For some time now I have been in the midst of a wonderful new (to me) exploration of a vast kingdom, whose species are greater in number than those of the plant and animal kingdoms, mostly unseen to the human eye, barely explored and a world that we walk over and past everyday without registering its existence. Fungi.

Although I’ve been photographing mushrooms in the forest for years now and enjoying their colours, textures and the delight of finding them, and although I was vaguely aware that below these visible fruits lay mycelium networks hidden below the surface of the earth I Had No Idea of what was really going on. Interest sparked by the Netflix documentary Fantastic Fungi, a film that makes “the invisible visible”, I have gone down the rabbit hole (perhaps pun intended) of this fascinating story of this world that is so complex and so key to life on this planet. This film is on the top of my Hot Tips list – the cinematography is amazingly beautiful and its stories are eye-opening, if not mind-blowing.

I’ve been reading everything I can get my hands on, books and articles, listening to interviews, watching other documentaries and generally having a fine time with those whose enthusiasm for the subject is contagious. People who work in the growing field of mycology are an interesting bunch.

Merlin Sheldrake in the introduction to his book Entangled Life describes this fascinating world :

“Fungi are everywhere but they are easy to miss. They are inside and around you. They sustain you and all that you depend on. As you read 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…Yet they live their lives largely hidden from view, and over 90% of their species remain undocumented.”

Here’s what I’ve been learning.

FUNGI 101

The mushrooms I’ve been searching for and photographing on my walks are only a tiny, visible part of the fungi kingdom.

All mushrooms are fungi but not all fungi produce mushrooms. Mushrooms are the fruiting bodies of certain fungi that surface from underground to release the spores, carried away by wind and creatures to reproduce themselves. Only a fraction of the fungi species reproduce in this way, others have different ways of getting the job done. Fungi themselves are masses of long, thin filaments called “hyphae” and a collection of these hyphae in a single specimen are called “mycelium”. Fungi grow by lengthening and branching the hyphae – creating a vast network. When I stand on the forest floor, I am standing on these masses of entangled strands of mycelium that if stretched out would reach out for miles.

Scientists believe that there are probably millions of species of fungi on earth (estimates of plant species are 320,000-380,000 and living animal species number about 1,500,000) but only a fraction of that have been “discovered” and named and of these only a few tens of thousands produce the visible and easier to find and categorize mushrooms. New species are continually being added to the lists of what is known, as the field of mycology itself is growing.

Unlike plants, fungi cannot produce their own nutrition. Some obtain it from decaying organic matter (decomposers), some by growing on their host plant (parasites) in some cases harming them, some are predators of nematodes and bacteria, and some form partnerships with plants, getting their nutritional needs from them via carbon in the atmosphere in exchange for providing water and minerals from the soil.

THE WOOD WIDE WEB

This latter relationship has been revealed as one of the most fascinating areas of current research. The plant-fungus symbiosis (mycorrhizae) is one of the most common ways the two interact for their mutual benefit. Over 90% of plants take on mycorrhizal fungal partners and without them would stop growing or die. Without their plant partners, almost all mycorrhizal fungi will die. This inter-connected relationship is one of the most important in sustaining life on the planet.

In this relationship the plant produces sugars through photosynthesis and feeds the fungus through their roots. The fungus absorbs water and minerals and other chemicals from the soil and feeds these to the plants. A single tree can have several different fungus species partners and a single fungus can attach to the roots of numerous trees. This underground network of plant roots and fungi mycelium supporting each other has been called “the wood wide web”, and has caught the imagination of both scientists and popular culture (think of James Cameron’s movie Avatar and even Lord of the Rings}. What happens to one, affects all.

It’s been a few decades since the scientific research has been revealed that shows that it is cooperation not competition that drives the relationship between tree species in the forests where trees share nutrient resources with each other via fungi and the implications this has for forest management and clear-cutting and monoculture replanting practices. Industry and government policy makers have been slow to change, no surprise there. Interesting how vision clouded by attachment to old ignorance and pursuit of money keeps on keeping on.

As I walk in the forest now, my imagination is caught by the ground under my feet, as I think of all the action taking place there. When I look at the trees I don’t just focus on a single tree or an indistinguishable mass of them. Instead I think of how they are all connected, sharing nutrients and passing chemical signals between them all through these vast, mycelium fungal networks.

My neighbours have become used to seeing me wandering around with eyes lifted looking for owls. Now I’ve been caught in the act of bending on one knee, poking around on the forest floor, sometimes with flashlight in hand, searching for the pale, thin strands of mycellium in fallen tree trunks and limbs and the outward signs of hidden fungi – their mushrooms. It’s all there to find, if you look.

Next: Fungi decomposers and what happens when fungi meets human imagination