Scattered around our village are native boletus, amanitas, anemone stinkhorns (that look like starfish and smell like rotting meat), delicate pale Parasols and plenty of others, including bracket fungi attached to wood.
The living world is mostly invisible. There are more microbes on our skin, in our mouths and guts than stars in the Milky Way. They evolved with us and keep us alive. Fungi live everywhere on and inside us as well.
Soil also keeps us alive, producing 95% of the food we eat. Good soil relies on microbes and fungi. Most fungi are made up of hyphae, long, branching, filaments and one teaspoon of soil can hold 10 metres of these networks.
Australia has up to 250,000 species of fungi, with only 12,000 being formally described. Fungi are in their own category, closer to humans than to plants, but their labyrinthine (mycorrhizal) networks enable plants and trees to exchange nutrients and chemical communications. They are top recyclers of decomposing dead organic matter and without fungi, life on the Earth would expire.
And just to note. Lichens are a symbiosis between a fungus and a photosynthetic partner like green algae. They are important for breaking down rock to create soil, and are now used as sensitive indicators of air pollution.
