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...[mycelia] weave themselves through the gaps between plant cells in an intimate brocade and help to defend plants against disease .
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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.
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Mycelium describes the most common of fungal habits, better thought of not as a thing but as a process: an exploratory, irregular tendency.
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Unsustainable agricultural practices reduce the ability of plants to form relationships with the beneficial fungi on which they depend. The widespread use of antifungal chemicals has led to an unprecedented rise in new fungal superbugs that threaten both human and plant health. As humans disperse disease-causing fungi , we create new opportunities for their evolution.
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...many fungi can live within the roots of a single plant, and many plants can connect with a single fungal network. In this way a variety of substances , from nutrients to signaling compounds, can pass between plants via fungal connections.
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Tricked out of our expectations, we fall back on our senses. What's astonishing is the gulf between what we expect to find and what we find when we actually look.
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Many scientific concepts—from time to chemical bonds to genes to species—lack stable definitions but remain helpful categories to think with.
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There was something embarrassing about admitting that the tangle of our unfounded conjectures, fantasies, and metaphors might have helped shape our research . Regardless, imagination forms part of the everyday business of inquiring.
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...wondered what it was like to be a fungus. I found myself underground, surrounded by growing tips surging across one another. Schools of globular animals grazing—plant roots and their hustle—the Wild West of the soil—all those bandits, brigands, loners, crapshooters. The soil was a horizonless external gut—digestion and salvage everywhere—flocks of bacteria surfing on waves of electrical charge—chemical weather systems—subterranean highways—slimy infective embrace—seething intimate contact on all sides.