The network effect ...

Bialowieza Forest in Poland.Credit...Wojtek Radwanski/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

Everything's connected. From quantum entanglement at the subatomic level to the intricate interactions of life on earth, connectivity reigns supreme, something readily seen with how fungi interacts with almost every living land entity in ways just beginning to be understood.

To whit ...

About 500 million years ago, when aquatic plants began to inch toward land, they couldn’t live there on their own. They enlisted fungal mycelium networks, which served as their root systems for a few tens of millions of years before they developed their own and could live independently. Still, about 90 percent of plants depend on symbiotic fungi.

But during that time, the planet was transformed: Early plants and their fungal networks helped lower the amount of atmospheric carbon dioxide by 90 percent, enabling the conditions for life on Earth as we know it.

Fungi, the great connector, is everywhere as without it, life on earth, in its current form, could not exist.

There is also a growing awareness of the fundamental interconnectedness of the living world — driven both by new research and by the worsening fallout from our ecocidal activities — which has prompted an ecological turn in academic and popular discourse. Fungi embody the most basic principle of ecology: that of the relationships between organisms. Mycelium is ecological connective tissue and reminds us that all life-forms, humans included, are bound up within seething networks of relationships, some visible and some less so.

Fungi may have become poster organisms for ecological thinking, but interest in fungal lives has also been driven by the rise of network science. “Network” has become a master concept, from computing to sociology, to neuroscience, ecology, economic systems. Fungi are ancient living networks, and the recent surge of interest in these organisms reflects our modern fascination with the extraordinary power of networks, from transport systems to the internet, to shape our lives and cultures.

BorgQueen - Sources clockwise from top left: File:Amanita muscaria tyndrum.jpg, File:Scarlet elf cap cadnant dingle.jpg, File:Mouldy bread alt.jpg, File:Spizellomycete.jpg, File:Aspergillus.jpg