Take a walk in the woods, and a mushroom you’re guaranteed to find (any time of year) is a polypore. They’re tough, occasionally massive, and one of the most important features of many terrestrial ecosystems.

Truffles, famous for their aphrodisiac effects, are one of the world’s most expensive foods. Their tantalizing flavours have recruited an entire industry of truffle hunters, obsessed with recovering these subterranean morsels. In this episode, we take the truffles perspective as we wonder why they yearn to be unearthed.

Sex is the raison d’être for many of life’s strange contortions, and fungi are no exception. The visible mushroom exists solely as a sexual organ: disseminating the spores of the next generation. But that’s only the beginning of the weird world of mushroom courtship. Join us in the nitty gritty, and reflect on what mushrooms can teach us about the nature of sex and gender.

How do mushrooms know the world around them? In this episode, we explore just a few of the ways that a fungus (without a brain, ears, or eyes) can feel with precision. Mendel gets extra nerdy on this one.

On today’s episode, we’re talking parasites: from pathogens, to freeloaders, to downright mushroom cannibals. Mendel is joined by Willoughby Arevalo to discuss some of the most far-out ways in which fungi can mooch for their livelihood, along a spectrum from benign to hyper-destructive.

Spores: the raison d'être of mushrooms. Invisible, ubiquitous, these tiny grains are in every breath we breathe. In this episode we learn a little more about how they work, and how they shape the world around them.