The Frog Pond #7: I was not prepared for how cool fungi are
Or, the fungus amongus is humongous.
You find The Frog Pond blossoming with toads and toadstools. You’ve brought a magnifying glass and notebook with you this time—not just to experience, but to learn.
This month’s frog pond is finding new joys, even in the smallest of spores.
Mist-erious knowledge
A cloud of spores bursts from a nearby puffball mushroom. The cloud grows thicker, larger, and closer, until the familiar mist surrounds you once again.
I am late to the mushroom game but boy has it grown on me
This one’s a collection of a variety of facts on fungi I’ve been collecting while researching for my eco-horror book. And I have to say: I have been so! excited! to talk! about! fungi!!!
Not plants, not animals, but a secret third thing
Fungi belong to the kingdom, fittingly, fungi, along with yeasts, mildews, molds, rusts, and smuts1. The cell walls of fungi have “chitin”, a fibrous substance that appears in the cell walls of animals, not plants2. In fact, fungi have a lot more in common with animals than plants. Fungi need food, water, and oxygen to survive, they expel waste products and CO2, and they can communicate with both plants and animals3.
Fungi also account for about 25% of the total biomass. Of the world4. Huh??? The largest current living organism in the world is an at least 2,400-year-old fungus in Oregon that’s over 5 miles wide, occupies 965 hectares, and is called the honey mushroom (armillaria ostoyae)5. Huh???
Much ado about mushrooms
What is a fungi, and what is a mushroom? The mushroom is one stage of development of the fungi. So when you’re talking about the organism itself, it’s a fungi from the bottom of its mycelium root network to the top of its spore-producing “fruiting body” mushroom top. Mushrooms account for about 5% of the total lifecycle of a fungus6, occuring at the end of its maturation cycle. While fungi can live for thousands of years, the mushrooms their produce can last anywhere from a matter of days to years.
Fungi have evolved an amazing variety of ways to spread spores, the purpose of mushrooms. The puffball (basidiomycota) grows spores internally and splits open to release them in a burst when broken7. The veiled lady mushroom (phallus indusiatus) creates a complicated lace-like web from the head of its cap to the ground, where it lures insects to the sticky spores up top, which is then spread by the bugs across the forest floor8. The shaggy ink cap (coprinus comatus) turns from white to pink when mature, then fills with black liquid spores. Once they’re dispersed, it uses a process of auto-digestion to devour itself9. Other mushrooms spread through their gill systems (think of the underside of a portobello mushroom), and still others have a parasitic quality to infect plants, insects, and other fungi with their spores.
Fungi can be your sweet dream or your beautiful nightmare
There are three broad categories for fungi related to how they interact with other organisms:
Saprophytes digest nutrients from dead material—think rotten logs or plant debris. These fungi help keep leaf litter, sticks, and branches in check so that the forest floor doesn’t become a forest mountain10. They also help complete the critical process of dead material becoming compost for the next living organisms to prosper.
Parasites digest material from living tissue, such as living trees or insects11. This group’s most famous sub-group is cordyceps (especially popularized as a brain-controlling malevolent force recently by The Last of Us) which mainly use insects as hosts12, but parasitic only means that a fungus takes more from its host than it gives. There are many forms of parasitic fungi and they mainly parasitizes trees or other fungi. The lobster mushroom, for instance, is a parasitic mold that engulfs other mushrooms such as the stubby bittergill or milk-cap and turns them bright red—and it’s also a culinary delicacy13.
Mycorrhizal fungi have a mutually beneficial relationship with the roots of plants. They assist plants to better absorb water and minerals, while the plants share those nutrients with the fungi. Some horticulturalists use Mycorrhizal fungi to promote plants to grow14!
The “Wood Wide Web”
Mycorrhizal fungi are specifically interesting for their communicative role in the forest ecosystem. The mycelial network spans between fungi and trees, and functions to communicate between trees. This allows trees to share nutrients as well as information—warning each other about droughts, pests, and diseases15.
