Shrooms and sterility

[jurga_li]

I suppose that your question just reflects how little we know about the functioning of Nature. First thing: competition. We know a little bit about it: fungi compete and even eat each other. But there is a part we know almost nothing about: co-existence and symbiotic relationships between fungi and other organisms. Fungi not only compete. They need each other and each others‘ chemicals, also other microorganisms to co-exist, to succeed on the substrate while it ages. For example, some bracket fungi can only grow after other brackets have done their job in deteriorating wood. There is plenty of this in nature, but when we take the substrate out of the nature, the co-existence, the succession chain is broken and the most aggressive and least demanding competitors emerge.