Subterranean fungi networks more than 100 quadrillion km in length
theguardian.com154 points by tosh 6 days ago
154 points by tosh 6 days ago
Say you have a filament that's 1 µm in diameter, and 1 meter long. You want to fill up a 1m^3 (1m W x 1m H x 1m L) space with these, how many of these can you place in such a space? Over a trillion! And thus, the combined km length of these will also be over a billion km. At such small scales things can become very long when summed up.
Everytime I see people talking about the length of their coastlines ...
Look at how long this edge of my fractal is, Ma!
It is obvious when you think that 3d volumes scale cubicly and 1d lengths scale linearly. Adding another 1 meter to a cube of said filaments would increase the total length by a power of 3!
Meanwhile, a single human cell's DNA stretches for about 2 meter, one human's DNA stretches for about 2 x 5.4 trillion meter, and all living human DNA for a whopping 8.6 x 10^22 meters, nearly a thousand times longer than the fungi networks...
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/theydidthemath/comments/1gfq6k2/how...
Learning that trees use mycelium like their own internet to communicate about where resources are was my first real..."oh man, I feel small" moment. Even crazier to think about when the scale of the network starts to get quantified.
100×10^12 km is about 10.6 light years. There are about 16 other stars closer to the sun than that. It's a bit like a human body containing blood vessels with total length greater than twice the Earth's circumference.
So it could be sentient but it's pace of thinking might be absolutely glacial.
I wonder if these measurements were done in similar fashion to how they measured kudzu coverage in the US. For the longest time it was assumed that one of the initial projections was correct; however, under closer examination that estimate was off by a factor of 30. Kudzu wasn’t enveloping the South. It did like the byways though.
Imagine if a 3year old has only one single blood vessel: The single blood vessel grows by approximately 88 kilometers per day since conception.
Here is the quick calculation using that timeline:
•Total Days: ~1,365 days (270 days in the womb + 1,095 days of life up to age 3).
•Total Length: ~120,000 kilometers.
That breaks down to an astonishing 3.7 kilometers of growth every single hour.
Typical adult walking speed: ~5 km/h . Next time you are walking then imagine the tiny thin blood vessel growing behind you almost at the same speed you are walking. If you slow down and stop it will catch up to you.
I believe Planet will talk to us if we are willing to listen. These fungal stalks behave as multistate relays: taken together, the neural net connectivity must be staggering. Can a planet be said to have achieved sentience?
- Lady Deirdre Skye, Planet Dreams, Alpha Centauri
Meanwhile she's using mind worms as police. I would love for Firaxis to revisit Alpha Centauri.
There wasn’t a government in that game that didn’t have a single horrifying policy of some sort. They were living their own individuated utopian dreams, and I feel like what made it real was that the writers never shied away from the dark side of each utopia.
So around the length of the coastline of UK.
Highly recommended: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/52668915-entangled-life
Great book. I really enjoyed the audiobook version which is narrated by the author.
It is on my to-read list, but be sure to take some claims of common mycorrhizal networks (aka "wood wide web") with a grain of salt. A later review paper [0] found that evidence for some claims is weak.
I read to the part where they used machine learning to get the results and lost all faith in this being accurate at all.
The article is still pretty cool, even though the discussion brings up some issues with their arithmetic.
If you have a number that is 1000^90000000 that number is larger than the number of atoms in the observable universe.
Length is ultimately an arbitrary concept, and a measurement like thay can be made even more impressive by going down to some other unit like Angstroms.
Interesting how deeply east coast Australia is colored. I live in Sydney, a city of 5.6 million humans, and yet my yard apparently has at least the following fungi I can identify to species level: Aseroe rubra (alien thing with tendrils), Astraeus hygrometricus, Cladia aggregata, Coprinellus disseminatus, Coprinellus micaceus, Cruentomycena viscidocruenta, Flavoparmelia caperata, Heterodea muelleri, Hypholoma fasciculare, Leratiomyces ceres, Mycena tenerrima, Myriostoma australianum, Omphalotus nidiformis (glows in the dark), Panellus luxfilamentus, Satyrus rubicundus (looks like a red penis), Scleroderma cepa, Scleroderma citrinum, Trametes coccinea, Trametes versicolor, Usnea hirta.
I live on the Gold Coast and I have seen in my yard Aseroe rubra, glow in the dark mushrooms (not for a while now) and many others. Just this weekend I found one that looks a bit like a king oyster. Where did you get your list? I was looking for a visual guide to local fungi
I got mine from a few years of iNaturalist. I have more, just not confirmed at species level. You can try https://qldfungi.org.au/fungi-id/foq-main-page ... probably the Border Ranges will have a lot, but right on the coast you'll see less.
there was other work done on nemetodes, that are all over the planet, in glaciers, deap ocean, in rock far underground, etc, where someone did a representation of the earth, but with everything but the nemetodes removed, my speculation is that a large part of nemetode and mycylium networks, overlap.
The map looks off. No way the American Southwest has 3 meters per cm cubed of fungal density in such an arid region. Plenty of desert.
Fungi survive in deserts: https://insideclimatenews.org/news/22062025/sonoran-desert-s...
The underground in desert regions can be much more humid and hospitable than the surface.
Well South Sudan as highlighted has 8, and thats basically a desert. Tibetan plateau is high altitude frozen desert with permafrost in many parts, and its 11.4.
Maybe there is more complexity than meets the first glance.
> First ever global mapping of arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi shows scale of hyphal systems that sustain plant life
Related and recent: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48209905 - "Mycorrhizal Fungi, Nature's Key to Plant Survival and Success" (pacifichorticulture.org)
153 points | 26 days ago | 50 comments
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