is a symbiotic one with plant life.  Mycorrhizal fungi use their filamentous construction to pass on nutrients to plants, and in return receive sugars necessary for growth and reproduction.  It is estimated that 90% of plants from crops to forest trees are dependent on fungi for their existence.  The fungal network can cover up to 700 times more soil than the plant roots alone. Fungal networks also connect individual plants together to share resources in a natural ecosystem.  How amazing is that!  Since ultimately nearly all life on our planet depends on vegetation, it is obvious that fungi play a vital role.

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Their role as decomposers is important.  Saprobes (an organism that feeds on dead organisms and decomposes them.)  thrive in soil, water and on decaying animal and plant tissues. It would be difficult to imagine a world where decaying animals and plants were not decomposed.

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Perhaps one of the most surprising things about fungi is that ants find them so nutritious that they actually farm them and have been doing so for 60 million years.  According to Ted Schultz, in a study published in The Smithsonian Magazine in 2017, about 240 species of attine ants—the leafcutters among them—are known to farm fungus in the Americas and the Caribbean.   These underground crops are apparently sustainable, and amazingly, resistant to pests and diseases.  Perhaps we humans have something to learn from ants and fabulous fungi.

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The Planet's Point of View - click here

The Beginnings of Life on Earth - click here

The First Big Advance - Cyanobacteria - click here

Vegetation - click here

Insects - click here

Earthworms - click here

Birds - click here

Mammals - including humans, click here

Water based life - click here

The Calculus - click here