Wood Wide Web

WOOD WIDE WEB
A Mycorrhizal network (also known as a common mycorrhizal network or CMN) is an

underground network found in forests and other plant communities, created by
the hyphae of mychorrizal fungi joining with plant roots. This network connects individual plants
together and transfers water, carbon, nitrogen, and other nutrients and minerals between participants.
Wood Wide Web Giclee Print from artist Molly Costello

Below you find a microscopy image of a cross-cut through a root colonized by a mycorrhizal fungus.
In green you see the fungus, and in red you see the plant cells. Can you distinguish how the fungus
forms an entire ring (the mantle) around the root, and how it has pushed the outermost root cells apart
to grow in between them? It’s in the area, where the fungus grows in between the root cells, that the
magic of this partnership happens: root and fungus start to exchange nutrients with each other and
foster their respective growth.
Cross-cut through a mycorrhizal root with a large fungal mantle around the root.
Magnified cross-cut through a mycorrhizal root. The small green circles are hyphae growing between
the plant cells (larger round/oval shapes).
The wood wide web has many functions. It can help trees gain access to nutrients such as nitrogen
and phosphorous. By surrounding the roots, the fungi can also protect roots from drought and soil-
living herbivores. The fungi have also often a great capacity to absorb and detoxify contaminants,
which can be chemicals or heavy metals. Therefore on old industrial sites, phytoremediation, which is
cleaning the soil using plants, can benefit from fungal contribution. However, whether the wood wide
web really shares its nutrients with the tree partners can depend on the soil quality. As our
collaborators recently discovered, the nutrient exchange between trees and fungi in the forest soil is
under control under a complex market strategy, that still haven’t understood in depth.
Prof Thomas Crowther, one of the authors of the report, told the BBC, "It's the first time that we've
been able to understand the world beneath our feet, but at a global scale."
change - and how vulnerable they are to the effects of it.
The research reveals how important mycorrhizal networks are to limiting climate
"Just like an MRI scan of the brain helps us to understand how the brain works, this global map of the
fungi beneath the soil helps us to understand how global ecosystems work," said Prof Crowther.
"What we find is that certain types of microorganisms live in certain parts of the world, and by
understanding that we can figure out how to restore different types of ecosystems and also how the
climate is changing."
Losing chunks of the wood wide web could well increase "the feedback loop of warming temperatures
and carbon emissions".
Mycorrhizal fungi are those that form a symbiotic relationship with plants.
There are two main groups of mycorrhizal fungi: arbuscular fungi (AM) that penetrate the hosts's
roots, and ectomycorrhizal fungi (EM) which surround the tree's roots without penetrating them.
Scientists are warning that pollution could be starving Europe's

trees of vital nutrients by damaging essential fungi.
• The fungi live on the roots of trees, supplying them with minerals and water.
• Current pollution limits may not be strict enough to protect the forest fungi, say researchers.
• Signs of tree malnutrition, such as discoloured or missing leaves, have been seen across
Europe's forests.
Double life
Fungi can be found living on the roots of trees, providing vital nutrients and water.
Known by the truffles and mushrooms formed by some species, they can live for decades beneath the
surface, growing to several square metres in size.
These fungi, known as mycorrhizal fungi, receive carbon from the tree in exchange for essential
nutrients, like nitrogen, phosphorous and potassium, which they take up from the soil.
The researchers studied 40,000 roots from 13,000 soil samples at 137 forest sites in 20 European
countries, including the UK, over 10 years.
They found local air and soil quality have a large impact on mycorrhizae.
The implications of the Wood Wide Web far exceed this basic exchange of goods between plant and
fungi, however. The fungal network also allows plants to distribute resources—sugar, nitrogen, and
phosphorus—between one another. A dying tree might divest itself of its resources to the benefit of
the community, for example, or a young seedling in a heavily shaded understory might be supported
with extra resources by its stronger neighbours .Even more remarkably, the network also allows
plants to send one another warnings. A plant under attack from aphids can indicate to a nearby plant
that it should raise its defensive response before the aphids reach it. for example, or a young seedling
in a heavily shaded understory might be supported with extra resources by its stronger neighbours.
Even more remarkably, the network also allows plants to send one another warnings. A plant under
attack from aphids can indicate to a nearby plant that it should raise its defensive response before the
aphids reach it.
Insights in the research of the network

