Explore the Fascinating Map of Fungi: An Introduction to the Vast Mushroom Kingdom

Here on Open Cul­ture, we’ve pre­vi­ous­ly fea­tured Domain of Sci­ence’s elab­o­rate info­graph­ic maps of such vast fields of intel­lec­tu­al endeav­or as math­e­mat­ics, physics, com­put­er sci­ence, quan­tum physics, quan­tum com­put­ing, chem­istry, biol­o­gy, and med­i­cine. Over time, the series’ cre­ator Dominic Wal­li­man has branched out, as it were, even to king­doms of the nat­ur­al world, like plants. With Plan­tae down, which of the oth­er five has he tak­en on next? That ques­tion is answered in the video above, which intro­duces Domain of Sci­ence’s new Fas­ci­nat­ing Map of Fun­gi.

Yes, this big map depicts the realm of the hum­ble mush­room, which “shares the for­est with the plants and the ani­mals, but it’s not a plant, and it’s not an ani­mal.” And the mush­room itself, like we’re used to see­ing sprout­ing beneath our feet, is only a small part of the organ­ism: the rest “lives hid­den, out of sight, below ground. Beneath every mush­room is a fun­gal net­work of hair-like strands called the myceli­um,” which begins as a spore.

The huge­ly diverse “fruit­ing bod­ies” that they push out of the sur­face have only one job: “to dis­perse the spores and grow the next gen­er­a­tion.” But only ten per­cent of fun­gi species actu­al­ly do this; the rest don’t pro­duce any­thing we would rec­og­nize as mush­rooms at all.

About 150,000 species of fun­gi have been dis­cov­ered so far. Though inan­i­mate, they man­age to do quite a lot, such as sup­ply­ing nutri­ents to plants (or killing them), gen­er­at­ing chem­i­cals that have proven extreme­ly use­ful (or at least con­scious­ness-expand­ing) to humans, hijack­ing the ner­vous sys­tems of arthro­pods, and even sur­viv­ing in out­er space. And of course, “because of their abil­i­ty to con­cen­trate nutri­ents from with­in the soil, fun­gi are an excel­lent source of food for us and many oth­er ani­mals.” Mycol­o­gists esti­mate that there remain at least two or three mil­lion more species “out there in nature wait­ing to be dis­cov­ered.” At least a few of them, one hopes, will turn out to be tasty.

Relat­ed con­tent:

A Stun­ning, Hand-Illus­trat­ed Book of Mush­rooms Drawn by an Over­looked 19th Cen­tu­ry Female Sci­en­tist

The Beau­ti­ful­ly Illus­trat­ed Atlas of Mush­rooms: Edi­ble, Sus­pect and Poi­so­nous (1827)

The Mush­room Col­or Atlas: An Inter­ac­tive Web Site Lets You Explore the Incred­i­ble Spec­trum of Col­ors Cre­at­ed from Fun­gi

Death-Cap Mush­rooms are Ter­ri­fy­ing and Unstop­pable: A Wild Ani­ma­tion

Björk Takes You on a Jour­ney into the Vast King­dom of Mush­rooms with the New Doc­u­men­tary Fun­gi: Web of Life

How Mush­room Time-Laps­es Are Filmed: A Glimpse Into the Pio­neer­ing Time-Lapse Cin­e­matog­ra­phy Behind the Net­flix Doc­u­men­tary Fan­tas­tic Fun­gi

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities and the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les. Fol­low him on the social net­work for­mer­ly known as Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.