> [!cite] > Sheldrake, Martin. *Entangled Life: How Fungi Make Our Worlds, Change Our Minds, and Shape Our Futures*. Vintage, 2021. --- ‘The rootlets branched like a small tree and their surface was covered with a filmy layer which appeared fresh and sticky. It was these delicate structures I wanted to examine. From these roots, a fungal network laced out into the soil and around the roots of nearby trees. Without this fungal web my tree would not exist. Without similar fungal webs no plant would exist anywhere. All life on land, including my own, depended on these networks. I tugged lightly on my root and felt the ground move.’ [[Sheldrake, Entangled Life, 2021|(Sheldrake 2021, 2)]] ^057341 ‘Fungi provide a key to understanding the planet on which we live, and the ways we think, feel and behave. Yet they live their lives largely hidden from view, and more than 90 per cent of their species remain undocumented. The more we learn about fungi, the less makes sense without them.’ [[Sheldrake, Entangled Life, 2021|(Sheldrake 2021, 3)]] ^fd10db ‘From deep sediments on the sea floor, to the surface of deserts, to frozen valleys in Antarctica, to our guts and orifices, there are few pockets of the globe where fungi can’t be found.’ [[Sheldrake, Entangled Life, 2021|(Sheldrake 2021, 5)]] ^bf7535 ‘A species isolated from mining waste is one of the most radiant-resistant organisms ever discovered, and may help clean up nuclear waste sites.’ [[Sheldrake, Entangled Life, 2021|(Sheldrake 2021, 5)]] ^7a53f1 ‘Mushrooms dominate the popular fungal imagination, but just as the fruits of plants are one part of a much larger structure that includes branches and roots, so mushrooms are only the fruiting bodies of fungi, the place where spores are produced.’ [[Sheldrake, Entangled Life, 2021|(Sheldrake 2021, 5)]] ^04915d ‘Mushrooms are a fungus’s way to entreat the more-than-fungal world, from wind to squirrel, to assist with the dispersal of spores, or to prevent it from interfering with this process.’ [[Sheldrake, Entangled Life, 2021|(Sheldrake 2021, 5–6)]] ^523d0d ‘\[Mushrooms] are the parts of fungi made visible, pungent, covetable, delicious, poisonous.’ [[Sheldrake, Entangled Life, 2021|(Sheldrake 2021, 6)]] ^f202ea Not all fungal species use the mushroom method to disperse their spores. In fact, ‘the overwhelming majority of fungal species release spores without producing mushrooms at all.’ [[Sheldrake, Entangled Life, 2021|(Sheldrake 2021, 6)]] ^933138 ‘Fruiting bodies, such as mushrooms, arise from the felting together of hyphal strands.’ [[Sheldrake, Entangled Life, 2021|(Sheldrake 2021, 7)]] ^75cc47 ‘Some, like truffles, produce aromas that have made them among the most expensive foods in the world.’ [[Sheldrake, Entangled Life, 2021|(Sheldrake 2021, 7)]] ^592b3c ‘Others, like shaggy ink cap mushrooms (*Coprinus comatus)* can push their way through asphalt and lift heavy paving stones, although they are not themselves a rough material.’ [[Sheldrake, Entangled Life, 2021|(Sheldrake 2021, 7)]] ^58fd96 ‘Pick an ink cap and you can fry it up and eat it. Leave it in a jar, and its bright white flesh will deliquesce into a pitch-black ink over the course of a few days (the illustrations in this book were drawn with *Coprinus* ink).’ [[Sheldrake, Entangled Life, 2021|(Sheldrake 2021, 7)]] ^faae53 ‘Fleming’s discovery is widely credited as one of the defining moments of modern medicine, and arguably helped to shift the balance of power in the Second World War.’ [[Sheldrake, Entangled Life, 2021|(Sheldrake 2021, 7)]] ^4d556a ‘Romans prayed to the god of mildew, Robigus, to avert fungal diseases but weren’t able to stop the famines that contributed to the decline of the Roman Empire.’ [[Sheldrake, Entangled Life, 2021|(Sheldrake 2021, 8)]] ^2a5830 ‘Over the last fifty years, the most deadly disease ever recorded — a fungus that infects amphibians — has been spread around the world by human trade. It has driven ninety species of amphibian to extinction and threatens to wipe out over a hundred more.’ [[Sheldrake, Entangled Life, 2021|(Sheldrake 2021, 9)]] ^132b40 ‘The variety of banana that accounts for 99 per cent of global banana shipments, the Cavendish, is being decimated by a fungal disease and faces extinction in the coming decades.’ [[Sheldrake, Entangled Life, 2021|(Sheldrake 2021, 9)]] ^1bbffa ‘The Jewish Talmud features a mould cure known as “chamka”, consisting of mouldy corn soaked in date wine.’ [[Sheldrake, Entangled Life, 2021|(Sheldrake 2021, 9)]] ^4e72fa ‘In 2017, researchers reconstructed the diets of Neanderthals … They found that an individual with a dental abscess had been eating a type of fungus, a penicillin-producing mould, imply knowledge of its antibiotic properties.’ [[Sheldrake, Entangled Life, 2021|(Sheldrake 2021, 9)]] ^4b1a95 ‘There are other less ancient examples, including ‘the Iceman’, an exquisitely well-preserved Neolithic corpse found in glacial ice, dating from around 5,000 years ago. On the day he died, the Iceman was carrying a pouch stuffed with wads of the tinder fungus (*Fomes fomentarius*) that he almost certainly used to make fire, and carefully prepared fragments of the birch polypore mushrooms (*Fomitopisis beulina*) most probably used as a medicine.’ [[Sheldrake, Entangled Life, 2021|(Sheldrake 2021, 9)]] ^279048 ‘… in 1640 the King’s herbalist in London, John Parkinson, described the use of moulds to treat wounds.’ [[Sheldrake, Entangled Life, 2021|(Sheldrake 2021, 9)]] ^330763 ‘Sixty per cent of the enzymes used in industry are generated by fungi …’ [[Sheldrake, Entangled Life, 2021|(Sheldrake 2021, 10)]] ^b653ca ‘Citric acid, produced by fungi, is used in all fizzy drinks.’ [[Sheldrake, Entangled Life, 2021|(Sheldrake 2021, 10)]] ^4dcc05 … a field station on an island run by the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute. The island and surrounding peninsulas were part of a nature reserve entirely covered by forest, apart from a clearing for dormitories, a canteen and lab buildings. There were greenhouses for growing plants, drying cupboards filled with bags of leaf litter, a room lined with microscopes, and a walk-in freezer packed with samples: bottles of tree sap, dead bats, tubes containing ticks pulled from the backs of spiny rats and boa constrictors. posters on the noticeboard offered cash rewards to anyone who could source fresh ocelot droppings from the forest. [[Sheldrake, Entangled Life, 2021|(Sheldrake 2021, 12)]] ‘The forest and its inhabitants dispel any illusions that scientists are in charge. Humility quickly sets in.’ [[Sheldrake, Entangled Life, 2021|(Sheldrake 2021, 13)]] ^b6348f ‘… it’s not always easy to be comfortable in the space created by open questions. Agoraphobia can set in. It’s tempting to hide in small rooms built from quick answers.’ [[Sheldrake, Entangled Life, 2021|(Sheldrake 2021, 15)]] ^bbdcc1 ‘Our perceptions work in large part by expectation. It takes less cogitative effort to make sense of the world using preconceived images updated with a small amount of new sensory information than to constantly form entirely new perceptions from scratch.’ [[Sheldrake, Entangled Life, 2021|(Sheldrake 2021, 16)]] ^e34a92 ‘The first is a growing awareness of the many sophisticated, problem-solving behaviours that have evolved in brainless organisms outside the animal kingdom.’ [[Sheldrake, Entangled Life, 2021|(Sheldrake 2021, 16)]] ^c5e801 ‘Because these organisms don’t look like us or outwardly behave like us — or have brains — they have traditionally been allocated a position somewhere at the bottom of the scale. Too often they are thought of as the inert backdrop to animal life. Yet many are capable of sophisticated behaviours that prompt us to think in new ways about what it means for organisms to ‘solve problems’, ‘communicate’, ‘make decisions’, ‘learn’ and ‘remember’. As we do so, some of the vexed hierarchies that underpin modern thought start to soften. As they soften, our ruinous attitudes towards the more-than-human world may start to change.’ [[Sheldrake, Entangled Life, 2021|(Sheldrake 2021, 17)]] ^46fc4c ‘Your gut (which if unfolded would occupy an area of 32 square metres), ears, toes, mouth, eyes, skin and every surface, passage and cavity you possess teem with bacteria and fungi.’ [[Sheldrake, Entangled Life, 2021|(Sheldrake 2021, 18)]] ^ec6613 ‘… the way that modern physicists portray the universe, more than ninety-five percent of which is described as “dark matter” and “dark energy”. Dark matter and energy are dark because we don’t know anything about them.’ [[Sheldrake, Entangled Life, 2021|(Sheldrake 2021, 19)]] ^f518d5 ‘… Oliver Rackham, an ecology and historian, who studied the ways in which ecosystems have shaped — and been shaped by — human cultures for thousands of years. He took us to nearby forests, and told us about the history of these places and their human inhabitants by reading the twists and splits in the branches of old oak trees, by observing where nettles thrived, by noting which plants did or didn’t grow in a hedgerow. Under Rackham’s influence, the clean line I had imagined dividing “nature” and “culture” started to blur.’ [[Sheldrake, Entangled Life, 2021|(Sheldrake 2021, 20)]] ^3cb3ec ‘Truffles with better “chemistry” will attract animals more successfully than those with worse. Like the orchids that mimic the appearance of sexually receptive female bees, truffles provide a depiction of animal tastes — an evolutionary portrait-in-scent of animal fascination.’ [[Sheldrake, Entangled Life, 2021|(Sheldrake 2021, 28)]] ^65a17a ‘In France, Saint Anthony — the patron saint of lost objects — is regarded as the patron saint of truffles, and truffle masses are celebrated in his honour.’ [[Sheldrake, Entangled Life, 2021|(Sheldrake 2021, 31)]] ^a9c45e ‘In human history, truffles have long been associated with sex. The word for truffle in many languages translates to ‘testicle’, as in the old Castilian *turmas de tierra*, or Earth’s testicles.’ [[Sheldrake, Entangled Life, 2021|(Sheldrake 2021, 31)]] ^0cd5ec ‘Agarwood, or *oudh*, is a fungal infection of *Aquilaria* trees found in India and south-east Asia and one of the most valuable raw materials in the world. It is used to make a scent — dank nuts, dark honey, rich wood — and has been coveted at least since the tie of the ancient Greek physician Dioscorides.’ [[Sheldrake, Entangled Life, 2021|(Sheldrake 2021, 32)]] ^2a7f23 ‘Polyphony is singing more than one part, or telling more than one story, at the same time. … No voice surrenders its individual identity. Nor does any one voice steal the show. There is no front woman, no soloist, no leader. If the recording was played to ten people and they were asked to sing the tune back, each would sing something different.’ [[Sheldrake, Entangled Life, 2021|(Sheldrake 2021, 61)]] ^01e9c3 ‘Mycelium is polyphony in bodily form.’ [[Sheldrake, Entangled Life, 2021|(Sheldrake 2021, 61)]] ‘“What shall I do with the night and the day, with this life and death?” writes the poet Robert Bringhurst. “Every step, every breath rolls like an egg towards the edge of this question.”’ [[Sheldrake, Entangled Life, 2021|(Robert Bringhurst, in Sheldrake 2021, 24)]] ^d03d2a ‘These living spires \[the prototaxites,] were scattered across the landscape \[400 million years ago, in the Devonian period]. Many were taller than a two-storey building. Nothing else got anywhere close to this size: plants existed but where no more than a metre tall, and no animal with a backbone had yet moved out of the water. small insects made their homes in the giant trunks, chewing out rooms and corridors. This enigmatic group of organisms — thought to have been enormous fungi — were the largest living structures on dry land for at least 40 million years, twenty times longer than the genus *Homo* has existed.’ [[Sheldrake, Entangled Life, 2021|(Sheldrake 2021, 4)]] ^4889c7 ‘A truffle’s odour increases as its spores develop, and its aroma ceases when its cells die. You can’t dry a truffle and expect to taste it later, as you can with some types of mushroom. They are chemically loquacious, vociferous even. Stop the metabolism, and you stop the smell.’ [[Sheldrake, Entangled Life, 2021|(Sheldrake 2021, 36)]] ^71f863 ‘Ancient Egyptian papyruses from 1500 BCE refer to the curative properties of mould …’ [[Sheldrake, Entangled Life, 2021|(Sheldrake 2021, 9)]] ^55424d ‘White-truffle hunters are famously secretive. These fungi have never been domesticated and can only be found in the wild.’ [[Sheldrake, Entangled Life, 2021|(Sheldrake 2021, 27)]] ^5eca16 ‘Truffle fungi have evolved to make animals giddy because their lives depend on it.’ [[Sheldrake, Entangled Life, 2021|(Sheldrake 2021, 31)]] ^484b14 ‘When we smell a truffle’s aroma, we receive a one-way transmission from truffle to world. The process is comparatively nuance-free. To attract an animal the aroma has to be curious and delicious — yes. But most of all it has to penetrating and strong.’ [[Sheldrake, Entangled Life, 2021|(Sheldrake 2021, 38)]] ^947121 ‘I imagined being sensitive enough to notice the truffle’s aroma at a distance, and compelled enough to drop everything to pursue it.’ [[Sheldrake, Entangled Life, 2021|(Sheldrake 2021, 38)]] ^8581df ‘However, their subterranean habitat confronts them with a basic problem. Truffles are spore-producing organs \[…] but underground their spores can’t be caught by air currents, and are invisible to the eyes of animals. Their solution is to smell.’ [[Sheldrake, Entangled Life, 2021|(Sheldrake 2021, 27–28)]] ^3debe9 ‘Truffles are the underground fruiting bodies of several types of mycorrhizal fungi. For most of the year, truffle fungi exist as mycelial networks, sustained in part by the nutrients they obtain from the soil and also by the sugars they draw from plant roots.’ [[Sheldrake, Entangled Life, 2021|(Sheldrake 2021, 27)]] ^d22500 ‘For your community of microbes — your “microbiome” — your body is a planet. Some prefer the temperate forest of your scalp, some the arid planes of your forearm, some the tropical forest of your crotch or armpit.’ [[Sheldrake, Entangled Life, 2021|(Sheldrake 2021, 18)]] ^6deee4 ‘We are ecosystems, composed of — and decomposed by — an ecology of microbes, the significance of which is only now coming to light. The 40 trillion-odd microbes that live in and on our bodies allow us to digest food and produce key minerals that nourish us. Like the fungi that live within plants, they protect us from disease. They guide the development of our bodies and immune systems and influence our behaviour. If not kept in check, they can cause illnesses, and even kill us. We are not a special case. Even bacteria have viruses with them (a nanobiome?). Even viruses can contain smaller viruses (a picobiome?). Symbiosis is a ubiquitous feature of life.’ [[Sheldrake, Entangled Life, 2021|(Sheldrake 2021, 18)]] ^53374d ‘For humans, identifying where one individual stops and another starts is not generally something we think about. It is usually taken for granted — within modern industrial societies, at least — that we start where our bodies begin and stop where our bodies end. Developments in modern medicine, such as organ transplants, worry these distinctions; developments in the microbial sciences shake them at their foundations.’ [[Sheldrake, Entangled Life, 2021|(Sheldrake 2021, 18)]] ^072e2e ‘The eighteenth-century French physician Théophile de Bordeu asserted that each organism “does not fail to spread exhalations, an odour, emanations around itself … These emanations have taken on its style and demeanour; they are, in fact, genuine parts of itself.”’ [[Sheldrake, Entangled Life, 2021|(Sheldrake 2021, 33)]] ^c373da ‘The human sense of smell is extraordinary. Our eyes can distinguish several million colours, our ears can distinguish half a million tones, but our noses can distinguish well over a trillion different odours. Humans can detect virtually all volatile chemicals ever tested. We outperform rodents and dogs in detecting certain odours, and we can follow scent trails. Smells feature in our choice of sexual partners and our ability to detect fear, anxiety or aggression in others. And smell is woven into the fabric of our memories; it is common for people suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder to have olfactory flashbacks.’ [[Sheldrake, Entangled Life, 2021|(Sheldrake 2021, 29)]] ^7d1773 ‘Noses are finely tuned instruments. Your olfactory sense can split complex mixtures into their constituent chemicals, just as a prism can split white light into its constituent colours. To do this, it must detect the precise arrangement of atoms within a molecule.’ [[Sheldrake, Entangled Life, 2021|(Sheldrake 2021, 29)]] ^d120d1 ‘Mustard smells mustardy because of bonds between nitrogen, carbon and sulphur. Fish smell fishy because of bonds between nitrogen and hydrogen. Bonds between carbon and nitrogen smell metallic and oily.’ [[Sheldrake, Entangled Life, 2021|(Sheldrake 2021, 29–30)]] ^2268ff ‘For an animal to experience a smell, a molecule must land on their olfactory epithelium. In humans, this is a membrane up and behind the nose. The molecule binds to a receptor, and nerves fire. The brain gets involved as chemicals are identified, and trigger thoughts or emotional responses.’ [[Sheldrake, Entangled Life, 2021|(Sheldrake 2021, 30)]] ^a6e49f ‘… it was only in 1928 that Alexander Fleming discovered that a mould produced a bacteria-killing chemical called penicillin. Penicillin became the first modern antibiotic and has since saved countless lives.’ [[Sheldrake, Entangled Life, 2021|(Sheldrake 2021, 10)]] ^6c47f6 ‘The indigenous peoples of Australia treated wounds with moulds harvested from the shaded side of eucalyptus trees.’ [[Sheldrake, Entangled Life, 2021|(Sheldrake 2021. 9)]] ^a39ce8 ‘In scientific circles imagination usually goes by the name of speculation and is treated with some suspicion — in publications it is usually served up with a mandatory health warning.’ [[Sheldrake, Entangled Life, 2021|(Sheldrake 2021, 21)]] ^93a7b7 ‘Even backstage, in the most nocturnal musings I shared with colleagues, it was unusual to get into the details of how we had imagined — accidentally or deliberately — the organisms we studied, whether fish, bromeliad, liana, fungus or bacterium. There was something embarrassing about admitting that the tangle of our unfounded conjectures, fantasies and metaphors might have helped shape our research.’ [[Sheldrake, Entangled Life, 2021|(Sheldrake 2021, 21)]] ^dc2b9d