The Read: Emily Monosson, Blight: Fungi and the Coming Pandemic
Friday's Child Is Loving and Giving
Why did I get this book?
Read a review of it. I’ve been strongly interested for a while in the idea that climate change might change the distribution and pathogenicity of fungi as one example of the unpredictable combinatorial effects of climate change, so I thought this book would help me give substance to that thought.
Is it what I thought it was?
Not quite? Climate change is involved, especially in the opening of the book, but it’s really more a tracing of fungi’s pervasive role in the changes and dangers of the Anthropocene as a whole.
What continuing uses might I have for it?
If I’m in a conversation about climate change or the Anthropocene, I now have more to say about this particular danger. I am also now much more worried about it in specific terms than I was before.
Quotes
“A warmer environment may enable some fungi to evolve a higher temperature tolerance. If a fungus can jump the temperature barrier, then humans and other mammals could become hosts to novel fungal infections. A yeast that normally grows in wetlands or on apple trees could possibly evolve to live in goats or bats or humans.”
“Throughout the 1930s and into the late 1960s many thousands of African clawed frogs were ovulating for women all over the world. By 1970 clawed frogs, kept either as pets or in laboratories, were among the world’s most widely distributed amphibians.”
“The global animal trade has created what some scientists say is ‘a functional Pangea for infectious diseases in wildlife.’”
Commentary, asides, loose thoughts, unfair complaints
Almost right away, I learned something I hadn’t known before, which was that there is considerable fossil evidence for huge fungal blooms in the boundary between the Cretaceous and Paleogene periods, after the catastrophic impact and volcanic eruptions that brought the era of dinosaurs to a close. Monosson describes research work that suggests that the major advantage of mammals in that boundary was that their hot body temperatures provided strong resistance against pathogenic fungi during that huge bloom period. (I had the distracting question of why that wouldn’t have protected dinosaur species that were also endothermic, but I realized that it actually did in the sense that those species were on their way to being birds.)
I frankly didn’t really know that most fungi are heat-intolerant—I have this image of fungi species being highly adapted to the tropics, particularly rainforests, that doesn’t really turn out to be valid in the sense that there’s evidence that species diversity of fungi is lower in the tropics.1 That at least has something to do with the common cultural understanding that I and most people have of what a fungus is—mushrooms and molds—and thinks of them as flourishing in wet environments. (And misleadingly, lichens, which are actually a symbiotic organism that’s one part fungus and one part bacteria.) There’s something about our other common cultural understanding of the tropics that associates the fungi we know with the environments we think of as tropical—wetlands and rainforests—creating images of omnipresent rot and mold. So to understand that this is not really the way it has been but that it may be the way it’s going to be is sobering.
Speaking of things I didn’t know, I had never heard about clawed frogs in pregnancy tests and the possible link between that and the spread of a global fungal pandemic affecting frog species. It made me wonder if there’s a good comprehensive history of “laboratory life”—of the ecological impact of laboratory science on particular species that human beings have found useful in research and medicine, whose genomes are now paradoxically far more distributed and in some sense evolutionarily successful because of it, but only within laboratory contexts (where they might suddenly suffer a form of catastrophic reduction when discarded or destroyed if they stop being useful). That seems like an important piece of the history of the Anthropocene.
In terms of a generalist knowledge of biology, one of my major blindspots is botany along with fungi. When I was young, I used to dream of being a herpetologist, and I generally read avidly about animal species and animal ecology. (I was sometimes like kids who know all their Pokemon, only with real animals both extinct and presently alive.) Plants just didn’t seem as interesting and today I still struggle to identify more than a relative handful of species, and know almost nothing about plant biology. Monosson’s chapter on rust fungus, especially in whitebark pines and right now a spreading threat to eucalyptus, was really absorbing for that reason. (I did know about chestnut blight just because it is such an important historical event in North America; the same for phylloxera in viniculture, a subdomain of biology that I have an established interest in.) So yet another thing I should really read more about, but in this case it’s such a vast domain of relative ignorance for me that I’m not sure where I’d even start.
In a couple of ways, the book felt a bit slight or lacking in insight. I was a little surprised that only Chapter 8 and 9 really focus centrally on fungi and disease or debility affecting people, and more surprised still that there wasn’t much on the impact of fungi on infrastructure, particularly residential infrastructure, and how that interacts with the impact of climate change. The first thing that makes a flooded structure dangerous even after you’ve gotten the standing water out of it is that structures that have absorbed water become favorable environments for mold. Mold in turn isn’t bad just because someone living in the structure is suddenly breathing in a lot of fungal spores but also because it accelerates the degradation of vulnerable structural elements in a building, because it spoils stored food, etc.
I also wouldn’t have minded more attention to how medical researchers are thinking about emerging fungal threats—there’s a fair amount of that, but it seems to me one of the most terrifying things about diseases and conditions that are fungal in nature is precisely that our immune systems aren’t as responsive to them and our common medical strategies aren’t as effective. (Or are in some cases as dangerous as the infection.)
One other thing I wouldn’t have minded more of is just some cultural history of how we think about fungi, which feels complicated and might be one reason that we’re not as responsive or systematic in understanding fungal threats as we are in other cases. It feels to me like we either intense aversion to some kinds of visible fungi—molds, rot, etc.—that are close to the visceral disgust that parasitism often creates. In other cases, we are both visually and gastronomically interested in fungi, in the case of mushrooms. In still other cases, I’m not sure most of us understand we’re looking at fungi as such, as in the case of rusts or yeasts, or we don’t know that fungi are ubiquitous in what we’re looking at, as in soil. The way that fungi work when you read about them seems kind of alien and unintuitive. I think that all matters to the history of globalization and the rise of the Anthropocene that weighs heavily on what Monosson does write about.
Větrovský, T., Kohout, P., Kopecký, M. et al. A meta-analysis of global fungal distribution reveals climate-driven patterns. Nat Commun 10, 5142 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-019-13164-8