Mycorrhizal mushrooms are the soil supply chains. With filaments thinner than hair, they close the vital nutrients to plants and roots of trees.
In return, mushrooms receive carbon to develop their networks. In this way, 13 billion tonnes of atmospheric carbon dioxide – a third of fossil fuel emissions worldwide – enter the ground each year.
These mushrooms cannot live alone; They need plant carbon. In turn, 80% of world plants are on fungal networks to survive and prosper. Both are dependent business partners.
These fungi make strangely intelligent choices, even without brain or central nervous system. Scientists describe them as “living algorithms”.
Commercial algorithms reward efficiency: building the most lucrative path possible for the lowest cost of construction.
Fungal networks seem to assess demand and supply. What plants need its nutrients most? What offers the most carbon? Where is the optimal gain? This analysis shapes how networks develop, as scientists have learned when they have mapped growth in real time.
“Mushrooms are super intelligent,” said Toby Kiers, an evolutionary biologist and director of the Society for the Protection of Underground Networks, a research organization. “They constantly adapt their commercial routes. They very precisely evaluate their environment. This is a lot of decision -making. »»
How do mushrooms do? To find out, Dr. Kiers and his colleagues cultivated mushrooms in hundreds of petri boxes, or “fungal arenas”.
Then, with an imaging robot, the team followed the growth of the networks constantly for days, measuring how the organizations reshaped their commercial routes in response to different conditions. Their study was published on February 26 in the journal Nature.
Special nodes or growing advice, mushrooms deploy filaments that explore and assess a new territory. Over several days, scientists marked and watched half a million new knots and mapped the expansion.
Growth revealed fungal decision -making in action. In previous work, the team has learned that a fungus will give up negotiation with the roots nearby in favor of more distant if the return in carbon is higher.
Fungal networks are sometimes described as the circulatory system of the soil.
But in fungal networks, the flow is open. Carbon, nitrogen, phosphorus, water and even fungal nuclei move in both directions, even in opposite directions at the same time.
“It’s physically breathtaking,” said Tom Shimizu, a biophysicist at Amolf, an Amsterdam physics institute, and the laboratory of which built the robot. The fungus, he said, “is essentially a microbe that plays economic games. How do you do this if you are just a flowing fluid tube?
They do it by obeying certain basic local rules, it turns out that. As growing advice is progressing, the new branches are formed behind them at a regular rate. But when a point strikes another, they merge and form a loop.
This removes dead ends, avoids the expansion of waste and maintains the resources that quickly move on the main highways. The edge of the fungal network develops as a undulation, fixing an effective trading link as you go.
Scientists always want to understand how mushrooms are moving as much carbon so far without obstructing the pipes. And they hope to simulate how these ancient organizations react to forest fires, drought and other disturbances in climate change. “We are trying to understand how they play the games they play,” said Dr. Shimizu.
Credits: Corentin Bisot – Amolf / Vu Amsterdam; Loreto Oyarte Gálvez – seen Amsterdam / Amolf; Rachael Cargill – seen Amsterdam / Amolf; Vasilis Kokkoris – seen Amsterdam / Amolf / Spun; Joe Togerier / Spun; LOKE VUGS; Saša Spačal.
Produced by Antonio de Luca And Elijah Walker.