The Mycelium Network

Amanita Muscaria aka Fly agaric has been the most glamorized, romanticized mushroom, with its bright red cap embellished with white spots standing on an elegant white stem, featured in fairy tales that mesmerize young minds clueless of its psychedelic properties. So it was no surprise that while still in single digits, one of my dreams was to walk the woods looking for this enchanting organism which was responsible for Alice (in Wonderland) being able to alter her size with just a bite. These fantastical mushrooms, sprawled in a bright red, eye-catching colony while the formidable, powerful Baba Yaga in Russian folklore flies over! As a child my imagination and curiosity saw no bounds, wanting to enter that ecosystem, to emerge in that dream world.  

Even though I had a distant dream and fascination, I can’t exactly call myself a mycophile. My connection to wild mushrooms resurfaced due to a quirky tradition that evolved organically within a hiking group that I am a part of. This is a group of hikers from our community. Among the hiking pictures that we share in the group, a tradition has evolved to post a picture of “the obligatory mushroom” found during a hike. The hunt for unique mushrooms for the picture rekindled my curiosity and interest, which ended up with an album full of dozens of intriguing varieties found during our distant hikes as well as the local ones in the woods close to our home which I frequent. I use an app Shroomify to help identify the varieties of mushroom, and to find out whether they are edible, poisonous, or psychedelic. I was able to find the elusive, mysteriously fascinating fly agaric - albeit only the yellow and orange-yellow kinds. That’s the best I could find in our area. I would have to travel westwards towards the Rockies, Andes or Alaska to find the red ones.

During covid, hiking was one activity we could indulge in with minimum risk and restrictions. The hiking group was the perfect forum where we shared about interesting hikes that encouraged members to take on new challenges. We have people from age 5 to 55 in the group. Some people went in small groups, sometimes taking along pets. Some hikes were meant to introduce young hikers to the joy of outdoor adventure and exploration. Some took up challenges like climbing major 4000 footer mountains in New England. One especially motivated group scaled Mt Washington (tallest in New England) - climbing up and down on the same day. In times that many folks were stuck with mostly virtual social media, we were fortunate to have a group of real people we could hike with. While the hikes were exhilarating, the hunt for the obligatory mushroom was becoming my favorite diversion.

On one local hike I pointed an interesting looking formation to a botanist friend, asking whether that was a mushroom, to which she responded matter of factly, “Yes that’s fungus”. To my non-biologist brain, fungus was the icky mold that forms on rotten food. I had never thought of these beautiful creations of nature as “fungus”. I was starting to learn there was so much more to fungus than mold. The mushroom visible to us on the surface is just the tip of the iceberg. Below the surface, the mushroom is connected by this gigantic Wood-Wide Web of a mycelium network of fungi, to almost every tree in the forest, which makes the forest a social, communicating ecosystem. If you have ever pulled the roots of a plant or a shrub and seen tiny, white fibers connected to the end of the tree roots, these are the mycelium, the vegetative part of fungi. The mycelium builds this underground network that transports resources and nutrients such as sugars, CO2, Nitrogen etc between trees and facilitates communication.

chicken of the woods

Yellow fly agaric

While walking through the woods it was mind boggling to imagine this sophisticated network under my feet which is built on cooperation rather than competition. This network is built by mycelium - the largest of which is larger than either a blue whale or a redwood tree and is 700 ton mass of fungi hyphae which is between 2000 to 8000 years old. In a world where flags are being raised about social networks the mycelium network looks like an example in biomimicry which can teach us how fungi, which have been around longer than humans, have evolved to facilitate the complex ecosystem of forests. I turn my attention to our personal mycelium network of the hiking group, where the obligatory mushroom is just the tip of the iceberg. The real connection is about how we motivated one another to scale new heights during covid.

    

Image credit : https://illinoismyco.org/?event=detangling-the-wood-wide-web-assessing-functionality-of-common-mycelial-networks