Feeds:
Posts
Comments

Posts Tagged ‘network’

Giving Fungus Its Due

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , , on March 13, 2026| Leave a Comment »

Photo: Dr. Shannon Guichon/National Forest Foundation.
Do you know about the “Wood Wide Web” (mycorrhizal network)? Fungus not only produces mushrooms (above) but connects trees and plants through tiny threads called mycelium.

Years ago, during one of our country’s endless wars over boundaries, I thought about earthworms and how they don’t recognize boundaries. I said to myself the world needed a kind of diplomacy that recognized what connects us instead of what separates us, Earthworm Diplomacy. After reading today’s feature, I’m thinking I should have focused on fungi.

In January “the Tyler Prize for Environmental Achievement, sometimes described as the ‘green Nobel Prize,’ was awarded to Toby Kiers, an evolutionary biologist at Vrije University Amsterdam who has spent the past three decades studying the workings and significance of the soil’s circulatory system.

Alan Burdick reported at the New York Times that “last year, Dr. Kiers won a MacArthur ‘genius’ award, as well as the Climate Breakthrough Award, sharing it with Giuliana Furci, a fungi conservationist, and Merlin Sheldrake, a mycologist at the University of Oxford.

“The fungal kingdom, which stands apart from plants and animals, contains anywhere from two million to five million species, including yeasts, mildew, lichens and mushrooms. Dr. Kiers studies mycorrhizal fungi, microbes that form vast, underground networks with carbon drawn from the roots of plants and trees, providing vital nutrients in exchange.

“Dr. Kiers and her colleagues have calculated that these microbial filaments, laid end to end, would span half the galaxy and that they sequester 13 billion tons of atmospheric carbon dioxide — one-third of the world’s fossil-fuel emissions — in the soil each year.

“These brainless, distributed organisms are also astonishingly strategic in their business dealings, her team has shown, imposing tariffs and inflating prices. In 2021, Dr. Kiers founded the Society for the Protection of Underground Networks, or SPUN, a global network of researchers and ‘underground explorers’ that works to identify and protect hot spots of fungal diversity. Last year they unveiled the first ever global underground atlas. And a new initiative called Underground Advocates, developed with the More-Than-Human Life program at the New York University School of Law, helps train scientists in legal and policy skills.

“In a recent video call, Dr. Kiers … said, ‘Fungi are usually the underdogs. The awards feel like an award for the invisible, the parts of the world that are challenging to understand, and a celebration of decentralized ways of thinking and operating that fungi have mastered.’ …

New York Times
Why fungi?

Toby Kiers
These underground ecosystems play a crucial role in regulating the climate. Soils store about 75 percent of Earth’s terrestrial carbon and contain close to 60 percent of Earth’s biodiversity.

Mycorrhizal fungi form the basis of food chains for those aboveground organisms, which together generate more soil and nutrients. They draw carbon from plants and get it to stick to minerals underground, where it’s hard to release back into the atmosphere.

The vast majority of crops form partnerships with mycorrhizal fungi and rely on them for their nutrients. Some beautiful experiments have shown that when plants interact with mycorrhizal fungi, they make bigger, sweeter flowers, which attract more pollinators.

These fungi also hold soil together; their bodies are woven into the aggregate and produce sticky chemicals that are hard to break down. Take away that scaffolding and soils would erode and disappear.

People think they know what soil and dirt is. With high-resolution imaging, we’re starting to make it visible and show that it’s alive. These are ecosystems, with as much complexity as what’s happening aboveground. I think 2026 is really going to be the year where people start talking about fungal restoration. It’s not enough to just add native plants to restore ecosystems; it has to be native plants together with native fungi. …

Times
How did you and fungi meet?

Kiers
When I was 19, I became so enchanted by the idea of being a field biologist that I left college, not knowing if I’d come back, and spent a year at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute, a research station on an island in the middle of the Panama Canal.

I needed a niche. At the time, mycorrhizal fungi were pretty unknown there. The older scientists were studying everything aboveground — trees, bats, primates. I started wondering what generated all that diversity. So I did an experiment with researchers where we took soil from underneath the trees of one species and used it to inoculate other tree seedlings to see if it would affect their growth.

We stained the roots with a dye, and you could see this intricate weave of fungi inside the cells — they penetrate it — called an arbuscule; it looks like a mini tree. That’s where nutrient exchange happens. And I could see that happening in the roots with my own eyes. …

Studies were starting to show that plants actually get huge benefits from fungi.

Later, I realized that they’re powerful actors in their own right. My Ph.D. thesis explored whether noncognitive organisms can discriminate between good and bad partners. For instance, from experiments, we know that plants will digest one of those arbuscules if they’re not getting enough phosphorus from the fungus; they can abort the interaction.

But the fungi make choices as well. We found that a fungus can avoid trading with plants in the shade, which have less carbon to trade. They trade differently depending on how many other fungal competitors are present. They can hoard resources in their network and artificially inflate the price. …

We’ve been studying fungal trade as an underground market and developing techniques to track, in real time, when and where important exchange deals take place, how fungi navigate space, how they decide when and how much carbon to send down each pathway, how they build their road systems and how they optimize that supply-chain design.

Are fungi capitalists? No. They’ve developed a system that is much more sophisticated than the economic system humans use. But it has allowed us to use economics as a mathematical framework to analyze these trade strategies, to make predictions and to see if the fungi follow them. The frontier is linking what we’re seeing on the micron scale to the global data to understand the role of fungi in the carbon cycle.

Times
Meanwhile, in SPUN, you’ve built a worldwide network of investigators to map the global distribution of networked microorganisms.

