Tag Archives: fungal networks

The Secret Life of Fungi

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The Kingdom: How Fungi Made Our World: Fungi Are ...

Prototaxetis fungi

Fungal Empire

Directed by Annamaria Talas and Simon Nasht (2018)

Film Review

Featuring environmental activist David Suzuki, this documentary explains that fungi are the oldest life form on Earth, dating back 1 billion years. Scientists have recently reclassified them as a separate from either plants or animals. Although they eat other organisms, as animals do, like plants, they also have the ability to continually change their structure as they search for food.

With their ability to break down rock to extract minerals, fungi created all the soil supporting land-based plants.

Five hundred million years ago, the first single-celled plant (algae) moved from water to land, where it formed a symbiotic relationship with the fungus it found. Now nearly every plant on Earth is nurtured through a symbiotic relationship with fungi. Fungi provide complex plant species with essential minerals while the plants provide fungi with sugars they manufacture via photosynthesis.

For millennia, planet Earth was dominated by gigantic eight meter tall fungi called prototaxetis. Found on every continent, their dominance ended with the advent of insects and large trees. New fungi evolved to form a symbiotic relationship with trees that made forests possible.

Presently vast underground fungal networks (that Suzuki calls the woodwide web) connect trees with one another. “Mother” trees use the network to send sugars to younger and weaker trees, as well as to transmit danger signals about environmental threats.

Following an asteroid collision 66 million years ago wiping out 70% of Earth’s species, fungi again became the dominant species. Because they were cold-blooded, large reptiles like dinosaurs were helpless to fight off fungal infections. This gave a clear advantage to warm-blooded mammals, who are resistant to all but a handful of fungal infections.

Unsurprisingly new evidence suggests the first grains humankind domesticated were chosen for their suitability to be fermented by fungi into beer. The discovery of grains suitable for bread making occurred much later.

https://dai.ly/x6vx06h

How Trees Communicate

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Intelligent Trees

Dragons Eyes Films

Film Review

This documentary examines the latest research into the extensive underground fungal networks trees use to communicate with one another. .

The film follows actual laboratory and forest experiments showing how trees use these networks (which resemble brain-neural networks), not only to share sugar and other nutrients, but to transmit complex electrochemical injury signals. The latter function a lot like neurostransmitters in animals.

I was very surprised to learn that trees live in tightly knit communities just as people do. Most of the research has investigated “mother” trees that demonstrate fostering behavior with daughter trees of the same species. However there is also strong evidence that trees of differing species also engage in cooperative behavior. Scientist believe this is why trees in monoculture forest plantations are less likely to thrive than diverse native forests that evolve naturally.

 

 

https://vimeo.com/341147972

How Industrial Farming Destroys Complex Plant Interrelationships

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What Plants Talk About

PBS (2014)

Film Review

The title of this documentary is misleading, as it focuses more on plant behavior than on plant communication. The latter is surprisingly similar to animal behavior in many respects. Research shows plants forage for food (via their roots), just as animals do. Like animals they also have complex social relationships with other plants. Not only do they compete aggressively with other plants for light and nutrients, but they share nutrients with sister plants and band together to fight off predators. For example, plants give off distress hormones when they’re attacked, and selective plants (such as lupins) give off noxious substances that protect all the plants around them.

In forests, mother trees have bee found to nurture daughter trees that are too shaded to produce their own sugars via photosynthesis. By injecting large mother trees with carbon-14, scientists discovered they were transferring sugars through their roots to young saplings that surrounded them.

In a forest trees establish vast cooperative networks with fungi that exchange nutrients they capture from soil for the sugars trees produce.

These complex networks are destroyed by industrial agriculture. Plowing and heavy use of synthetic fertilizers, pesticides and herbicides destroy the vast fungal network essential for healthy plant growth. This is the main reason why organic farming – which preserves vital soil organisms – produces much higher overall yields than industrial agriculture.