Squatting on Planet Mushroom (which is why we need more mycologists)

There is no place where fungi are absent and no way in which we can (or should) avoid them

I was in Leeds to play some D&D and, while waiting for the game to start I’m chatting to the girlfriend of one of the other players. This young woman was looking for jobs and, in one of those slightly off-the-wall remarks, mentioned she fancied working in mycology. As a mushroom enthusiast I obviously urged her on in this mission while observing that we have too few mycologists and too many sociologists. Despite the recent surge of interest in fungi, there are only a few specialist courses in mycology (primarily medical mycology) alongside resources from organisations like the British Mycological Association.

We are squatters on Planet Mushroom. There is no place where fungi are absent and no way in which we can (or should) avoid them. Without fungi we have no bread, no wine and less flavoursome cheese. Fungi help protect us from disease and cure us when we fall ill. Fungi break down even the most stubborn of materials - plastics, oil, hard woods and metals. And fungi also infect us, kill animals and destroy plants. That we know so little about these ubiquitous entities sharing our planet should represent one of the challenges for the future - if we’re going to continue living on Planet Mushroom, we ought to put some effort into learning about the most important organisms on the planet.

There are a lot of different fungi:

“In 1991, a landmark paper estimated that there are 1.5 million fungi on the Earth. Because only 70000 fungi had been described at that time, the estimate has been the impetus to search for previously unknown fungi. Fungal habitats include soil, water, and organisms that may harbor large numbers of understudied fungi, estimated to outnumber plants by at least 6 to 1. More recent estimates based on high-throughput sequencing methods suggest that as many as 5.1 million fungal species exist.”

We have a pretty negative relationship with our mushroom masters - they cause disease, they rot things, they poison us and are a symbol of dark, unpleasant places. If you set a google alert for fungi, you'll get a pile of stories about fungal infections complete with gory detail and hard-to-look-at pictures. Plus stories about how bats, frogs and bananas are heading for extinction - destroyed by fungi. These days that alert is filled with dire warnings about Candida auris: “...an emerging fungal pathogen that is associated with nosocomial infections and is considered a serious global health threat”.

But for every negative aspect of our relationship with fungi, there is a positive. We are rightly concerned about bacterial resistance to antibiotics but those antibiotics are one of the things our fungal friends have given us and the development of new drugs will, in part, come from helping those fungi develop in response to the microbes they destroy. Meanwhile we rely on yeasts and moulds to make our bread, beer, cheese and wine.

Yeasts are probably man’s oldest industrial microorganism predating the development of writing and they occur naturally. And this is a wonderful thing, so much so that it was once referred to as ‘god is good’:

“Bread and ale, both packed with calories and nutrients, lay at the heart of all diets, and ale barm was so vital that it was sometimes known as godisgoode 'bicause it cometh of the grete grace of God'.”

And, as wine and beer drinkers know, god is definitely good as Miquel Hudin (writing on Henry Jeffrey’s Drinking Culture substack) tells us:

“Once installed in that cellar (i.e., propped in a corner), everything else was smooth sailing. Saint Albert helped me locate some young garnatxa grapes from a friend of a friend in the neighboring village. They were destemmed and crushed with all 300kg tossed into the amphora for the "magic" to happen and by "magic" I mean spontaneous fermentation via the ambient yeasts.”

Your treasured sourdough starter or ginger beer plant represent more of this great goodness that comes from the fungal world. As well as, of course, the mushrooms themselves - Agaricus bisporus, Boletus edulis, Lentinula edodes, Pleurotus ostreatus - that add such flavour and interest to our cooking. It shouldn’t surprise us that much of what we eat and drink owes a lot to fungi, but it remains sadly true that too little is known about the world of mushrooms. Fungi might even help us regulate how much carbon dioxide there is in the atmosphere:

"Natural fluxes of carbon between the land and atmosphere are enormous and play a crucial role in regulating the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and, in turn, Earth's climate,"

We really do live on Planet Mushroom. We can use fungus to break down disposable nappies, clean up oil pollution, make building materials, produce car parts, decontaminate polluted water,  and make moon dust fertile. Wherever we go we take fungi with us - even to the space stations where the spores of fungi and lichen have adapted to live on the outside, yes the outside, of the orbiting tin cans:

“In one of the most intriguing phenomena observed in recent times, a lichen species has been discovered growing on the exterior of the International Space Station (ISS). This finding has sparked widespread interest and curiosity in the scientific community, raising several questions about the resilience and adaptability of life forms in the harsh conditions of outer space.”

If we are going to colonise near earth space (and we should) then fungi will be, just as they are on our planet, both friend and foe. Without fungi it is unlikely that we can terraform colonised places lacking in the things earth gives us for free but they also contaminate, cause illness and corrode. Understanding how to make the most of the positives and minimise the risks of using fungi is the reason why we need more mycologists and a better understanding of the fungal world we’re standing on.

Biologist Nicholas Money wrote this marvellous encapsulation of our relationship with Planet Mushroom:

“Mushrooms have been around for tens of millions of years and their activities are indispensable for the operation of the biosphere. Through their relationships with plants and animals, mushrooms are essential for forest and grassland ecology, climate control and atmospheric chemistry, water purification, and the maintenance of biodiversity. This first point, about the ecological significance of mushrooms, is obvious, yet the 16,000 described species of mushroom-forming fungi are members of the most poorly understood kingdom of life. The second point requires a dash of lateral thinking. Because humans evolved in ecosystems dependent upon mushrooms there would be no us without mushrooms. And no matter how superior we feel, humans remain dependent upon the continual activity of these fungi. The relationship isn’t reciprocal: without us there would definitely be mushrooms.”

I hope that young woman I met in Leeds does get to be a mycologist because we really need them. And I hope too that our relationship with the natural world doesn’t become a war on the muckiness of mushrooms, a sort of sterilisation process driven by those hard-to-look-at pictures of nail fungus and black mould. There are too few mycologists and, even with a renewed interest in fungi, their numbers are dwindling:

“There's a real shortage, caused by several problems. Firstly there are only a handful of taxonomists left in institutions, which, when you have 1.5 million species of fungi and only 100,000 have been described, is disastrous.

We have a couple of flourishing mycology research groups but the number elsewhere is dwindling. People retire and don't get replaced. There are more and more biology degrees where fungal biology is not compulsory and some where you don't get taught any at all, which is really worrying considering how important fungi are.”

That is Professor Lynne Boddy from Cardiff University, one of the very few professors of mycology in the UK. It should concern us that this essential area of knowledge is so disregarded especially given that, as I’ve repeatedly said, we are squatting on Planet Mushroom.