Paleontology and fungi

Fungi are weird. Neither plant nor animal, they respire and eat more like animals and have plant-like structure; fungi have vacuoles and cell walls like plants -though cell walls made of chitin (an animal protein) not cellulose. I include slime molds in with fungi, though at some point in my lifetime they were put in with the broader category of eukaryotes; those are now considered amoebas that got above their station. In a different life I might have become some kind of mycologist, as they seem endlessly surprising and fascinating.

Fungi have strange lifestyles; they live in radioactive environments, they cause bizarre parasitic diseases in amphibians,  they do mind control on insects, a fungus is the biggest and oldest known organism, they have reproductive habits involving thousands of sexes (humans with nonstandard gender identification sometimes do look a bit fungi-like), they often contain the same neurotransmitters as are in human brains, they produce melanin like humans do, there are electrical signals to communicate along hyphae structures of fungal colonies like primitive brains, they even take over space stations. Fungi brew up our booze and cheeses for us, they gave us antibiotics, they make bugmen hallucinate and they rot the food in the refrigerator.

Ant mind control fungus; possibly cordyceps: it also boosts testosterone

One of my speculative ideas is that some degenerative diseases have a fungal component. There are known fungal diseases;  yeast infections,  pneumocystis pneumonia, athlete’s foot, blastomycosis, cryptococcal meningitis, aspergillosis, valley fever, histoplasmosis are all known so far, some of them pretty remarkable when you stop to think about them. My guess is that there are many more; perhaps some degenerative bone diseases or even mental illnesses. Science is finding weird stuff all the time here. People who inject drugs or receive transplants can often be infected by obscure fungi; I knew a junkie kid who had fungus growing on his heart valves. It wouldn’t surprise me to find out that they live in various human tissues as symbiotes.

There’s wild speculation that fungi are so damn screwy they might be extraterrestrial somehow. They’re odd enough “fungi from Yuggoth” doesn’t seem that far-fetched, though life is generally peculiar. I suppose proving it would involve cultivating novel fungi from interstellar space dust. It seems likely that terrestrial fungi are going to be found in other planets in the solar system. The spores of various fungi are rugged enough, meteoric strikes have almost certainly deposited them on the surface of Mars. I assume readers know that Mars rocks end up on earth all the time via the same process. Arrhenius (the guy who won the Nobel for inventing half of chemistry) wrote a book talking about this in 1908.

One of the more interesting theories about fungi are that they ended the carboniferous period. The carboniferous period was a time when most of the coal in the earth’s crust was laid down. There were giant fern-tree things that would stack up like cord-wood and no organisms to break down the cellulose and especially lignin into carbon dioxide; something that fungi and some bacteria do now. Cellulose and lignin were something that plants had to evolve to learn how to make. Large scale plants on the surface are only possible with these organic polymers. There was a time before plants could do this, and a time after: the immediate time after was the caboniferous period.

The earth was populated by these giant club moss fern-tree things, thirty foot long crocodile looking amphibians, giant 8 foot long millipedes and dragonflies with foot long wingspans. The atmosphere had more oxygen back then (35% versus 21% now) and allegedly higher pressure (I can’t find good figures here -probably indirect models) to support large bugs -animals who respire through their surface area rather than using lungs. Amphibians also respire partially through their skin; one of the reasons there were really giant ones in the carboniferous period. For those of you who don’t know physics or math; larger objects have smaller ratios of surface area to volume. Surface goes like distance squared, volume is distance cubed. If there’s more oxygen, a smaller surface to volume ratio (of a larger animal) can support respiration. All the CO2 coming out of volcanoes before and after this time was turned into vegetation and oxygen, and since the vegetation didn’t rot, the oxygen stayed.

There is some controversy about the end of the carboniferous period, we don’t know that it was due to fungi. But there are pretty good indications of it, and it’s been a popular idea based on basic observations and common sense for a century or two. There are other vague theories for the presence of coal in the carboniferous era; they amount to “conditions were good for forming coal for a while” -and fungi and lignin-eating bacteria had nothing to do with it. To be honest I think it makes people mad that there was little CO2 in the atmosphere in those days and the earth was mostly a giant, hot swamp.

William Corliss didn’t have much to say about fungi, but has an interesting section on coal anomalies (ESC14).  He notes that occasional inclusions of fusain, a charcoal like substance, is pretty odd, though it could have come about from lightning strikes. As we know, there are unexpected heavy metals and other elements in coal: uranium, mercury, germanium. The presence of these substances are why even I support phasing out coal burning -I don’t like eating mercury laden fish (entirely from coal burning), and coal ash is a much more important source of radioactive waste than nuclear power. One which isn’t legally classified or treated as such and is just dumped to the environment or turned into building material. How did those substances get there? They certainly don’t bioaccumulate in ferns. Corliss noted the ideas of Gold that fossil fuels had some abiological origin. To be honest most of his anomalies on coal are pretty weak; saltwater looking organisms in coal fossils, igneous-looking (aka like liquid injection) intrusions, low mineral content, cases where modern wood structures quickly turned into coal, meteors with coal-like stuff in them. IMO the best of these is the heavy metal inclusions. Heavy metals in coal are associated with pyrites which … are also odd. But then, rock formation is inherently pretty odd, so nothing much of interest there.

Whether or not fungi caused a climatological cataclysm which wiped out the carboniferous period, they certainly are important to the ecosystem and the atmosphere today. Soil and fungi are left out of most climatological calculations (most of which are balderdash), but they’re arguably one of the most important drivers. Had I studied biology, I’d probably have become some kind of mycologist. In my opinion there is much to discover here, and even if there ain’t, they sure are interesting.