The mushrooms that many people think of as classic fungi, for example, are just the spore-forming appendages of larger organisms that are typically hidden from view. Desai/ Scienceĭespite their ubiquity and importance, however, fungi challenge biological paradigms and have defied easy description. “Wherever there are roots,” Kiers says, “there are fungi.” N. And some fungi construct intricate underground webs known as mycelium that can stretch for kilometers. (Roughly speaking, “mycorrhiza” means “fungal root.”) Some plants get up to 80% of their phosphorus-a vital nutrient-from fungi. To this day, most land plants access water and nutrients in part by partnering with mycorrhizal fungi that grow on-and often into-their roots. By breaking down rock and freeing up nutrients, they helped plants colonize land some 500 million years ago. They evolved hundreds of millions of years before land plants and animals. “It’s amazing there are philanthropists that have the vision and interest to support this type of activity.”Īppreciated or not, fungi are integral to Earth’s ecosystems. “I don’t think anything like this has ever happened before,” says Kabir Peay, a mycologist at Stanford University who advises SPUN. “I am rather skeptical that we will really learn a lot from this big science project.”īut SPUN’s effort to make soil fungi more visible is being welcomed by most mycologists, who often feel as overlooked as the organisms they study.
Mapping “a single class of microorganism seems to me too limited to come to an understanding of the big picture,” says Heribert Hirt, a plant scientist at the King Abdullah University of Science and Technology. Others question whether the surveys will appreciably add to what scientists already know, in part because SPUN is only studying one segment of the fungal community: those that form associations with plant roots. Some researchers, however, harbor doubts that SPUN’s mapping effort will have much practical impact, noting that conservationists are already protecting forests and other ecosystems that harbor fungi and store planet-warming carbon. Mycologist Toby Kiers marks a fungi sampling plot in Chile’s Valdivia National Reserve. Celebrities such as primatologist Jane Goodall and best-selling author Michael Pollan have signed on as SPUN advisers. (“I really love jumpsuits,” Kiers says.) A documentary video crew followed SPUN scientists on their first expedition, into Chile. They wear customized blue jumpsuits emblazoned with “PROTECT THE UNDERGROUND” for publicity photos and when working in the field. SPUN researchers describe themselves as “myconauts” heading into the unknown. The project launched last fall with a media-savvy campaign, including slick videos, arguing that society must do more to study and protect fungi to safeguard biodiversity and curb climate change. “We have to figure out where they are and what they’re doing.” “Up to 50% of the living biomass of soils are these networks,” says ecologist Toby Kiers of VU Amsterdam, a co-founder of SPUN and one of the leaders of the Chile expedition. It has raised some $3.5 million for an ambitious effort to map the global distribution of mycorrhizal fungi, which can create subterranean networks that are thought to play a key, but often overlooked, role in shaping ecosystems.
The April ascent was also a road test of sorts: the first of many surveys that the Society for the Protection of Underground Networks (SPUN), a new fungus-focused nonprofit, hopes to conduct. “I wouldn’t be surprised if there are 100 undescribed species” of fungi in each bag, said mycologist Giuliana Furci, founder of the Chilean nonprofit Fungi Foundation and one of the expedition leaders. By the end of an exhausting day that included bushwhacking through heavy brush, the fungi hunters had filled seven small plastic sacks with dirt from different locations. The multinational research team had come to collect soil samples they hoped would, with help from DNA testing, reveal exactly which fungi live here, and how they support this complex assemblage of flora. Chile’s famed Araucaria-commonly called monkey puzzle trees-soon appeared, their spiny branches curving jauntily upward like so many cats’ tails.īeneath the majestic trees, the scientists were focused on something far less glamorous-indeed, mostly invisible: mycorrhizal fungi, tiny organisms that intertwine with roots of the Araucaria and nearly all the other plants in this forest.
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Download PDFĬhile’s Villarrica National Park-As a motley medley of mycologists climbed the basalt slopes of the Lanín volcano earlier this year, the green foliage at lower elevations gave way to autumnal golds and reds. A version of this story appeared in Science, Vol 377, Issue 6602.
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