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Throughout history, at least according to this theory, we’ve been protected from fungi because they haven’t adapted to live at the temperatures inside our bodies.
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”īut even if fungi had nothing to do with the modern age of mammalian dominance, we should still be paying a lot more attention to them. “But did it contribute? I think it's fascinating, and we probably will never know until we start sequencing stuff and we find invasive mold and things like that in dinosaur fossils, if we ever do. “I think it's definitely a fringe theory at this point to say that that's the only thing that happened,” says Spec. There are very few places where evidence of fungi, or fungal infections, has been preserved in the fossil record-not because they weren’t present, but because fungi tend to be squishy and degradable, not ideal for turning into fossils. This is a tricky theory because it’s almost impossible to prove. In other words, it was the warm-blooded creatures’ resistance to fungal infections that allowed them to become dominant, while the remaining cold-blooded dinosaurs fell to the infections. “The reason that we are the dominant animal is because it was a fungal filter,” he says. He says that this could help explain one of evolution’s great mysteries: After the asteroid killed off the dinosaurs, why didn’t they simply repopulate and once again dominate the Earth? “If the reptiles were so fit, how come we didn't have a second reptilian age?” he asks. Of the many benefits to being warm-blooded, one of them, Casadevall argues, is the fungal filter.
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“This is dating myself, but you know the Sting song “Every Breath You Take"? Well, every breath you take you inhale somewhere between 100 and 700,000 spores,” says Andrej Spec, a medical mycologist at Washington University School of Medicine in St. One of the reasons fungal infections are so common in so many creatures is that fungi themselves are ubiquitous. To put that into context, that’s around one out of every 16 amphibian species known to science. (Fungal infections are known to wipe out snakes, fish, corals, insects, and more.) In recent years, a fungal infection called Batrachochytrium dendrobatidis (chytrid) has decimated amphibian populations around the world, with some scientists estimating that chytrid is responsible for population decline in over 500 amphibian species. And if you happened to be a fish, a reptile, or an amphibian, fungus would also be quite high on your list of fears, were you able to enumerate them. Arturo Casadevall, a microbiologist at Johns Hopkins university who studies fungal diseases. “If you were a tree, you'd be terrified of fungi,” says Dr. Humans should consider ourselves lucky that they don't have to constantly worry about fungal infections. Some scientists think this sudden boom in global cases is a harbinger of things to come. About a third of people infected with Candida auris die from the infection within 30 days, and there have now been thousands of cases in 47 countries. Instead, scientists were seeing multiple, independent infections of an unknown fungal disease, emerging around the world, all at the same time. Scientists assumed that the spread was due to human travel, but when they sequenced the cases, they were surprised to find that these strains weren’t closely related at all. The highly transmissible Candida auris fungus had been previously unknown to science (and resistant to the drugs available to treat it), but within a few years, cases started emerging in Venezuela, Iran, Russia, and South Africa. In 2009, a patient in Japan developed a new fungal infection on their ear.
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But what is likely not high on your list is fungi. There’s COVID-19, of course, but if you’re anxious like me you could probably rattle off a very long list of additional fears: getting hit by a car, cancer, being poisoned by an ill-advised gas station meal, getting caught in a wildfire, electrocuting yourself plugging your laptop in at a dodgy cafe. There are plenty of things in this world that might keep you up at night.