Fauna, Flora … Funga?

Scientists and botanists believed that fungi were part of the plant kingdom until the mid-20th century, when fungi were finally classified as a kingdom of their own.

This new distinction was made based on structural differences between plant and fungal cells, as well as key distinctions in how they source their energy: while plants rely on chlorophyll to transform the sun’s power into energy, fungi, like humans, find their food sources in the world around them. Fungi are, in fact, more closely linked to humans than to plants, as we share a common ancestor that branched off around 1.5 million years ago.

While the kingdom of fungi is highly diverse, and fungal taxonomy has historically been somewhat in flux, the fungi kingdom generally consists of mushrooms, yeasts, and molds. These fungi fall into three categories: saprobic, parasitic, and mutualistic. Saprobes are decomposers who feast on dead bodies; parasites eat living bodies, and mutualists create symbiotic relationships with living organisms.

Much Western science on fungi has emphasized their pathogenic potential, and far less has trained an eye on the ways they have made life on earth possible, for plants, animals, and humans alike. This is despite the fact that, as mycologist and Fungi Foundation director Guiliani Furci and the biologist and author Merlin Sheldrake wrote in a joint piece for Time, “accounts of the living world that do not include fungi are accounts of a world that doesn’t exist.”

Fungi as “world-makers”

Fungi are ubiquitous, with scientists having found them living everywhere from the bottom of the Dead Sea to the guts of flies, deep oceanic sediments, and the stratosphere. In his groundbreaking book What a Mushroom Lives For, Michael Hathaway, professor of anthropology at Simon Fraser University, highlights the lesser-known history of planet Earth. This history features the work of fungi, which was essential in breaking down rock so that plants could move from water to land, helping to decompose wood so that new trees could grow, and enriching the planet’s soils in a way that allowed plants to thrive.

These are some ways that Hathaway considers fungi to be “world-makers,” noting throughout his book how fungi shape their environments. In his research on matsutake, a mushroom prized in Japan, which grows in southwest China, he noticed how the fungi shaped the behaviour of insects, who evolved complex ways of tracking it down.

The fungi were also capable of sensing the type of insect they were interacting with; if it perceived itself as under attack, it would release a type of saliva that summoned a predatory wasp to take care of the original insect predator.

Hathaway also began to regard seemingly passive occurrences like rot as proactive activities that fungi carry out, in turn creating food for whole ecosystems.

“I think it’s important to see fungi as world-makers to help expand our sense of recognizing liveliness and agency among all living things,” says Hathaway in an interview. “In Western society, we are often so focused just on humans or treating other species in terms of what they offer us as food, medicine, or building supplies that we aren’t equally encouraged to see how wondrous they are.”

Fungi’s powerful properties

When humans focus on the positive potential of fungi, we often have in mind what they might do for us. Medicinal mushrooms give us a health boost, while Penicillium forms the basis of antibiotics, and fungi like Rhizopus oryzae and Aspergillus ferment foods into delicious products.

These days, there’s much buzz about the “radical” potential for fungi to help repair our damaged world: innovations in technology using fungi are taking place in fields as diverse as construction, consumer packaging, and waste disposal.

Mycroremediation, which refers to the potential of fungi to reverse environmental damage, is one particularly promising area of study, with scientists finding that fungi have the potential to break down plastic and metal waste and clean up oil spills.

While these developments are exciting, Hathaway cautions against falling into the same extractive mindset that has landed us here to start with.

“These stories tend to imagine that we can just use fungi as a resource to keep on with our ways of living that are actively polluting the planet,” he says. “However, while I’m glad to see scientists appreciating the potential of fungi, we should also be reorganizing our economy and livelihoods in ways that better respect the lives of all beings.”

Protecting fungal life

While thinking about what fungi can do for us, we also need to think about what we can do for them.

Inspired by a campaign led by the 3F Initiative, the pledge recently submitted at COP16 for fungi to be considered a separate category in the UN convention on biodiversity (CBD) aims to recognize fungi as a unique and vital kingdom of life on par with plants and animals.

Fungi have historically been left out of conservation frameworks, and if successful, the initiative would pave the way for them to be better protected in conservation and agricultural policy. It would also encourage more funding to flow toward fungal research.

The research component will be crucial as, until now, scientists have only assessed the conservation status of 0.4 percent of known fungi species, compared to 80 percent for animals and 18 percent for plants. These assessments are important, as they’re used to create the International Union for the Conservation of Nature’s (IUCN) Red List of Threatened Species, a global index to monitor species extinction risk and promote the protection of threatened species in law.

One of the sponsors of the COP16 pledge, Chile, is already a world leader in fungal conservation, with national laws obliging companies and government bodies to include fungi in environmental impact assessments for construction projects.

Globally recognizing fungi as their own conservation category could also increase protections for fungi used in natural health products, ensuring that suppliers harvest sustainably and avoid protected areas.

As the makers of our world, fungi deserve our utmost attention and respect.

This article was originally published in the June 2025 issue of alive magazine.