So, fungal spores are literally everywhere, and the requirements for fungus to thrive seem to be trivially low; give it a moderately humid environment and it’ll grow on a bare concrete wall ffs eating god only knows what; the dust from the air maybe?
Well, and the great outdoors is full of slightly damp places, many of them downright soggy most of the time - and absolutely rife with organic material to snack on.
Where’s the bottleneck? Why isn’t the world a choking fungal hellscape?
One huge component to natural selection is the limited availability of resources. The preference for quite specific environments is partially due to a lack of other organisms being able to thrive in it. But you seem to know fungi well, are you a mycologist?
Hobbyist. I have studied fungi quite a bit though as they are interesting little creatures. After cultivating for fun, I got super absorbed in the field for about a year or so and almost started a side-gig selling gourmet mushrooms and still maintain a few dozen different mycelium strains and am still building up a spore collection. (When I jump into a hobby, I don’t fuck around.)
Needless to say, I am quite fascinated in any medicinal qualities when it comes to the treatment of various mental health issues. Because of that, I try my best to keep up with recent studies, but neuroscience is horrendously complex.
To your comment, you are absolutely correct and it was a good call-out. However, the biggest caveat with fungi is its ability to adapt to different conditions extremely fast. Actually, it has completely broken out modern naming conventions because of that. Even with that, basic traits usually remain static, so that is even more confusing. (An oyster mushroom is just an oyster mushroom. However, it’s genetic markers could become completely unique over a short period of time. Cultivators have problems shipping strains around the world because of that.)