How Many Fungi are There?

Current taxonomic estimates of described mushrooms range between 11,000 and 14,0000, only accounting for macro-fungi, those species we can see. Other estimates find at least 148,000 known fungi both microscopic and macro. Yet more speculative estimates range from 1.5 million 5.1 millions of species that are yet to be discovered. This would make a fungi-to-plant species ratio of 6 to 1. This is a mere estimation because fungi is cryptic. That is, it is a phenomena that remains insufficient to empirical categories; much of these species live underground (or in our bodies) and out of sight. Another compounding factor is the radical change found within species: the characteristics that would define a single entity are transformed in the course of a lifecycle into what appears to be an altogether different entity (this is called pleomorphy: or polymorphism). Likewise within an identified “body” of mycelium multiple genomes may be found. The Linnaean taxonomy system that has proven useful for organizing plants and animals and that DNA has only confirmed falls apart when encountering the speciation of fungi. The Linnaean system is a holdover from the fixed and changeless categories of platonic and Christian metaphysics: it speculates a divine order that man, the scientist, can know. The fungal breakdown of this divine taxonomy leads one to conclude that the “individual” does not strictly speaking exist: what we have instead are movements and flows, dynamic duplication of codes that scramble any static or unitary being. There are no mushrooms, rather there is a mushrooming; these species are not nouns but verbs