alt Hacker NewsIt may be worth mentioning, for anyone who didn't know this already; that the fruiting body, which is what your normally see, isn't most of the mushroom. The rest of it is in the ground, or in something else like a dead log or live tree. So the organism can afford the fruiting body to be eaten, if it serves the purpose of spreading spores.
This relates to why you will often see multiple mushrooms of the same type blooming at the same time in a ring pattern: the edge of the ring is the periphery of the linearly, radially expanding mat of subterranean fungal fiber weave, which produces fruiting bodies at its edges.