What is Mycelium?

Mushrooms are a revolutionary fruit.

And like every apple or banana you munch on, they have a host organism.

Mycelium is the brain-like being who produces the mushroom caps we all know and love. If you take a step in your yard, there is approximately 300 miles of webby mycelium underfoot (and nearly eight miles in every cubic inch of soil).

Mycelium also lives inside trees, often eating the tree "poop" that the plants dispose of in their center. That's why you occasionally see mushrooms like hoof fungus or chaga popping out of them. Mycelium also lives in rocks, challenging a core assumption many have about the world that these materials are lacking life or intelligence.

In fact, Mycelium's ability to sneak its way into these materials is the reason why we have all life on land. Before it evolved about a billion years ago, the world above water consisted of solid rock and thunderstorms. It was mycelium, in the form of their early ancestors prototaxites, who broke this hard crust apart creating the soil we have today. Now, about seven in ten plants depend on mycorrhizal mycelium, that is species that partner with the root systems of plants, to obtain nutrients from between the sand and debris in soil.

Moreover, mycelium is likely the most intelligent being on our planet, at least in square footage. In Oregon's Blue Hills, scientists believe they have found the largest mycelium in the world (which produces parasitic honey mushrooms). It is nearly three times the size of Central park in New York City, underlining just how massive of a network mycelium can create.

Scientists have also identified at least 50 words that mycelium can communicate, which based on our understanding are effectively chemical messages about conditions. Of course, we don't know what we don't know. If this organism is capable of language, it likely has a whole set of preferences, communication and even culture we're too human to even get (understandably so).

A word of caution is merited, however. The documentary "Fantastic Fungi" on Netflix has embedded the idea in many people's minds of a "Wood Wide Web," whereby mycelium allows trees to communicate. While there is a shade of truth to this, considering mycelium shares nutrients between trees and even stumps that can no longer produce their own energy, there are larger communications styles at play. Trees often communicate with each other far more precisely about predator bugs or giraffes in the area via pheromones, chemical signals released from their leaves that float along the wind.

Learning this should be humbling. We are products of systems we hardly understand.

As naturalist and Massachusetts author Henry Beston put it best:

“We need another and a wiser and perhaps a more mystical concept of animals. Remote from universal nature and living by complicated artifice, man in civilization surveys the creature through the glass of his knowledge and sees thereby a feather magnified and the whole image in distortion. We patronize them for their incompleteness, for their tragic fate for having taken form so far below ourselves. And therein do we err. For the animal shall not be measured by man. In a world older and more complete than ours, they move finished and complete, gifted with the extension of the senses we have lost or never attained, living by voices we shall never hear. They are not brethren, they are not underlings: they are other nations, caught with ourselves in the net of life and time, fellow prisoners of the splendour and travail of the earth.

So the next time you fry up some oyster mushrooms or take a mind-altering trip, remember this. We are not alone nor superior on this planet but merely a consequence of it. You are eating a fruit given to you by an organism that has already given you the world.