Featured there is Amanita Muscaria, which isn't really that poisonous. White Amanitas are lethal, never touch those, but with Muscaria you could have some fun.
Some even theorise that the reason Santa is red and white comes from Amanitas, basically a siberian shaman got fucked up on shrooms and climbed down the middle pole of the tent to give everyone else shrooms as well. Which is why Santa comes from the chimney and gives colorful presents. :) (Or so some people have theorised, I'm not asserting it as fact lol.)
edit and also reindeer love chomping on amanitas, and amanitas are associated with feelings of "flying". and the way these people would get high is that the shaman would eat a lot of shrooms, then after he got high he'd piss in a bowl and that piss would get people really high.)
White Amanitas are lethal, never touch those, but with Muscaria you could have some fun.
These are my favorites because of their common name. Destroying Angel.
Fun fact: the survival rate without treatment is about half, but that goes up to ~90% if you get treated quickly. However, it can still destroy your liver. The toxin is thermostable so cooking doesn't break it down. It is excreted in urine so a lot of the treatment consists of pumping you full of fluids and making you pee a lot. There is no actual antidote to the toxin.
Few weeks ago I read up on A. Muscaria, picked up a couple in a local forest, decarboxydized them in an oven and drank tea with 4g of (poorly) dried mushroom. 3 days before sleep.
Holy mother of fungi, it's like having an antidepressant that, you know, works. Deep sleep duration increased from 10 to 19%. Walking up in the morning felt normal. Weed consumption dropped roughly by half.
Only after three evenings, effects are felt four days after, although waining.
I'm just a noise on the Internet, my words are worth nothing. But read up on the mushroom, it's definitely something different from what people think it is.
Reminds me: In the roguelike game Cataclysm DDA, there's fungus monsters. Basically once they're on the map, the best strategy was to just run and keep running until they were out of the game's "simulation bubble."
They would spread fungal colonies uncontrollably, creating fungal towers, spawning more spores, and fungal versions of monsters, which would spread more spores...
You could hack away at them or burn them sure, but all of them? Unlikely. You could also get infected with spores! They'd rapidly take over the entire game basically lol ... Dunno if that's been nerfed now.
The part about them being too closely related to Humans sounds like BS, but there is a mushroom that is perfectly safe the first few times you eat it, and then eventually makes your immune system attack your blood cells.
There's a Paul Stamets video where he talks about how mushrooms are so closely related to humans that we both fight off similar pathogens and that is why they are so useful to us for medicine (penicillin for example.)
Do you mean the stoned ape theory? Never have seen it interpreted in that way, but it's weirdly comforting and I kinda want to believe it now. Makes humanity feel less lost when there could be some fungi buddies looking after us, secretly manipulating us into becoming better beings.
A web of mycelium that permeates the ground and constantly regenerates itself, occasionally producing visible fruiting bodies.
It's "immortal" only in the sense that an organism with distinct genetics doesn't die of old age, but fungi aren't really individual organisms like we are.
It looks like dirt. Or, depending on your perspective, a forest
How does it work? Imagine nanobots created to control nature. It connects to all the plants, creating little tubes to exchange nutrients and electrical messages between them, in exchange for a nutrient "tax". Split the network in half, and now you have two. Put them back together, sometimes even entirely different species of mycelium, and you have one.
How do they reproduce? All the ways. They range from 2-8 distinct stages of lifecycle. Sometimes they have haploid reproduction, sometimes they recombine their own genetics, sometimes they clone themselves. Sometimes they have more than 2 parents.
Sometimes they have extra special forms like truffles that only come out in certain conditions. Sometimes they have multiple variants of mushrooms with the same genetics. Sometimes they possess multiple distinct sets of genetics
Mushrooms are just the sexual organs of the mycelium... Sometimes they spread based on time, or based on moisture, or just when they feel like it. Sometimes they don't have mushrooms at all
Mycillium does everything in every way, their spores can literally call down rain and they choose what plants live and die. It looks like they have language based on analysis of the electrical signals running through them.
The more you talk about them, the more insane you sound