Beyond Real Time: Everything's connected

Many years ago, we were at Yosemite having an outdoor dinner in the Douglas fir forest. The trees, huge and old, loomed over us with dignity and solemnity befitting life as wondrous as this. Seems this sense of wonder is well-founded as everything's connected, a notion proven to be true yet again as seen by a Wired piece equating the forest to the web in terms of how diverse life forms create a communicative system of great sophistication and complexity.

I tracked another root from the elder and found another truffle, and another. I raised each to my nose and breathed in its musty, earthy smell of spores and mushroom and birth. I traced the black pulpy whiskers from each truffle to the riggings of roots of seedlings of all ages, and saplings too. With each unearthing, the framework unfolded—this old tree was connected to every one of the younger trees regenerated around it. Later, Kevin would return to this patch and sequence the DNA of almost every Rhizopogon truffle and tree—and find that most of the trees were linked together by the Rhizopogon mycelium, and that the biggest, oldest trees were connected to almost all of the younger ones in their neighborhood. One tree was linked to 47 others, some of them 20 yards away by Rhizopogon alone. We published these findings in 2010, followed by further details in two more papers. If we’d been able to map how the other 60 fungal species connected the firs, we surely would have found the weave much thicker, the layers deeper, the stitching even more intricate.

This forest was like the internet too. But instead of computers linked by wires or radio waves, these trees were connected by mycorrhizal fungi. The forest seemed like a system of centers and satellites, where the old trees were the biggest communication hubs and the smaller ones the less busy nodes, with messages transmitting back and forth through the fungal links. Back in 1997, when my article showing carbon was transmitted between Douglas fir and paper birch through the mycorrhizal network had been published in Nature, the journal had called it the “wood-wide web.” This was turning out to be much more prescient than I’d imagined. All I knew back then was that carbon moved back and forth between the tree species through a simple weave of mycorrhizas. This forest, though, was showing me a fuller story. The old and young trees were hubs and nodes, interconnected by mycorrhizal fungi in a complex pattern that fueled the regeneration of the entire forest.