Nature's Internet: The Vast, Intelligent Network Beneath Our Feet  

Posted by Big Gav in , , ,

Derrick Jensen (who I've always categorised as interesting, but fundamentally unhelpful) has an interview with Paul Stamets, author of Mycelium Running: How Mushrooms Can Help Save the World, in "The Sun Magazine" about the "Vast, Intelligent Network Beneath Our Feet" that few think about, but which has a huge influence on life on earth as we know it - Going Underground.

Fun fact: mycellium break down hydrocarbons.

When we think of fungi, most of us picture mushrooms, those slightly mysterious, potentially poisonous denizens of dark, damp places. But a mushroom is just the fruit of the mycelium, which is an underground network of rootlike fibers that can stretch for miles. Stamets calls mycelia the “grand disassemblers of nature” because they break down complex substances into simpler components. For example, some fungi can take apart the hydrogen-carbon bonds that hold petroleum products together. Others have shown the potential to clean up nerve-gas agents, dioxins, and plastics. They may even be skilled enough to undo the ecological damage pollution has wrought.

Since reading Mycelium Running, I’ve begun to consider the possibility that mycelia know something we don’t. Stamets believes they have not just the ability to protect the environment but the intelligence to do so on purpose. His theory stems in part from the fact that mycelia transmit information across their huge networks using the same neurotransmitters that our brains do: the chemicals that allow us to think. In fact, recent discoveries suggest that humans are more closely related to fungi than we are to plants.

Almost since life began on earth, mycelia have performed important ecological roles: nourishing ecosystems, repairing them, and sometimes even helping create them. The fungi’s exquisitely fine filaments absorb nutrients from the soil and then trade them with the roots of plants for some of the energy that the plants produce through photosynthesis. No plant community could exist without mycelia. I’ve long been a resident and defender of forests, but Stamets helped me understand that I’ve been misperceiving my home. I thought a forest was made up entirely of trees, but now I know that the foundation lies below ground, in the fungi.

Stamets became interested in biology in kindergarten, when he planted a sunflower seed in a paper cup and watched it sprout and lift itself toward the light. Somewhere along the way, he developed a fascination with life forms that grow not toward the sun but away from it. In the late seventies he got a Drug Enforcement Administration permit to research hallucinogenic psilocybin mushrooms at Evergreen State College in Washington. Stamets is now fifty-two and has studied mycelia for more than thirty years, naming five new species and authoring or coauthoring six books, including Growing Gourmet and Medicinal Mushrooms (Ten Speed Press) and The Mushroom Cultivator (Agarikon Press). He’s the founder and director of Fungi Perfecti (www.fungi.com), a company based outside Olympia, Washington, that provides mushroom research, information, classes, and spawn — the mushroom farmer’s equivalent of seed. Much of the company’s profits go to help protect endangered strains of fungi in the old-growth forests of the Pacific Northwest. I interviewed Stamets in June 2007.

Jensen: How many different types of mushrooms are there?

Stamets: There are an estimated one to two million species of fungi, of which about 150,000 form mushrooms. A mushroom is the fruit body — the reproductive structure — of the mycelium, which is the network of thin, cobweblike cells that infuses all soil. The spores in the mushroom are somewhat analogous to seeds. Because mushrooms are fleshy, succulent, fragrant, and rich in nutrients, they attract animals — including humans — who eat them and thereby participate in spreading the spores through their feces.

Our knowledge of fungi is far exceeded by our ignorance. To date, we’ve identified approximately 14,000 of the 150,000 species of mushroom-forming fungi estimated to exist, which means that more than 90 percent have not yet been identified. Fungi are essential for ecological health, and losing any of these species would be like losing rivets in an airplane. Flying squirrels and voles, for example, are dependent upon truffles, and in old-growth forests, the main predator of flying squirrels and voles is the spotted owl. This means that killing off truffles would kill off flying squirrels and voles, which would kill off spotted owls.

That’s just one food chain that we can identify; there are many thousands more we cannot. Biological systems are so complex that they far exceed our cognitive abilities and our linear logic. We are essentially children when it comes to our understanding of the natural world. ...

Jensen: Of course this raises the question of boundaries: Is that tomato-fungus-virus one entity or three? Where does one organism stop and the other begin?

Stamets: Well, humans aren’t just one organism. We are composites. Scientists label species as separate so we can communicate easily about the variety we see in nature. We need to be able to look at a tree and say it’s a Douglas fir and look at a mammal and say it’s a harbor seal. But, indeed, I speak to you as a unified composite of microbes. I guess you could say I am the “elected voice” of a microbial community. This is the way of life on our planet. It is all based on complex symbiotic relationships.

A mycelial “mat,” which scientists think of as one entity, can be thousands of acres in size. The largest organism in the world is a mycelial mat in eastern Oregon that covers 2,200 acres and is more than two thousand years old. Its survival strategy is somewhat mysterious. We have five or six layers of skin to protect us from infection; the mycelium has one cell wall. How is it that this vast mycelial network, which is surrounded by hundreds of millions of microbes all trying to eat it, is protected by one cell wall? I believe it’s because the mycelium is in constant biochemical communication with its ecosystem.

I think these mycelial mats are neurological networks. They’re sentient, they’re aware, and they’re highly evolved. They have external stomachs, which produce enzymes and acids to digest nutrients outside the mycelium, and then bring in those compounds that it needs for nutrition. As you walk through a forest, you break twigs underneath your feet, and the mycelium surges upward to capture those newly available nutrients as quickly as possible. I say they have “lungs,” because they are inhaling oxygen and exhaling carbon dioxide, just like we are. I say they are sentient, because they produce pharmacological compounds — which can activate receptor sites in our neurons — and also serotonin-like compounds, including psilocybin, the hallucinogen found in some mushrooms. This speaks to the fact that there is an evolutionary common denominator between fungi and humans. We evolved from fungi. We took an overground route. The fungi took the route of producing these underground networks that are highly resilient and extremely adaptive: if you disturb a mycelial network, it just regrows. It might even benefit from the disturbance.

