Recycling

This unidentified wood-decay fungi was happily, and very slowly, recycling a fallen tree trunk when I met him on my walk by the river. It was far too windy for macrophoto but mushrooms are notoriously immovable so it was not a problem. We tend to see fungi as organisms that are far behind us on the evolutionary tree, but still they are the only known eucaryotes (protists, fungi, plants or animals) that can digest lignin (polymers of which wood is made). As lignins, together with cellulose, make up 70% of the world's biomass, it means that fungi will be the last organism to go "hungry" on planet earth!