6 ideas
A fungal mycelium grows only at its hyphal tips, constantly extending, fusing, branching and pruning, so its body is a record of where it has foraged. Treating an organism as an ongoing pattern of growth, rather than a bounded object, explains how one mycelium can be enormous, shapeless and still coordinated.
A lichen is not one organism but a stable partnership of a fungus with algae or cyanobacteria, and later work found additional fungal partners, such as yeasts, in some lichens. Because the 'individual' turns out to be a negotiated collective, symbiosis rather than isolated units should be treated as the default condition of life.
Most plants exchange carbon from photosynthesis for phosphorus, nitrogen and water gathered by fungal hyphae around their roots. Experiments show fungi can move more nutrients toward roots that supply more carbon, and shared networks can link multiple plants, allowing resources and signals to pass between them.
Framings like the 'wood wide web' or 'biological markets' import human ideas of cooperation, commerce or kinship into fungal biology. Each metaphor makes some questions easy to ask and others invisible, so researchers should use them deliberately and notice where they break down.
Fungal hyphae placed in microscopic mazes navigate obstacles efficiently, and mycelia allocate growth toward rich food patches while abandoning poor ones. Adaptive decision-making can therefore emerge from distributed growth and signaling across a network without any central brain, which challenges definitions of intelligence built around neurons.
Ophiocordyceps infects carpenter ants and drives them to climb vegetation, clamp their mandibles onto a leaf at a specific height, and die there, where conditions suit the fungus's spore release. The fungus grows through the ant's body and muscles, largely sparing the brain, which shows an organism's behavior can be partly authored by another species.