Fungi expand underground through their mycelium, creating a network of living tissue that connects everything. But, in reality, we have barely heard about them. Not even science has given them adequate attention, even though they are the invisible cushion of the biosphere. The mycelia would create a vast interconnection on Earth, which would interconnect the biosphere, in the same way, that a red network between plants and living beings on Pandora allows the Na’vi people, in James Cameron’s film Avatar, to communicate with each other, the superorganism made up of its planet, through the mother tree.
Mycelium, or mycosis, is a fungus that expands underground, creating a network of connections between all plant species. When a tree in the forest is cut down, this mycelium communicates to too many trees in the forest that one of them is dying and all the other trees through the mycelium begin to care for the remaining trunk to try to save that life. Do you know what mycelium is? Whoever made the Avatar movie knew it.
Mycelia, the “hidden” part of fungi, are mattresses made up of tangles of interconnected filaments that extend hundreds of kilometers in the equivalent of a square foot, capable of connecting the world’s forests with soil nutrients. With a design similar to that of the nerve or brain cells of complex organisms (also the Internet), mycelia regulate communication between the soil, its nutrients, and the forests. They form a spongy, invisible mattress that silently decomposes plant matter and has the potential to heal (antibiotics) and save the world (they can feed on oil and pesticides, organic substances that they convert into simple carbohydrates).
These filaments are invisible to humans, although crucial, part of fungi. They constitute the underground tissue capable of supporting fungi, which often reach the surface of the undergrowth. Their appearance is, in fact, very similar to a conceptual representation of the interconnections created by the Internet, and perhaps even more similar to brain tissue seen from a microscope, they are capable of extending their branches at high speed (more than 1 mm per hour), They absorb nutrients through millions of unicellular filaments.
The most gigantic specimen has an area of 9.7 square kilometers (971 hectares, or 2,400 acres), the equivalent of 1,665 football fields. It is 2,200 years old (the mushroom began to form when Carthage and the Republic of Rome ended the hegemony of Hellenistic Greece in the Mediterranean).
To understand the weight of these filaments, we must understand how they help their ecosystem. Returning to the gigantic specimen, for example, it has destroyed on several occasions the forest that grows on the surface of the land it occupies and, during this process, by being able to benefit from the nutrients of the forest mass, it builds deeper layers of soil that allow the growth of ever larger trees.
For that reason, they are the great recyclers of the planet and the vanguard species in habitat restoration.
This story was written in Spanish by Perla Vallejo in Ecoosfera
