Fungi are critical for making bread, beer, cheese and wine — basically, everything important in life. They can also cause pesky, and sometimes even fatal, infections in humans. Beyond that, they can be edible mushrooms or luxury truffles. Some make us hallucinate and others can kill us, perhaps after inducing said hallucination. Still others are deadly for animals and plants, whether it means zombifying ants or killing off trees and plants. Fungal diseases like chytrids are responsible for large-scale losses of entire populations of amphibians, while the deadly white-nose syndrome is wiping out bats across North America.
But what fewer people know is that fungi are also critical for the health and success of plant life on land overall. They exchange critical nutrient with plant roots and even provide a kind of information highway — sort of like a fungal internet — that can help plants warn their neighbors about threats and share resources. Fungi are also critical in the degradation of dead plants and recycling of nutrients. “They can be fantastic tools for pushing the growth and health of plants, but on the other hand, they can degrade the plants and can be very dangerous pathogens,” says Paola Bonfante, a retired plant biologist who studied fungal interactions at the University of Torino in Italy. “They go from being good friends to very dangerous killers.”
