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| Photo: flickr\Muffet |
How Avatar got it right
“Mother trees” use fungal systems to feed the forest
By Cori Howard
Suzanne Simard always had a fetish
for soil. As a kid growing up in the
British Columbia Interior, she loved
digging for worms. Little did she know
that she would spend most of her career
exploring dirt. Now a forest ecologist at
the University of British Columbia,
Simard helped make the major finding,
first published in the journal Nature, that
trees and plants communicate. She discovered
an underground web of fungi
that connects trees and plants together
and shuttles resources, allowing trees to
help one another survive and thrive.
Simard noticed brilliant white and
yellow fungal threads in the forest floor.
Many of these fungi were mycorrhizal,
living in tree roots. Through microscopic
examination and experimentation, she
realized the fungi were transporting carbon,
water and nutrients between trees,
depending on which needed it most. “The
big trees were subsidizing the young ones
through the fungal networks,” explains
Simard. “Without this helping hand, most
of the seedlings wouldn’t make it.”
Mycorrhizal networks exist in ecosystems
around the world (and were featured
in the movie Avatar), and Simard’s
research has shown that without “Mother
Trees” — the big trees that dominate
forests and are connected to all other
trees — efforts at regeneration often fail.
Her latest results reveal that when a
Mother Tree is cut down, the survival rate
of new seedlings is very low. The implications
for the forest industry and conservation
groups are huge: conserve Mother
Trees and preserve mycorrhizal networks,
or we could lose our forests.
January/February 2011 issue
