“Mother trees” use fungal systems to feed the forest
By Cori Howard
Suzanne Simard always had a fetish for soil. As a kid growing up in the British Columbia Interior, she loved digging for worms. Little did she know that she would spend most of her career exploring dirt. Now a forest ecologist at the University of British Columbia, Simard helped make the major finding, first published in the journal Nature, that trees and plants communicate. She discovered an underground web of fungi that connects trees and plants together and shuttles resources, allowing trees to help one another survive and thrive.
Simard noticed brilliant white and yellow fungal threads in the forest floor. Many of these fungi were mycorrhizal, living in tree roots. Through microscopic examination and experimentation, she realized the fungi were transporting carbon, water and nutrients between trees, depending on which needed it most. “The big trees were subsidizing the young ones through the fungal networks,” explains Simard. “Without this helping hand, most of the seedlings wouldn’t make it.”
Mycorrhizal networks exist in ecosystems around the world (and were featured in the movieAvatar), and Simard’s research has shown that without “Mother Trees” — the big trees that dominate forests and are connected to all other trees — efforts at regeneration often fail. Her latest results reveal that when a Mother Tree is cut down, the survival rate of new seedlings is very low. The implications for the forest industry and conservation groups are huge: conserve Mother Trees and preserve mycorrhizal networks, or we could lose our forests.
Taken from: http://www.canadiangeographic.ca/magazine/jf11/fungal_systems.asp
Taken from: http://www.canadiangeographic.ca/magazine/jf11/fungal_systems.asp
