As the hope and promise of winter rain grows, I look forward to the season of mushroom hunting. While the semi-arid climate of southern California isnt as famous for mushroom hunting as the lush rainforests of the Pacific Northwest or the rainy redwoods of Northern California, there are still plenty of fungal treasures to discover in the oak woodlands and coastal sage scrub of the front range once rain arrivesif you practice a keen eye and patience.

Mushrooms are the fruiting bodies of underground mycelial webs which knit the world together. They are the visible, often delicious aboveground manifestation of subterranean fungal networks comprised of threadlike, hollow tubes called hyphae. Mushrooms emerge briefly, triggered by rain and humidity, to cast fungal spore into the wind for reproduction. Even after mushrooms release their spore to the wind and disappear the fungal webs from which they came persist for generations, sending up new fruiting bodies every rainy season.

Despite their reliance on humid climates, fungi thrive throughout the world from the Arctic Circle to the Mojave Desert. In fact, fungal networks are a critical component to the soil ecology of arid landscapes, including those of inland California. Fungi are long-lived and can grow to enormous proportions. The largest known organism on Earth is a honey mushroom in Oregon whose mycelial web underpins almost 2400 acres of the Malheur National Forest.

Fungi are essential to life on Earth. They are primary decomposers of decaying matter, recycling spent, dead and dying material into organic, fertile soil capable of growing carbon-storing forests, lush river valleys and rich fields for human agriculture. Because of their ability to break things down, fungi play a central role in the growing science of bioremediation, as humans begin to confront and repair ecosystems damaged with plastic litter, agricultural poisons, nuclear waste and chemical and oil spills. Fungi show incredible promise in returning these intractable-seeming waste streams into harmless environmental elements. Amazingly, in one recent experiment scientists grew oyster mushrooms out of plastic waste in just a few short months, reducing waste volume by 80% while producing edible oyster mushrooms.

Fungi are one of the most mysterious kingdoms of life on Earth. Scientists estimate that at least 90% of fungus species remain unknown and undocumented, despite their everyday importance in our lives. One of the most interesting developments in mycology (another word for fungus) research is that of mapping communication networks spanning the underground webs of fungal organisms and trees and plants within forest communities.

Recent research reveals that fungi are constantly communicating via electrical and chemical signals, and that different branches of the same fungal network spread over a vast space are capable of sharing nutrients with depleted areas of the network. Fungi also seem to facilitate a similar sharing of resources within separate, distinct trees and plants in old-growth forest communities. For example, scientists have shown through peer-reviewed field experiments that forest trees warn one another of insect pests, herbivore predations and toxic shifts in the physical environment, allowing surrounding trees to mount chemical defenses. In addition, mature trees dying of old age will share their remaining nutrient stores with younger, smaller trees nearby before their demise. Scientists speculate that much of this communication and chemical sharing is enabled by the fungal networks that span healthy, diverse forests, connecting trees to one another.

This research is groundbreaking because it calls into question one of the basic premises of evolutionary biology: survival of the fittest or the belief that life on Earth is a constant battle for limited resources. While the critical science of this work is still emergent, early conclusions drawn from decades of fieldwork provide a hopeful and helpful alternative moral compass for our human community as well, predicated on communication, resource-sharing and cooperation for the betterment of the whole.

This work underlines how little we still understand about the complexity and interdependence of old-growth habitats.

Much of the recent work on mycelial webs within forests was triggered by foresters who realized that the replanting of logged forests with a single species of trees wasnt working. Despite extra water and care, young trees were unable to survive in clear cut landscapes. Current scientific thought points to the fact that logged landscapes often cause the erosion and degradation of the recently-exposed soil surface, which damages or kills the fungal network partly responsible for feeding and nurturing young trees, to the detriment of replanted monocultures.

I wrote an article this September on the Forest Services proposal to log old growth pine forests in our backcountry backyard along the Pine Mountain ridgeline. Perhaps sciences growing recognition of the interconnection and interdependence of seemingly disparate wild lives is another caution against such a proposal.

Alena Steen is coordinator of the Carpinteria Garden Park, an organic community garden located at 4855 5th St., developed by the citys Parks and Recreation Department.Community members rent a plot to grow their own fresh produce. For more information, visit carpinteria.ca.us/parks-and-recreation or contact Alena at alenas@ci.carpinteria.ca.us.

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The world of mushrooms | Opinion | coastalview.com - Coastal View News