The world is inhabited by fauna, flora and FUNGA.
“As you are reading these words, fungi are changing the way that life happens, as they have done for more than a billion years. They are eating rock, making soil, digesting pollutants, nourishing and killing plants, surviving in space, inducing visions, producing food, making medicines, manipulating animal behavior and influencing the composition of the Earth’s atmosphere.”
-Merlin Sheldrake, Entangled Life.
Funga, one of life’s kingdoms. They are everywhere but mostly go unnoticed. I can assure you you’ve been in contact with them, when taking a sip of your beer, biting into your sandwich, or even when taking antibiotics.
Fungi can be single-celled, as is the case with yeast, or multicellular like mushrooms. Mushrooms are the most well-known form of the fungi, but they are actually only the fruit of the organism. To disperse its spores, the fungus exposes itself to the world. Underground, it hides in the form of tiny tubular filaments called hyphae which combined make up mycelium, large systems that inhabit almost all ecosystems around the world.
Underneath visible vegetation, fungi inhabit the soil and covertly regulate its biology and chemistry through several mechanisms, including symbiotic relationships and decomposition.
The Wood Wide Web
The symbiotic relationship between mycelium and plants is known as mycorrhiza (meaning ‘fungus-root’) and functions as a trading system: the sugars and fats that plants produce through photosynthesis are traded for nutrients and water that the mycelium absorbs from depths out of reach of the plants’ roots. This exchange is possible thanks to the tightness with which the hyphae wrap around plant roots, allowing nutrients and chemicals to flow from the fungi to the plant.
The extent of mycorrhiza is so large it has come to be known as the ‘Wood Wide Web’, its intricacy and size relatable to that of the internet.
Astonishingly, this web has also been used by plants of the same species to send warning signs to one another: when under a threat a plant can send a warning message to their neighbours, in the form of volatile organic compounds, who respond by preparing their own defence weapons to deter the attacker, be it a pest or a disease.
Foliar Forensics
Although occurring underground, this symbiosis is even visible from above thanks to its effect on tree canopy chemistries. New technology of imaging spectroscopy is improving our knowledge of global distributions of mycorrhiza: Satellite missions are aiming to catch the subtle but detectable influence of mycorrhizae on the structure and composition of forests. These insights could allow the incorporation of forest composition into Earth system models, to improve the modelling of carbon, nitrogen, and phosphorus cycling.
There is no regeneration without degradation
Our biosphere relies on recycling to regenerate the nutrients that sustain life. One of the fundamental recycling processes is the breakdown of organic matter, which is essential to recover nutrients from dead organisms and insert back into the cycle. This process heavily depends on fungi, which play a key role in decomposing organic material.
Although fungi break the matter into smaller, digestible components for their own benefit this behaviour supports plants around them too, making the food source available to the wider community. The hyphae explore the soil for food and secrete organic acids to breakdown whatever they find. They often deal with plant matter that contains the phosphorus that the plants had absorbed throughout their life cycle. As fungi decompose the buried plants, they recycle them back into the ecosystem, making it available for living plants.
This synergy can be beneficial for our crops as well since it facilitates the uptake of nutrients from the soil. But instead of taking advantage of what is naturally present in the ground, existing agricultural practices prefer to rid the soil of the fungi, and then replace the source of nutrients with inorganic fertilisers. How counter-intuitive.
Although the introduction of these fertilisers boosted the yields of the crops, recent studies have shown the actual nutrient content in crops has declined. These results have spurred farmers to commercially harness mycorrhiza to improve crop health and productivity. Particularly vigorous strains of mycorrhizal fungi have been successfully used as a soil inoculant, effectively extending the plant root system through mycelium.
Deep collaboration can catalyse planetary regeneration.
By acknowledging the importance of fungi in maintaining a healthy and stable ecosystem, not only can we can implement strategies to allow them to thrive, but we can try to imitate them.
Like fungi, we should strive to create a symbiotic relationship with the surrounding environment, changing our perspective to understand that we are an integral part of the biosphere, living within and interacting with a system that responds to our actions.
