THREADS: The Fungal Firsts

These filamentous creatures are half as old as Earth itself.

A gilled mushroom is being invaded and consumed by another species, maybe, its conspicuous thready hyphae laid over its victim like a shroud and digesting it for the good of the Matrix. Wouldn’t a time lapse be interesting?

For today’s post I was all set to tie together a half-dozen loose threads about Kingdom Fungi—some of my favorite people. I have notes and links on fungi lying about unattached and begging to be pulled from odd corners of my scrapbook and tied together.

There are notes in here about the role fungi play in animal biology, in plant biology and how they contribute to terrestrial and aquatic ecology. Other curated notes talk about the chemical and medicinal properties of certain fungi. All interesting stuff that we'll get around to. But I got sidetracked.

So before moving on to those future mycological posts, there’s this:

From information that is not new but was new to me when I discovered it today, we must go back to the drawing board and re-evaluate the Tree of Life on Earth. It just might be that the primitive ancestors of today's familiar fungi got their start vastly farther back in the planet's history than we used to think.

The record for oldest life form goes to Blue-Green algae (cyanobacteria). Specimens from Western Australia are 3.5 billion years ago. This is kind of a shocker since the mantle of the planet only formed 3.8 billion years ago. So these are likely the oldest forms of life we will ever find.

But fungal threads, I discover, have been found that are a billion years old.

A Billion-Year-Old Fungus May Hold Clues to Life’s Arrival on Land

Mr. Loron used electron microscopes to survey the fine structures, and found that the spheres and filaments had double walls — another hallmark of fungi. To see what molecules were contained in the fossils, Mr. Loron and his colleagues fired infrared beams at them and measured the light they released.

Three fossils produced a pattern that matches that of a substance called chitin. All fungi make chitin to build their tough walls. Only insects and a few other species do the same.

We will take a closer look at chitin here soon.

But before leaving this brief look at the ancient beginnings of fungi, as if a billion is not a staggering age for fungi, samples drilled from rock that was once the floor of the deep sea show evidence of fungi—or their primitive filamentous ancestors that are over 2.4 billion (that’s 2400 million) years old.

World's oldest fungus' raises evolution questions

"The deep biosphere (where the fossils were found) represents a significant portion of the Earth, but we know very little about its biology and even less about its evolutionary history," Prof Bengtson told BBC News.

The fossils are almost indistinguishable from those found in similar environments on land, although they are much older.

They are made up of jumbles of tangled threads some hundredths of a millimeter thick.

And what a match made in heaven. Fungi and algae together.

Why don’t we shack up, they said out of the blue one day. And so they did. And they left their home in the cold dark and moved into beachfront property. The fungal threads attached themselves firmly to the rocks of the ocean spray, while the algae set up housekeeping in the thin fungal film. And let the sun shine in.

Today we have a name for these mutual arrangements between a fungus and an alga. We call them LICHENS. And more on that and other myco-topics as they weave themselves together into Substack posts.