The largest living thing on Earth is a fungus (2014)

Smile molds are now considered Protozoa, partially due to behavioral differences in how they eat, but mostly due to genetic testing.

An interstellar fungal communication/transportation network is also a ongoing plot element in the current season of "Star Trek: Discovery".

They are fascinating organisms, and the more we learn about them the wilder it gets. Radiolab did an episode that talks about some of the things they do. They present evidence that the fungal networks are what make forests possible, and that fungi are not simply passive participants: in woodlands that are affected by global warming, the fungi send nutrients from dying trees that are not well-suited to a changing climate to different species which are better equipped to survive the new temperatures instead of what they normally do, which is to share the nutrients with young trees of the same species. They essentially farm the plants whose nutrients they rely on.

Paul Stamets, mentioned briefly in your second linked article, has been doing research into their antimicrobial and antiviral properties. A handful of soil has hyphae that are only one cell wide, but something in the neighborhood of miles long, so they are constantly being attacked by any number of organisms and have developed advanced countermeasures that we can take advantage of to fight the maladies that plague us. There are treatments available in Japan for cancer, called PSK and PSP, which are essentially extracts from the Turkey Tail mushroom. He has performed studies that show promise in combating colony collapse disorder in bees with extracts from the garden giant fungus, which he discovered by watching bees congregate to lick the mycelium.

Their networking concepts have been refined over millions of years, and are undoubtedly worthwhile to study, but it seems that we are only beginning to scratch the surface of what we can learn from fungi.

http://www.radiolab.org/story/from-tree-to-shining-tree/

I just recently read a great book called The Hidden Life of Trees by Peter Wohlleben [1] that touches on the subject of a social network among trees via a fungal network known as the "Wood Wide Web" [2].

[1] https://www.amazon.com/Hidden-Life-Trees-Communicate_Discove...

[2] https://www.nytimes.com/2016/01/30/world/europe/german-fores...

The argument against Pando is that it's fractured into many smaller parts that are no longer connected.

it all depends on definitions...

The fungi appear to be especially good at exploiting this impulse :)

We can eat the fruiting bodies, the "mushrooms" which the fungus sends up above the surface of the soil for reproductive purposes. Evidently they smell bad raw, but when you cook them they're delicious.

If you don’t eat, you’ll die. I’d say you’re being sensible...

A few years ago there was an article posted on Slashdot about Russian and Japanese scientists cooperating on the attempt to clone a wooly mammoth.

About half the comments were about eating the mammoth and what it would taste like. :)

Even the 'identical twins' are not 100% genetically identical[0] and they can't 'fuse' with each other like these fungi are and can. Humans also can't asexually produce more of their own clones to cooperate with while these fungi apparently can do both asexual and sexual reproduction with asexual one being more common. Even if we could then our clones have their own central nervous system and aren't enslaved by their genes to do the same as us and 'fuse' and cooperate with us.

On the other hand, common bananas are sterile clones[1] but they are more 'separate' from each other and not 'fused' in any way (I guess? I have no idea) then these bunches of fungus... But we are all over the Biological Kingdoms (Animalia, Fungi, Plantae), methods of reproduction, human intervention, 'fusing' and so on by now.

I'm not a biologist but I had very high level biology class with a really good (and demanding..) retired biologist as the teacher and I still remember how WTF this all gets (the entire Protista Kingdom which is just a bag of stuff that doesn't fit elsewhere and varies a lot internally, the pseudo-life of viruses, the scyphozoan jellyfish life cycle, concept of biological immortality, etc.). Pluto planet debacle is nothing and a 100% clear cut case with 0 controversy in comparison to this.

[0] - https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/identical-twins-g...

[1] - https://piecubed.co.uk/bananas-facts/

It's this hard to say what a single organism is, and many people still believe there is a simple definition of what a species is.

As the article hints, the concept of an individual is a very slippery thing in filamentous fungi. A single hyphal network can contain genetic material from more than two parental spores, and while a bi-nucleate condition is typical (in a "stable dikaryon"), genetically different nuclei can cohabit different regions of the same mycelium at different times, and even established nucleotypes can be completely displaced by newly-fusing types. This all leads to quite different genetic situations from those that delimit individuals in the usual sense.

In this study, somatic compatibility of isolates (their readiness to fuse into a single mycelium) seems to have been interpreted as an indication of clonality – that the isolates are completely genetically identical. (At least it was by the BBC; the abstract of the linked paper, which is all I read of it, is vague on this point.) That would make the determination that this is a single individual fungus rather unassailable. But it's not clear to me at all that we can assume things are so simple.

I was thinking the same thing. Or the Cavendish banana clones...

very smart point

We are more confined than to The Local Group[1]. Andromeda, the closest galaxy to us is in The Local Group and is 2.5 million light years away.

We are confined to our galaxy. In fact, we are confined to a small region of our galaxy. It's 100,000 light years wide. Without faster than light travel, very little is accessible to us.

[1] "The Local Group" is the name of a cluster of galaxies which are gravitationally bound to each other. Our galaxy, the Milky Way, is in that cluster. When all other galaxies drift away from us in billions of years, the local group will be the only thing visible to us.

HeLa would fail the latter portion of the definition provided in the article:

> The record-breaking A. solidipes clonal colony passes the test based on a definition of being made up of genetically identical cells that can communicate, and that have a common purpose or can at least coordinate themselves.

Why not the universe? (Star Trek Discovery reference, I assumed)