Wood wide web: Trees' social networks are mapped (2019)

Great to see an article on mycorrhizal fungi! They’re an essential and under appreciated part of our ecosystem.

Admittedly though this article is a very skimmed over purview of mycorrhizae’s roles. Their contention that EM fungi store more carbon than AM fungi, for example, is dubious, but I’ll have to dig into the source paper to see their citations.

The realty is both AMF and EMF will sequester carbon. AMF for example produce a substance called glomalin which is a carbon store and soil glue basically, but in soils where mycorrhizal fungi are present, glomalin alone can make up up to 30% of the soil carbon. And glomalin effectively only comes from AMF (from the genus Glomus). Hence my hesitation to accept that EMF are responsible for more carbon sequestration than AMF.

Besides that nitpicking, it’s great to hear this dataset is now available tho because, amongst other things, it’ll be incredibly useful for helping predict good matches between mycorrhizal inoculant and any particular ecosystem of interest. Or for example, in my case, when hunting for new wild sources of mycorrhizal strains I can now make more educated decisions on where to collect samples.

Strange dream the other day... Green lettuce levitates out off the French dressing, shakes it off like a dog, bends spacetime and is gone.

I belive putting walls/stone/steel around tree roots is cruelty :(