No one is quite sure how old the fungus is, though estimates based on the rate of growth and size run in the thousands of years. And if you are lucky enough to visit the forest in autumn, you may come across the “fruits” of the fungus – mushrooms – which are edible and highly prized.

Some living organisms get most of our attention, while others are aliens on our planet. Surely, fungi fall into this latter category. A research report in April in Royal Society Open Science claims some fungi “talk” to one another using fast electrical signals. Another research article in March in PLOS Genetics found a kind of fungus with 17,550 sexes.

Fungi are not plants, though if you have studied biology in India, they are part of the botany curriculum. Some fungi cause diseases, and these species are included in clinical microbiology courses. Some are needed to brew beer and to make bread. Many fungi have medicinal properties due to their production of antibiotics and psychedelics.

Without question, compared to plants and animals, fungi – which range from the microscopic to the massive – are poorly studied. Ask people what they think of fungi, and they’ll probably mention mushrooms. Mushrooms are fruiting bodies of certain fungi, but only a small part of the organism – the proverbial tip of the iceberg.

Underground, certain fungi grow in all directions forming gigantic networks for communication and transportation. The filaments of these fungi merge with roots of plants. Indeed, ancient fungi may have paved the way for algae to colonise land, giving rise to the earliest land plants.

Fungi communicate with tree roots through chemical signals that they can sense and respond to. They form mutually beneficial trading partnerships with the subsurface roots of plants. This vast underground network has been called the Wood Wide Web.

Fungi also seek out food and digest them, using enzymes. Merlin Sheldrake, author of the eminently readable Entangled Life: How Fungi Make Our Worlds, Change Our Minds & Shape Our Futures writes – “Some organisms – like most animals – find food in the world and put it inside their bodies, where it is digested and absorbed. Fungi have a different strategy. They digest the world where it is and then absorb it into their bodies.”

In addition to humans and some other mammals, bees and ants have language. But all of these animals have brains. Do fungi, which don’t possess brains, also talk to one another? They certainly communicate using chemicals, but whether they “talk” may be a matter of semantics.

There is a flow of information in fungi that is more rapid than you might imagine just from looking at the structures of their networks. These underground fungal networks are decentralised as far as we know in that they have no brain or heart, but they do perform many of the same functions of nervous and circulatory systems of animals.

Electrical signaling is a hallmark of neurons in the nervous system. But some organisms that don’t have nervous systems also show electrical activity. Many kinds of fungi have demonstrated electrical activity with specific patterns in response to changes in light, chemicals, and stresses in the environment.

In the 1990s, Swedish mycologist Stefan Olsson inserted electricity-detecting electrodes into fungal networks. He chose the honey fungus, the same kind of fungus that stretches for kilometers underground in Oregon. Olsson noticed that the fungus changed its electrical signals when a block of wood was placed on the fungal networks. Wood is food for the fungus and the electrical chatter increased. But this could not be observed when the wood was replaced by an inedible object like plastic. Were the fungi actually talking in response to a meal?

More corroborating research has been published since then. In 2018, Andrew Adamatzky at the Unconventional Computing Laboratory in the United Kingdom inserted electrodes into mushrooms and found that their electrical signals changed based on stimuli. Adamatzky hypothesised that fungal signals could be used as a way to read the health status of the soil environment. Fungi could act as living and breathing computers.

The new research on fungal communication that made headlines globally was also conducted by Adamatzky. He found that electrical spikes created by networks of different kinds of fungi can be clustered into discrete units or “words” that show some of the complexity of human language.

But to say that these electrical signals constitute language, we need to know that they have meaning. Adamatzky acknowledges that the spikes in electrical activity might be “phenomenological” which is a fancy way to say that it isn’t language at all. Understandably, there are many skeptics. More research is needed.

Sheldrake offers a philosophical view. “Biological realities are never black-and-white… Might we be able to expand some of our concepts, such that speaking might not always require a mouth, hearing might not always require ears, and interpreting might not always require a nervous system?”

Ultimately, accepting that there are forms of talking and thinking that are alien to our human-centric view might require more than experiments. It might require humans to reassess the uniqueness of our place in the world.

Anirban Mahapatra is a scientist by training and the author of a book on Covid-19. He is working on a second popular-science book

The views expressed are personal