There are moments in moist love when heaven is jealous of what we on earth can do.
—HAFIZ
F#4643•
As you read these words, fungi are changing the way that life happens, as they have done for more than a billion years. They are eating rock, making soil, digesting pollutants, nourishing and killing plants, surviving in space, inducing visions, producing food, making medicines, manipulating animal behavior, and influencing the composition of the Earth's atmosphere.#4633•
The ability of fungi to prosper in such a variety of habitats depends on their diverse metabolic abilities. Metabolism is the art of chemical transformation. Fungi are metabolic wizards and can explore, scavenge, and salvage ingeniously, their abilities rivaled only by bacteria. Using cocktails of potent enzymes and acids, fungi can break down some of the most stubborn substances on the planet, from lignin, wood's toughest component, to rock; crude oil; polyurethane plastics; and the explosive TNT.
Few environments are too extreme.
A species isolated from mining waste is one of the most radiation-resistant organisms ever discovered and may help to clean up nuclear waste sites.
The blasted nuclear reactor at Chernobyl is home to a large population of such fungi.
A number of these radio-tolerant species even grow toward radioactive "hot" particles, and appear to be able to harness radiation as a source of energy, as plants use the energy in sunlight.#4642•
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. 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.#4635•
In 2017, researchers reconstructed the diets of Neanderthals, cousins of modern humans who went extinct approximately fifty thousand years ago. They found that an individual with a dental abscess had been eating a type of fungus—a penicillin-producing mold—implying knowledge of its antibiotic properties.
There are other less ancient examples, including the Iceman, an exquisitely well-preserved Neolithic corpse found in glacial ice, dating from around five thousand 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 mushroom (Fomitopsis betulina) most probably used as a medicine.#4628•