This breaks down a fundamental issue in pop culture evolutionary biology—the idea that everything is in mortal competition with each other. These networks of fungi are cooperating, not competing, with the plant life around them for mutual benefit. Sometimes a tree will deplete some of its own resources, against its self-interest, to aid other trees16. We don’t think about plants and fungi as intelligent, or in their own way compassionate, but these relationships are complex. Their communication began long before any humans started chatting.
(I highly recommend the book Underland: A Deep Time Journey if you find this section interesting!)
Mushrooms can air bend
Thousands of fungi species don’t just rely on chance wind to disperse their spores. In fact, studies have found that some mushrooms can use evaporative cooling in the air to create convective airflow17. This mush-wind can carry spores across 1 cm-wide gaps and lift them 10 cm in the air. This aspect of mushrooms could explain why they have high water needs, and benefit from crowding18—a spore can travel much farther on a whole blanket of mushroom caps than one alone!
Mushrooms make rain and love lightning
What makes the rain fall in rainforests? Spoiler: it’s mushrooms.
When fungi release their spores into the wet air of rainforests, they float across the forest and attract moisture. When these spores have collected enough water from the low-lying tropical clouds, they fall as rain19. A whopping 90% of tropical raindrops have fungal spores in their centre20.
That’s not the only mushroom-related meteorological event. Lightning strikes has been shown to more than double some mushroom crops21! Japanese studies have found that mushrooms, such as shiitake, can be coaxed to grow faster with artificial lightning strikes22.
Your friendly forest leaf disposal and carbon reservoir
While the pop culture view on fungi relations with insects is a malevolent force that tortures insects, there’s much more to the relationships between these two.
Take Leucoagaricus gongylophorus for instance, which is cultivated and farmed by leafcutter ants23. The ants feed from the gongylidia, the fungi’s nutrient-rich hyphal swellings24, cultivating the fungus like a farm. L. gongylophorus produces mushrooms (often eaten by the ants), but these structures are no longer equipped with sexual spores and cannot emit them effectively to spread on their own25. This fungus is entirely dependent on ants for survival after 20-25 million years of specialization, and relies on new queens of the colony to carry a piece of their mycelium in their mandibles to found new colonies26. This symbiotic relationship means that ant colonies are the only place where this fungus can naturally grow27.
This fungi and ant partnership plays an important role in forest ecosystems. Leafcutter ants account for 25% of plant consumption in forest ecosystems28. This process of breaking down plant life creates high concentrations of carbon dioxide. Ant nest openings can have 100,000 times more carbon dioxide than soil without nests29. These carbon sinks act as storage of carbon dioxide in the forest floor, which is then released in a cycle30.
What’s in a name?
Fungi twitter is super nice!! I had some lovely interactions about fungal naming conventions, and they seem like such a friendly community!
If you’re looking for a place to start with learning about mushrooms from passionate fungi fans, I highly recommend my friend Hannah! She takes fantastic photos of local mushrooms and always has interesting facts to share on the subject!
A word from a passing frog
June!! My favourite month!! My birthday month31!!
Querying
I’m making a soft-goal of sending 150 queries now that I’ve met my 100 target. I’m not sure when I’ll close this first querying experience out, but while I still have agents to send to and wait for, I’m still keepin’ on32.
Submitted: 113
Rejections: 80 (including Closed No Responses and Withdrawals)
Active Full Requests: 3 (1 new one this month!!)
Waiting on: 34
I should do something fun for the 100th rejection, right? Suggestions welcome! I’m great at setting up reward systems, but not at executing on them.
Drafting
Last month I committed to taking a break. And I did! For two and a half weeks, I did NO writing. Instead I played a lot of CIV and Sims 4, took up watercolour for the first time in a few years, and swam. It was unbelievably necessary to reset, and re-evaluate.
The TL;DR : I need space from my historical gothic horror novel. I made some big changes to it in April, and it will benefit from even more substantial space away to regroup.
Instead, I’m re-visited an older project that I’ve had on the backburner, waiting for rewrites. This project is nicknamed TIE, and it’s a sci-fi eco-horror novel I originally drafted in 2020/2021. My break inspired me to plot its new course. It’s now 1 POV instead of 3 (!!), the ending is completely different, and I’m so excited to hone its voice and plot into something really special. Currently at 4k first-rewrite-draft written!
