If thoughts about fungi ever flit through your mind, chances are it’s in reference to last night’s truffle risotto dinner, or perhaps, less fortunately, a bout of Athlete’s Foot or spreading spores on your bathroom ceiling. The splendid Entangled Life by Merlin Sheldrake is here to bedazzle your uninformed brain, as both a scientific exploration and all-round appreciation of fungi as ‘regenerators, recyclers, and networkers that stitch worlds together’. From medicinal aides to mind-controlling zombie types, there’s a fungus for every occasion; they are sophisticated, problem-solving survivors and our world would collapse without them.
Sheldrake is a mycologist, a dedicated student of the fungal world. Mycology, he tells us, is a ‘neglected megascience’, as we live in an animal-centric society, which tends to consider other forms of life as an ‘inert backdrop,’. As fungi are, quite literally, inside us and all around us, it’s time we were acquainted with such intimate companions, and Sheldrake begins by introducing us to the alluring world of the truffle and its life beyond the risotto pot.
The aromatic ‘sweet funk’ of truffles is their prize tool for survival, their scent having evolved to such a dizzying pungency that they are greedily sniffed, gobbled, and dispersed by both animals and humans. To such a degree, in fact, that their relative scarcity has led to skulduggery. In this opening chapter, Sheldrake takes us on a truffle hunt in Italy, a fascinating account that highlights the covert nature of hunting, dealing, and even poaching, in an industry often tainted by criminality. After all, it’s ‘like money lying on the ground’.
Truffles are certainly among the most high-profile inhabitants of the fungi family, along with their mushroom cousins (magic mushrooms, by the way, are the fungal celebrities of the past century, having seduced humans with their psychoactive ways into seeking and cultivating them in ever-increasing numbers), but in the eyebrow-raising stakes, there are a couple that really stand out: lichens and Ophiocordyceps Unilateralis (that’s zombie fungi to you and me).
Lichens cover as much as 8% of our planet’s surface, and in Sheldrake’s characteristically evocative prose are variously described as draping and tufting, creeping and seeping, and layering and flaking. They are made up of two separate organisms, whose symbiotic relationship ensures survival in the most extreme places. The realisation of this fact caused much consternation in the nineteenth-century scientific community, as it disrupted Charles Darwin’s theory that species evolve by diverging. The uniquely subversive lichens had decided on a cooperative, convergent way of being.
Continuing the subversive theme, the zombie fungus, Ophiocordyceps Unilateralis, terrorises ants by growing up through their bodies, sprouting out of their heads and showering spores down onto ant passers-by. This ingenious dispersal method is also achieved by controlling the mind of the host ants, a startling notion explained with welcome simplicity. Be prepared for accompanying unsettling photographs!
As if this wasn’t mind-blowing enough, Sheldrake also gives us fungi as eco-champions, amongst them a type that digests toxin-saturated used cigarette butts. Having survived Earth’s five major extinction events, it looks like they may have a thing or two to teach us about our shared planet.
A marvellous and unforgettable read.
If you like this, see also Gathering Moss by Robin Wall Kimmerer.
Entangled Life by Merlin Sheldrake is published by Vintage, 368 pages.
