
The Secret Lives of Fungi - Hooke
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2020/05/18/the-secret-lives-of-fungi
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wittedhaddock
My roommate moved out, and we couldn't fill the room in the coronavirus world,
so we started a mushroom farm making a couple hundred pound of oysters per
week and haven't looked back:

[https://heartymushroom.com/](https://heartymushroom.com/)

Stamets taught me that one cubic meter of soil has 7 miles of mycelium! I
think we have a lot to learn from the digestive tract of nature :)

~~~
Alex3917
Make sure you keep a HEPA filter running so you don’t get mushroom lung from
the spores. If you’re growing in the hundreds of pounds per week I wouldn’t
even go into that room without full PPE.

~~~
wittedhaddock
Yeah thank you -- I have a squirrel box fan pulling 1800 CFM out of the room,
but this is a legit risk for sure

~~~
hanniabu
Yeah definitely want negative pressure and to make sure the door and any vents
are sealed.

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cbanek
If you're interested in mycology, I suggest you watch Fantastic Fungi from
last year! It was really cool and had great time lapses!

[https://www.imdb.com/title/tt8258074/](https://www.imdb.com/title/tt8258074/)

~~~
firloop
I found myself not liking the film very much, despite finding parts of it
educational and illuminating.

Particularly, I found it really bizarre that it discusses the stoned ape
theory without mentioning any of the criticism or prevailing theories against
it. The movie just passes it (and most other things Stamets believes) along as
unchallenged gospel.

It took me out of it and made the film feel (even more) ideologically one-
sided, despite the fact that the film is full of interesting detail otherwise.

~~~
n4r9
My wife is a plant pathologist and mycologist and had a similar opinion: "some
interesting bits, is too preachy".

The SAH has always seemed empty to me. If you don't propose an actual
mechanism, do you even have a hypothesis?

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BlackVanilla
'in 2014 scientists reported that they had grown oyster mushrooms on a
substance made from used diapers, reducing their weight and volume by eighty
per cent'

This may refer to a study in 2015. [1] Along with Ideonella sakaiensis,
bacteria which can also break down PET[2], there seems to be potential for
nature to heal the wounds we have inflicted on it.

Can anybody explain what is preventing us from expanding this? According to
this article, 'bacteria are far easier to harness for industrial uses'. [3]
What limits these solutions to acedemia and studies instead of being used to
reduce plastic pollution on a widespread basis?

[1]
[https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/26291558](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/26291558)

[2]
[https://science.sciencemag.org/content/351/6278/1196](https://science.sciencemag.org/content/351/6278/1196)

[3]
[https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2018/apr/16/scientis...](https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2018/apr/16/scientists-
accidentally-create-mutant-enzyme-that-eats-plastic-bottles)

~~~
hansvm
A good rule of thumb is that everything an organism does costs energy. If a
bacterium produces the proteins necessary to break down plastic, create
gasoline precursors, etc, then it likely paid for that with a reduced ability
to defend itself or otherwise compete outside of a sterile environment. The
energy/labor cost to maintain that environment for your bioreactor can be cost
prohibitive (either in the narrow sense in which you put yourself at a
disadvantage because competitors use cheaper strategies or even in the broad
sense where, e.g., energy costs are large enough to completely counteract any
environmental benefits).

It's fairly common for the waste products to be toxic to your microorganisms
(or to need a high concentration of the growth medium, etc). If that mixed
output of partially digested waste, biomass, etc is not useful by itself (e.g.
because it's a little less environmentally impactful than the raw precursors)
then you're faced with the challenge of modifying or purifying it into
something that is worthwhile.

There aren't a lot of economically sustainable business models you can build
around "healing the environment," however beneficial it might be. If you
aren't directly producing something profitable (e.g. construction materials
made from fungi) then your main path to profitability is to rely on donations
of some kind (sometimes charitable donations or crowdfunding, usually grants
or other legal maneuverings). Mind you, I think that has potential to be a
great outcome -- tax businesses proportionally to the damage they do (banning
practices we don't know how to clean up) and simultaneously fund businesses
who fix it. That funding route is still pretty unpolished though, and any
business pursuing that avenue is fighting a regulatory battle on top of any
biotech problems.

Etc.

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tosh
If you are into fungi you might enjoy this Joe Rogan episode with Paul Stamets

[https://youtube.com/watch?v=mPqWstVnRjQ](https://youtube.com/watch?v=mPqWstVnRjQ)

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mykowebhn
As a former relatively active amateur mycologist, the question we hated
hearing the most from non-mycologists was "is it edible?"

Can't we be interested in fungi just for the sake of being interested? Why do
fungi have to serve a purpose for most people in order to be interesting to
them?

~~~
r00fus
They're too tasty to ignore the edible aspect. Also knowing which ones are
edible (and ones that are not) is a survival skill.

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dmitryminkovsky
Great In Our Time episode about Fungi:
[https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b09r3nwl](https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b09r3nwl)

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hinkley
One of the concerns I have is that there is a correlation between temperature
and soil biology that appears to disfavor micorhyzzal symbiosis in warmer,
wetter situations.

And while building these communities can sink carbon and make for more
resilient temperate forests, doing so may take more and more effort over time,
or become infeasible in some areas.