I have long proposed that mycelia are the earth’s “natural Internet.” I’ve gotten some flak for this, but recently scientists in Great Britain have published papers about the “architecture” of a mycelium — how it’s organized. They focused on the nodes of crossing, which are the branchings that allow the mycelium, when there is a breakage or an infection, to choose an alternate route and regrow. There’s no one specific point on the network that can shut the whole operation down. These nodes of crossing, those scientists found, conform to the same mathematical optimization curves that computer scientists have developed to optimize the Internet. Or, rather, I should say that the Internet conforms to the same optimization curves as the mycelium, since the mycelium came first.



The subject of the great network of mycellium came up in Bruce Sterling's last "State of the world" gabfest, however Bruce gave it short shrift. Bruce's acolytes at WorldChanging are more enthusiastic about mushrooms though, so there is still a chance their filaments may spread throughout the Viridian world.
Well, if a hallucinatory network of intelligent fungal filaments is in charge of the planet's ecosystem, it needs to do a better damn job.

Y'know, as a science fiction writer, I dote on that kind of daft deep-green whimsy, I'm kind of a connoisseur of it. It's not much use in case of trouble, though. It's like going to a broken levee in New Orleans and signalling the sky with bottle rockets because, you know, the Space Brothers might help out.

8 comments

I've got enough heavyweight stuff sitting on the front page for the moment, so out of consideration for those with smaller amounts of bandwidth, I haven't embedded this TED Talk from Stamets on "6 ways mushrooms can save the world"

http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/paul_stamets_on_6_ways_mushrooms_can_save_the_world.html

Anonymous   says 12:41 PM

History moves like a slime-mold.

Only one of the Biochar studies I've seen have incorporate MYC/ VAM inoculates to their treatment groups.

Nitrogen Management and the Effects of Compost Tea on Organic Irish Potato and Sweet Corn
http://scholar.lib.vt.edu/theses/available/etd-06042008-164832/unrestricted/FINALThesisRoman.pdf

"Subplots (two beds, 23 m long) were in-row placement of Soil Biology Innovations granules at planting—control (no SBI) and SBI applied at 22-33 kg/ha (30#/Acre) (see Irish potato and sweet corn sections for different rates applied). SBI is a proprietary product (Bio-Char Group, Asheville, NC), composed of dehydrated compost tea absorbed on charcoal."

This study only states compost tea amended char, but I am told by the maker of SBI that MYC inoculum is also present.The VT study got a 20% increased yield in corn with this very low application rate.
(Most biochar studie's application rates have ranged 1% by volume to 30% at which growth benefits decline.)

I find this surprising in light of Johannes Lehmann recent work;

Mycorrhizal responses to biochar in soil – concepts
and mechanisms
Daniel D. Warnock & Johannes Lehmann &
Thomas W. Kuyper & Matthias C. Rillig

http://www.css.cornell.edu/faculty/lehmann/publ/PlantSoil%20300,%209-20,%202007,%20Warnock.pdf

Also,
posted on the TerraPreta/Bioenergy site http://terrapreta.bioenergylists.org/ , this presentation is one of the best I've seen to get across how MYC symbiotically permeates all in roots & soils, and elucidates often hidden benefits. Very nice pictures;
http://www.ars.usda.gov/SP2UserFiles/person/4947/Presentations/ScagelMycorrhizaeOhioCents06.pdf


Erich
540 289 9750

Thanks Erich - that last presentation you linked to is very informative.

If you look on youtube, there is a documentary where a shaman in the south american jungle used mushrooms to locate a missing donkey. This could only be done through use of an 'Earth Network' such as mycelium.

The part we are missing is the fact that consciousness is the interface between us and the network, rather than a material interface that we use for the computer internet.

I think this is why you take a 'Trip' when people take magic mushrooms. With work, it seems you can merge with its consciousness to obtain 'Earth Information'

Overview of Plant electrophysiology and its potential to create sonic art

http://www.pdfhost.net/index.php?Action=Download&File=338296f48fa85b357c17ffddebdb5dde

This paper presents a brief overview of plant electrophysiology and looks at some interesting recent research in the area of plant neurobiology.

Action potentials have been detected both in the root systems of plants [i] and the mycelia of fungi [ii]. Some research has been conducted on electrical activity in the myzcorrhizal network [iii] Another paper showed “action potentials in fungal mycelia signalling the availability of nutrients at the tips of hyphal chords” [iv]. However despite this tantalising data , to the authors knowledge no research has been done on whether action potentials can cross from the root systems of plants to the mycelia and back to the roots of other trees via the Arbuscular mycorrhizal network.
http://augustineleudar.tumblr.com

Beans’ talk
Talk about Agricultural experimentation.
Here's the next collaboration I would like to ferment with char as a variable;

I'm just saying, the microbial mechanism side, plant signaling, is where I would love to see char as a variable in the Bean's conversations.
Never seen the mesh sieves used before, maybe suggest a collaboration or hookup Dr. David Johnson of the University of Aberdeen to the UK Biochar organizations ;

Beans’ talk
http://www.economist.com/news/science-and-technology/21580443-vegetables-employ-fungi-carry-messages-between-them-beans-talk

Ya hear me,
Erich

Thanks Erich - I hadn't seen that one.

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