See the wood for the trees It’s hard to fathom that sometimes the most familiar of things you look at everyday are not what you think they are at all. When it comes to the secret lives of trees, there could be nothing more astounding than the discoveries of recent years. Researchers from all around the world are now agreeing that forest trees are like a society and are communicating to each other about their environment through an internet-like fungus. By Richard Forsyth
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hen you see the domes of mushrooms sprouting in clusters on the forest floor, what you can’t see is the thin, wiry, tangled lattice of silver threads (mycelium) where the fungus spreads underground. These sprawling fungal networks connect, infect and wrap around plant and tree roots in what’s known as a mycorrhizal network, a symbiotic bond of roots and fungus. There could be hundreds of kilometres of the threads under your very feet, with every step you take in a forest. The fungus, which of course cannot photosynthesise, will identify, locate and collect the nutrients and water in the soil and gift it to the roots of trees in an exchange for photosynthate (sugar) from the tree. This is a ‘win-win’ woodland relationship. As the fungus links up trees directly, even ones far away, it has facilitated another useful purpose – becoming the hardwiring for a kind of organic information superhighway, a natural living internet, passing information from tree to tree. This mycorrhizal network delivers a mixture of chemical and electrical activity to make ‘news flashes’ for trees. The comparison to the internet is so obvious, that it’s been coined the ‘wood wide web’ by scientists involved in this research. And there are several scientists that are excited by this, in different parts of the world.
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Woodland community Suzanne Simard, of the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, has become the reference point of this research when she was published in the Nature journal with her startling discoveries, back in 1997. It was one of those landmark research piece’s, that really shook up the way people perceived forests. In her own words, many thought she was ‘crazy’ for pursuing her study but she saw the research through, with truly astounding results. Her studies showed that douglas fir and paper birch trees can transfer carbon between them via this fungal network. Carbon transfer translates to food distribution. It became apparent that the ‘wood wide net’ also has an online free delivery option attached to it. Although this theory had been, to some extent, already demonstrated in a lab, she conducted experiments in the forest to find out more about the phenomena within the natural environment, to put a context on this method of exchange. She used two isotopes, including Carbon-13 and a radioactive isotope, Carbon-14 (radiocarbon), to trace the biological reactions in the organic material – also armed with a Geiger counter, microscopes and a toolbox of scientific equipment, borrowed from her University. Her extensive experiments proved that trees could feed each
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