Forming Relationships with Fungi (And the Brutality of It)

I love fungi. Of the 10 most important relationships in my life, at least three are with fungal individuals. My relationship with these individuals has spanned years; countless projects, hardships, developmental milestones, enthralling successes and bitter failures. I’ve known these individuals from the intimacy of a petri dish to the unforgiving scale of a factory. I’ve reached a level of mediation with these individuals that, at times, feels conversational. These strains have seen and experienced the absolute best and most reprehensible worst in me, and they have physically endured that full spectrum in the most visceral ways (the sheer volume of mycelium I have grown and ‘deactivated’ is staggering). 

These fungal individuals are psychopaths; or better put, it is unreasonable but necessary for me to form these relationships. Let me explain. 

In the current cultural moment, there is an impulse to humanize fungi in particularly benevolent terms. And while it can be a beautiful way of creating accessibility to the powerful qualities of fungi, the reality is less sentimental. When you work with fungi long enough, and deeply enough, you stop experiencing them as anonymous biological processes and start recognizing them as individuals. Not species, strains, or acquisitions in a library, but quite literally unique individuals. And after years of cultivating the same individuals across dozens of processes, I know their idiosyncrasies like I know an old friend’s. I know how they behave when they’re thriving. I know what frustrates them. I know how they bend under stress and how they leap with exuberance under the right conditions. It feels exactly like being in a long-term relationship complete with joy, disappointment, patience, and (sometimes hard-won) understanding.

Fungi are not human. And projecting humanness onto them is both a mistake and a subtle disrespect.

Because when you strip away the romance, when you look honestly at the organizing principles of fungi (their biochemistry, ecological roles, and evolutionary strategies) you quickly realize these organisms are built for ruthless, unfeeling efficiency. They are biological opportunists; aggressive foraging algorithms. Their interactions with each other, other organisms, with us, are driven by resource acquisition, territorial dominance, and biochemical warfare.

If you were to honestly anthropomorphize fungal behavior, you wouldn’t meet a wise old teacher. You’d land on something closer to a cold, calculating, but maybe charming psychopath. 

Fungi are master poisoners. The secondary metabolites we extract as medicines (penicillin, cyclosporine, statins) emerge from a broader fungal chemical repertoire shaped by antagonism, defense, signaling, development, and ecological interaction (Keller, 2019). They are not sentimental molecules. They are mycological bludgeoning devices, refined over millions of years to rupture competitors' cell membranes, disrupt metabolism, or alter the terms of survival. When a fungus encounters a rival, it does not negotiate politely.

Spatial conquest is similarly uncompromising. Mycelial expansion amounts to aggressive annexation via secreted enzymes that dismantle complex polymers (cellulose, lignin, chitin), converting structure into fuel. When two colonies meet, the interaction often escalates to hyphal interference, deadlock zones, or outright replacement, where one colony is displaced, overgrown, or consumed back into the contested substrate (Hiscox & Boddy, 2017; Hiscox et al., 2018). Each comes to the interaction with a cascading series of weapons deployed first at a distance through chemical antagonism, then escalating with proximity until it devolves into hyphae-to-hyphae combat through physical antagonism.

Consider the entomopathogenic fungi Ophiocordyceps, which do not just kill ants, they hijack their very agency. In the Ophiocordyceps unilateralis system, infected ants exhibit manipulated biting behavior before fungal development proceeds from the host body, turning the ant’s body into a vehicle for fungal transmission (de Bekker et al., 2014). The fungus penetrates, colonizes, redirects, kills, and then uses the corpse as architecture. Its body becomes a vehicle, then a launch platform, then food.

Even in so-called mutualistic relationships, fungi are not benevolent. The exchange is conditional, negotiated, and contingent on advantage. In arbuscular mycorrhizal symbiosis, plants and fungi can discriminate among partners and preferentially reward more favorable exchange, stabilizing cooperation through reciprocal control rather than generalized generosity (Kiers et al., 2011). The “partnership” persists because it works for the organisms involved. When it stops working, the relationship changes.

This is where cute descriptions of dispassionate behaviors miss the point. These metaphors mistake strategy for virtue. The mycelial network linking plants is not altruistic by default; it is a conditional exchange system shaped by resource context, partner quality, and fungal access to advantage. To project benevolence onto fungi is to disrespect them by erasing their actual nature, flattening ruthless competence into feel-good fantasy.

Fungi succeed because they are extraordinarily good at warfare, competitive displacement, and relentless resource extraction. When resources appear, they strike. When competition emerges, they deploy whatever calculus maximizes survival: aggression, evasion, chemical inhibition, replacement, or mutualism, all equally valid solutions in the fungal grammar of survival (Hiscox & Boddy, 2017; Hiscox et al., 2018; Kiers et al., 2011).

And yet I form relationships with fungi. Because I believe to work effectively with fungi, especially in process design or material development, you have to. You have to invest the time to understand their behavior, to earn familiarity with their tendencies, to internalize how they respond to subtle changes. You form relationships not because they are like us, but because they are not, and perhaps by virtue can more honestly recognize the error in humanizing them. You form relationships because the only way to navigate their plasticity, their unpredictability, their merciless opportunism, is through relentless, patient familiarity.

The cultural fascination with fungi often veers toward the whimsical; mushrooms are framed as wise elders, mycelium as a benevolent internet, fungi as teachers of interconnectedness. And while there’s poetry in that, there’s also danger in losing sight of reality. So the art of forming relationships with fungi is allowing for the human impulse to form the relationship while maintaining an objective view of the fundamentally brutal aspects of what fungi are. And ultimately, that brutality defines the toolkit that allows us to make good things for humans.

References

de Bekker, C., Quevillon, L. E., Smith, P. B., Fleming, K. R., Ghosh, D., Patterson, A. D., & Hughes, D. P. (2014). Species-specific ant brain manipulation by a specialized fungal parasite. BMC Evolutionary Biology, 14, Article 166. https://doi.org/10.1186/s12862-014-0166-3

Hiscox, J., & Boddy, L. (2017). Armed and dangerous: Chemical warfare in wood decay communities. Fungal Biology Reviews, 31(4), 169–184. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.fbr.2017.07.001

Hiscox, J., O’Leary, J., & Boddy, L. (2018). Fungus wars: Basidiomycete battles in wood decay. Studies in Mycology, 89, 117–124. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.simyco.2018.02.003

Keller, N. P. (2019). Fungal secondary metabolism: Regulation, function and drug discovery. Nature Reviews Microbiology, 17(3), 167–180. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41579-018-0121-1

Kiers, E. T., Duhamel, M., Beesetty, Y., Mensah, J. A., Franken, O., Verbruggen, E., Fellbaum, C. R., Kowalchuk, G. A., Hart, M. M., Bago, A., Palmer, T. M., West, S. A., Vandenkoornhuyse, P., Jansa, J., & Bücking, H. (2011). Reciprocal rewards stabilize cooperation in the mycorrhizal symbiosis. Science, 333(6044), 880–882. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.1208473