Sheldrake is twenty-eight years old and tall, with a tight head of dark curls. As an undergraduate
studying natural sciences at Cambridge, in the late aughts, Sheldrake read the 1988 paper
“Mycorrhizal Links Between Plants: Their Functioning and Ecological Significance,” by the plant
scientist E. I. Newman, in which Newman argued boldly for the existence of a “mycelial network”
linking plants. “If this phenomenon is widespread,” Newman wrote, “it could have profound
implications for the functioning of ecosystems.”
Those implications fascinated Sheldrake. He had long loved fungi, which seemed to him possessed
of superpowers. He knew that they could turn rocks to rubble, move with eerie swiftness both above
ground and under it, reproduce horizontally, and digest food outside their bodies via excreted
enzymes. He was aware that their toxins could kill people, and that their psychoactive chemicals
could induce hallucinogenic states. After reading Newman’s paper, he understood that fungi could
also allow plants to communicate with one another.
He once said “You could imagine the fungi themselves as forming a massive underground tree, or as a
cobweb of fine filaments, acting as a sort of prosthesis to the trees, a further root system, extending
outwards into the soil, acquiring nutrients and floating them back to the plants, as the plants fix carbon
in their leaves and send sugar to their roots, and out into the fungi. And this is all happening right under
our feet.”
“Soil is fantastically difficult stuff to work with experimentally, and the hyphae are on the whole too thin
to see,” he said. “You can put rhizotrons into the ground to look at root growth—but those don’t really
give you the fungi because they are too fine. You can do below-ground laser scanning, but again that
is too crude for the fungal networks.”
“Hyphae will be growing around in the decomposing matter of this half-rotting leaf, those rotting logs,
and those rotting twigs, and then you’ll have the mycorrhizal fungi whose hyphae grow into hotspots,”
Sheldrake said. In addition to penetrating the tree roots, the hyphae also interpenetrate each other—
mycorrhizal fungi on the whole don’t have divisions between their cells. “This interpenetration permits
the wildly promiscuous horizontal transfer of genetic material. “The kingdom of the gray.” It captured
their otherness: the challenges fungi issued to our usual models of time, space, scale, and species.
“You look at the network,” Sheldrake said. “And then it starts to look back at you.”
A central debate over the Wood Wide Web concerns the language used to describe the transactions it
enables, which suggest two competing visions of the network: the socialist forest, in which trees act as
caregivers to one another, with the well-off supporting the needy, and the capitalist forest, in which all
entities are acting out of self-interest within a competitive system. Sheldrake was especially
exasperated by what he called the “super-neoliberal capitalist” discourse of the biological free market.
One of the reasons Sheldrake loved the Voyria, he explained, is that they were harder to understand,
mysterious: “They are the hackers of the Wood Wide Web.”
WE could equally view the exchanges as smaller trees stealing carbon

from larger ones, or as the entirely incidental side effect of mycorrhiza
growing on multiple trees. But whatever the slant, it’s clear that “even
a very mixed forest is much more connected than we thought”
The relationship between mycorrhizal fungi and the plants they connect is now
known to be ancient—around four hundred and fifty million years
old. Illustration by Enzo Pérès-Labourdette

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WOOD WIDE WEB

A Mycorrhizal network (also known as a common mycorrhizal network or CMN) is an

Wood Wide Web Giclee Print from artist Molly Costello

Scientists are warning that pollution could be starving Europe's

Insights in the research of the network

WE could equally view the exchanges as smaller trees stealing carbon

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