Humans Have Gaps of Knowledge 🍄 (who knew?)

Notes from the fungi field

As a reminder, if you’ve read my novel, Earthly Bodies, you’ll know that the world of mycelium and fungi is fascinating to me. I bring you the juice about this topic around once a month so that you can learn about it too.

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My favourite piece of fungi news this month is that National Geographic has put fungi on the front cover of their magazine. This is the first time in the magazine's 130-year history that fungi have been featured in this way. It’s the April edition so should be in the shops now, if not soon.

This coincides with the wider acknowledgement of the term Funga. With Funga being seen as equally important as Flora and Fauna when referring to macroscopic life on Earth. This is huge for fungi because it is somewhere between an animal and a plant. They are their own kingdom (queendom, even).

Up next is the documentary film, Fungi: Web of Life. It features the brilliant Merlin Sheldrake (biologist, mycologist, and author of Entangled Life) and the iconic, (I’ve loved her since the nineties) Björk, who is on narration duties.

This has been showing on IMAX screens only, unfortunately not near me. I’d love to know if you’ve seen this yet. Here’s the trailer.

Finally, just so we all remember fungi aren’t all sweetness and light, Deadly Morel mushroom outbreak highlights big gaps in fungi knowledge. This article underlines that mushrooms aren’t always what you think, and if in any doubt, do not eat them. Whether the mushrooms in the article were problematic because of lack of cooking or poor storage, I don’t know (read the article and decide for yourself). Or perhaps they’d crossed with another fungus growing close by, after all, everything is connected.