The Secret Language of Trees Dominika Front
You’re walking in a lush forest, admiring the spreading branches of tall trees. The birds are chirping, the sun is shining through the leaves, painting golden stripes on the forest floor. Yet while enjoying such a walk, few people would think that anything exciting is happening under the layer of branches, dead leaves, and ferns. You’d be quite surprised. Down below, a vast web of fungal hyphae stretches out, penetrating each square centimetre of soil and forming a channel for trees to communicate.
Fungi branch out their hyphae so that they collectively make up the mycelium – the fungus’s body. Not only does this complex root system allow the tree and fungus to get what they need, but it also connects the tree roots together forming mycorrhizal networks, such as the common mycelial network (CMN). According to a global project by the Society for the Protection of Underground Networks (SPUN): “A single gram of soil can contain up to 90 meters of mycelium. The total length of mycorrhizal mycelium in the top ten centimeters of soil is around 450 quadrillion kilometers: around half the width of our galaxy.”
The fungal network grows around tree roots and penetrates them, absorbing the excess sugars that the tree obtained during photosynthesis. The sugars are indispensable for the survival of the fungi. In turn, the fungi provide the tree with nutrients from the soil, such as phosphorus and nitrogen. In other words – a win-win type of situation. This process is called mycorrhizas, a symbiosis between a plant and a fungus.
The complexity of the CMN does not end there. There are hundreds of species of mycorrhizal fungi; there are roughly 3 trillion trees on our planet and each tree can cooperate with dozens of fungi. These results in unique connections between individual trees and their own set of fungi. Together, they make up the CMN or, as it was dubbed by Nature in 1997, the Wood Wide Web. This name is a perfect fit for two reasons. First, it coincided with the dissemination of the Internet; second, there is a parallel between the CMN and the Internet (but more or that later).
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