Reading
This month I read most of THE POPPY WAR by R.F. Kuang and OUR WIVES UNDER THE SEA by Julia Armfield.
I got 78% through THE POPPY WAR before the audiobook was returned to the library and I’m waiting on my next hold. I’ve thoroughly enjoyed this historical military fantasy about a smart young girl’s rise from escaping an arranged marriage at 14, to training at an elite military academy, to harnessing a God’s magic to fight in a horrible war. I was already a fan of Kuang’s work thanks to BABEL, so this was a treat. It’s not for the faint of heart—there’s some pretty gnarly stuff in the second half, but that’s not surprising for a book unflinchingly centred on class, race, gender, poverty, drug trade, nationalism, and imperialism in the context of war.
OUR WIVES UNDER THE SEA was a fantastic short novel. It’s literary, sci-fi, eco-horror, and something else I can’t quite place. It’s got the short story energy of something twisting and gutting, featuring two timelines of a woman in a submarine on a mission that goes awry, and her wife when she finally returns, changed. If you’re a fan of ANNIHILATION (book or movie), this one scratches that same itch!
I’ve also just started LITTLE THIEVES by Margaret Owen as a buddy read with some friends!
Not quite reading, but learning: I attended a few talks from Romancing the Gothic, a fantastic volunteer literary group who coordinate talks with experts on all kinds of aspects of gothic literature. The most recent theme was (conveniently!) eco-horror! Check out their YouTube channel for all sorts of fascinating topics.
Back to the pond
You breathe out, watching spores dance in the sunbeams to their new homes within the soil. Your notebook is full of scribbled notes, but you don’t remember having written them.
The spring peepers call out a promise of night. There are responsibilities and joys to get on with. Friends to see, s’mores to eat, and words to write. The world keeps moving, even if the frog pond stays quiet, strange, and weirdly wonderful.
But maybe you’ll turn left again, the next time you go walking.
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Footnotes
1
https://www.britannica.com/science/fungus
2
https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/agricultural-and-biological-sciences/chitin
3
https://www.sciencelearn.org.nz/resources/590-all-about-fungi
4
5
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/strange-but-true-largest-organism-is-fungus/
6
https://hostdefense.com/blogs/host-defense-blog/mycelium-explained
7
http://www.mssf.org/cookbook/puffballs.html
8
https://esj-journals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1046/j.1440-1703.1998.00241.x
9
https://www.worldcat.org/title/1127137515
10
11
12
https://academic.oup.com/mbe/article/17/4/629/1127835
13
Meuninck, Jim (2017). Foraging Mushrooms Oregon: Finding, Identifying, and Preparing Edible Wild Mushrooms. Falcon Guides. p. 16. ISBN 978-1-4930-2669-2.
14
15
https://www.newyorker.com/tech/annals-of-technology/the-secrets-of-the-wood-wide-web
16
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/the-whispering-trees-180968084/
17
18
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/26929324/
19
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0140407
20
https://www.bbcearth.com/news/8-fantastic-facts-about-fungi
21
https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/article/100409-lightning-mushrooms-japan-harvest
22
https://physicsworld.com/a/artificial-lightning-strikes-encourage-growth-of-shiitake-mushrooms/
23
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3675943/
24
https://doi.org/10.1038%2Fncomms6675
25
26
https://www.nature.com/articles/ncomms6675
27
https://www.nature.com/articles/ncomms6675
28
https://besjournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/1365-2435.13319
29
https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1029/2018JG004723
30
https://extension.psu.edu/how-forests-store-carbon
31
It’s the 8th for those curious!
32
Querying can feel like you’re vying for a lottery ticket to break your own heart, over and over. I remember reading a few years ago the advice of an agent I respect (paraphrasing): “If you can do anything else but writing, do that instead”. That advice has sat with me for a long time and helped me solidify my conviction. I’m a fool who can’t stop herself from telling stories, even if it means working hundreds (thousands) of hours of unpaid (loving!) labour that may result in nothing but a bunch of kilobytes of data on my computer.
Honestly, despite the fears, there is an odd freedom and courage in just doing this damn thing anyway. There’s no shame in chasing your dreams, even if what was once a sprint starts feeling like a marathon.
