21st Century Guidebook to Fungi

This chapter deals with fungal co-operative ventures, including ant agriculture, termite gardeners and agriculture in beetles. An important co-evolutionary story is that linking anaerobic fungi, the evolution of grasses and the rise of the ruminants. It is a fascinating story that links with human evolution since humans use cereal grasses as staple foods and selected their main food animals from among the ruminants. Finally, we look at the predatory nematode-trapping fungi.

Fungi have coexisted with animals and plants throughout the whole of the evolutionary time since these three groups of higher organisms originally separated from one another. Living together closely for this length of time has given rise to many co-operative ventures. We have already seen how many fungi have combined with plants as partners in mutually beneficial relationships such as mycorrhizas and lichens. In these symbiotic or mutualistic associations the partners each gain something from the partnership so that the association is more successful than either organism alone. The organisms concerned (often two but sometimes more) live in such close proximity to each other that their cells may intermingle and may even contribute to the formation of joint tissues, as they do in the lichen thallus, which is one of the most ancient mutualistic associations of all and found in some of the most inhospitable environments.