Kiers
We wanted to turn the traditional approach on its head. SPUN has become a rambunctious, decentralized community of people working together to study and protect underground fungi. We’re slightly outside academia while still adhering to rigorous science and publishing in top journals.

In 2022, we set up the Underground Explorers Program. It’s a network of researchers who are dedicated to mapping fungal biodiversity in their local ecosystems. We’ve given away 137 grants across 58 countries, 80 percent of them to researchers in the global south and more than half led by women. It’s a fungi-without-borders approach. For these scientists, climate change is not an option to care or not care about; it’s their survival, their livelihoods, with consequences that their children will inherit.

There’s a researcher in Mongolia who is trying to map and protect fungal communities that are threatened by desertification — fungi that hold the grass down and enable nomadic herders to continue grazing their animals. In Nigeria, a scientist named Bolaji Thanni is studying the effects of textile effluents on soil health to help advocate for stricter waste disposal regulations and the use of eco-friendly dyes. In Mexico, there’s a professional climber who is mapping mycorrhizal fungi along cliffs — which is just so unknown, right?

We’re a really scrappy organization. We’re super lean and mean; we don’t even have an office. We are everywhere and nowhere. That really helps us. In an academic setting, you almost have to know what you’re going to find before you’re funded to find it.

I use the term ‘punk science.’ We’re trying to cross boundaries and disciplines and not accept the state of the world as a given, while celebrating science that is rooted in creativity.

More at the Times, here.

Read Full Post »

Love for Fungi

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , on December 9, 2020| 3 Comments »

As a kid, I was kind of creeped out by fungi, but in recent years I’ve found myself fascinated by their unexpected beauty and mystery. And I’ve taken lots of pictures, three of which are here.

In an article at the New York Times, Ferris Jabr, describing the symbiotic relationship between trees and fungi, talks to forest ecologist Suzanne Simard about what trees are communicating with one another through their subterranean networks of fungi.

“By the time she was in grad school at Oregon State University, [Simard] understood that commercial clearcutting had largely superseded the sustainable logging practices of the past. Loggers were replacing diverse forests with homogeneous plantations, evenly spaced in upturned soil stripped of most underbrush. Without any competitors, the thinking went, the newly planted trees would thrive. Instead, they were frequently more vulnerable to disease and climatic stress than trees in old-growth forests.

“In particular, Simard noticed that up to 10 percent of newly planted Douglas fir were likely to get sick and die whenever nearby aspen, paper birch and cottonwood were removed. The reasons were unclear. The planted saplings had plenty of space, and they received more light and water than trees in old, dense forests. So why were they so frail?

“Simard suspected that the answer was buried in the soil. Underground, trees and fungi form partnerships known as mycorrhizas: Threadlike fungi envelop and fuse with tree roots, helping them extract water and nutrients like phosphorus and nitrogen in exchange for some of the carbon-rich sugars the trees make through photosynthesis.

“Research had demonstrated that mycorrhizas also connected plants to one another and that these associations might be ecologically important, but most scientists had studied them in greenhouses and laboratories, not in the wild. For her doctoral thesis, Simard decided to investigate fungal links between Douglas fir and paper birch in the forests of British Columbia. …

‘The old foresters were like, Why don’t you just study growth and yield?’ Simard told me. ‘I was more interested in how these plants interact. They thought it was all very girlie.’

“Now a professor of forest ecology at the University of British Columbia, Simard, who is 60, has studied webs of root and fungi in the Arctic, temperate and coastal forests of North America for nearly three decades. Her initial inklings about the importance of mycorrhizal networks were prescient, inspiring whole new lines of research that ultimately overturned longstanding misconceptions about forest ecosystems. By analyzing the DNA in root tips and tracing the movement of molecules through underground conduits, Simard has discovered that fungal threads link nearly every tree in a forest — even trees of different species. Carbon, water, nutrients, alarm signals and hormones can pass from tree to tree through these subterranean circuits.

“Resources tend to flow from the oldest and biggest trees to the youngest and smallest. Chemical alarm signals generated by one tree prepare nearby trees for danger. Seedlings severed from the forest’s underground lifelines are much more likely to die than their networked counterparts. And if a tree is on the brink of death, it sometimes bequeaths a substantial share of its carbon to its neighbors.

“Although Simard’s peers were skeptical and sometimes even disparaging of her early work, they now generally regard her as one of the most rigorous and innovative scientists studying plant communication and behavior. … In May, Knopf will publish [her] book, Finding the Mother Tree, a vivid and compelling memoir of her lifelong quest to prove that ‘the forest was more than just a collection of trees.’ …

“Before Simard and other ecologists revealed the extent and significance of mycorrhizal networks, foresters typically regarded trees as solitary individuals that competed for space and resources and were otherwise indifferent to one another. Simard and her peers have demonstrated that this framework is far too simplistic. An old-growth forest is neither an assemblage of stoic organisms tolerating one another’s presence nor a merciless battle royale: It’s a vast, ancient and intricate society. There is conflict in a forest, but there is also negotiation, reciprocity and perhaps even selflessness. The trees, understory plants, fungi and microbes in a forest are so thoroughly connected, communicative and codependent that some scientists have described them as superorganisms. …

“Together, these symbiotic partners knit Earth’s soils into nearly contiguous living networks of unfathomable scale and complexity. ‘I was taught that you have a tree, and it’s out there to find its own way,’ Simard told me. ‘It’s not how a forest works, though.’ ”

More at the New York Times, here.

Hat tip: Hannah.

Read Full Post »