Fungal highways are vast, yet hidden underground – new study |
Beneath our feet lie some of the largest living organisms on Earth. Fungi are mostly invisible and largely overlooked, but they help sustain the ecosystems and food systems that we depend on every day.
In a new global study, colleagues and I have mapped Earth’s vast underground networks of arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi. These fungi are invisible to the naked eye and form partnerships with the roots of most land plants. Their hyphae – fungal thread-like filaments – explore soil that roots cannot reach. This helps plants acquire water and nutrients in exchange for carbon fixed by the plants through photosynthesis.
These mycorrhizal relationships are ancient, dating back more than 450 million years, and were probably instrumental in helping plants colonise land.
This new research provides the first global estimate of the sheer scale of these underground fungal networks. We found that the world’s topsoils contain approximately 110 quadrillion kilometres of living fungal filaments. That is almost one billion times the distance between the Earth and the Sun.
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