Mushrooms are more closely related to us than they are to plants. Us, as in animals. As in me. I don't know why this information got to me the way it did, but I immediately started looking at mushrooms differently. I think my brain has always categorized them as honorary plants. Obviously I knew fungi were their own thing, but come on. They grow out of the ground, they live next to trees, they don't move, and they are literally sitting beside the spinach at the grocery store. Everything about them feels plant-adjacent. Apparently biology does not care about my organizational system.
Somewhere ridiculously far back in evolutionary history, fungi and animals shared a common ancestor after the lineage leading to plants had already gone its separate way. That does not mean a mushroom is secretly an animal or that I should start referring to one as my cousin, but technically, if you drew the enormous family tree of life, fungi would be hanging out closer to us than they would be to plants. I kept thinking about that because it feels wrong in the same way that learning whales used to have land-dwelling ancestors feels wrong. You understand it once somebody explains it, but your brain still wants to argue a little.
Then I started reading about the similarities, which only made the whole thing stranger. Plants can make their own food from sunlight, which is already one of those insane biological facts that feels normal only because we see plants every day. Fungi cannot do that. Like us, they have to get their energy from organic material. The difference is that fungi have chosen what I can only describe as a much more disgusting method of eating. Instead of taking food into their bodies and digesting it internally, they release digestive enzymes into whatever they are growing on, break the material down outside themselves, and then absorb the nutrients. I respect the efficiency, but I don't necessarily enjoy knowing this.
There are other little similarities too. Fungi store energy as glycogen, which is also how animals store it, while plants mostly use starch. Their cell walls contain chitin, the same material that shows up in things like insect exoskeletons, instead of cellulose like plants. None of this means that I am basically a mushroom, obviously, but every new fact makes mushrooms feel less like some weird vegetable and more like a very distant relative who took a completely different path in life. I went toward having bones, anxiety, and student loans. They went toward decomposing logs. We all make choices.
What I think I actually love about this is how badly nature fits into the little categories we make for it. Humans are obsessed with putting things into boxes because I guess the world would become unbearable if everything were allowed to be as complicated as it actually is. Plant. Animal. Fungus. Bacteria. Alive. Not alive. Dangerous. Harmless. Food. Definitely not food. We need names for things, obviously, but sometimes I forget that the names are ours. Nature was doing all of this long before we showed up and started organizing it.
Mushrooms are especially good at ruining the illusion that things are simple. The little mushroom you see above the ground is not even most of the organism. A lot of the fungus can exist underneath the soil or inside whatever it is growing on as a network of microscopic threads called mycelium. The mushroom itself is basically the reproductive structure. Which means I have spent years seeing adorable little mushrooms in forests and thinking they looked cute when technically I was admiring fungal reproductive organs. Biology has a way of making innocent things slightly uncomfortable.
The mycelium part is probably what fascinates me most, though. Some fungal networks can spread through huge areas underground, so you can walk through a forest and see mushrooms scattered all over the place without realizing that some of them may be connected to the same organism below your feet. From the surface, everything looks separate. Underneath, there is this entire hidden structure linking it together. Maybe I am being dramatic. There is something about knowing that the version of nature we see is only the visible part that makes the world feel much bigger.
This is probably why I keep coming back to biology even when it makes me feel stupid. Every time I think I understand what something is, biology finds a way to make it stranger. A mushroom stops being a weird little plant and becomes part of an entirely separate kingdom. A forest stops being a bunch of trees and turns into layers of organisms interacting above and below the ground. Even my own body gets weird if I think about it for too long. I walk around feeling like one single person, meanwhile I am made of trillions of cells somehow cooperating well enough for me to go buy a bagel and complain about coursework.
I think there is something comforting about realizing how tangled up all of life is. Humans have a habit of acting like we are standing outside nature looking in, like everything else belongs to the natural world and we somehow graduated out of it once we invented buildings and Wi-Fi. But we are still animals. We still came from the same ancient mess everything else came from. If you trace the branches backward far enough, eventually things that look completely unrelated start meeting each other again.
So now apparently I have another thing to think about the next time I see a mushroom growing on the side of a trail. Not just that it is cute, or that I probably shouldn't touch it because I have no idea what kind it is, but that somewhere in the absurdly long history of life, we share a connection. I don't know. I just think that's really cool.
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