Francis Gooding · From Its Myriad Tips: Mushroom Brain · LRB 20 May 2021

Take the proficiency of fungi at problem-solving. Fungi are used to searching out food by exploring complex three-dimensional environments such as soil, so maybe it’s no surprise that fungal mycelium solves maze puzzles so accurately. It is also very good at finding the most economical route between points of interest. The mycologist Lynne Boddy once made a scale model of Britain out of soil, placing blocks of fungus-colonised wood at the points of the major cities; the blocks were sized proportionately to the places they represented. Mycelial networks quickly grew between the blocks: the web they created reproduced the pattern of the UK’s motorways (‘You could see the M5, M4, M1, M6’). Other researchers have set slime mould loose on tiny scale-models of Tokyo with food placed at the major hubs (in a single day they reproduced the form of the subway system) and on maps of Ikea (they found the exit, more efficiently than the scientists who set the task). Slime moulds are so good at this kind of puzzle that researchers are now using them to plan urban transport networks and fire-escape routes for large buildings.

❤️

Massospora, a species completely unrelated to Ophiocordyceps, infects cicadas: it rots away the abdomen of an infected insect, leaving it tipped with a yellowish plug of spores that looks like a mass of pollen. Infected cicadas are not incapacitated or ill: in fact they become ‘hyperactive and hypersexual despite the fact that their genitals have long since crumbled away’. Rushing between mates, they become ‘flying salt-shakers of death’, dusting other cicadas with Massospora’s spores.

☠️

How rapidly, how finely must the network be communicating and acting to puppeteer the central nervous system of a living creature, to measure distance and conditions, to determine direction and time of day? The question of fungal sentience hovers in the background, like the ambiguous ghosts of spirit photography.

​

Posted on May 17, 2021