The Shape of a Circle in the Mind of a Fish: The Understory of the Understory
5th & 6th December 2020
Online at themind.fish
The Understory of the Understory is the fourth instalment in an ongoing series of festivals on consciousness and intelligence across species, part of the Serpentine’s General Ecology project. With The Understory of the Understory, we go to that place which is simultaneously ground, land, soil and Earth, that is to say, the place where diverse species come together, collaborate, communicate and constitute one another but also where complex systems of redistribution of toxicity, logics of extraction and geopolitics meet.
Lynne Boddy
Death and decay – The Keystone of Life in the Natural World
They rot our food and our homes, and are a major nuisance – or at least that might be the first impression. Some fungi can certainly inconvenience us sometimes, but the truth is: we would not be here without them. Planet-wide, land plants form about 150 petagrams (15,000,000,000,000,000 kg) of new plant material every year. Similar amounts of dead material are produced. If this were not broken down again into its constituent parts then we would be up to our armpits in dead stuff. Aside from this inconvenience, our ecosystems would run out of nutrients for plants to use to grow, as the nutrients would be locked up inside dead material. So, every year, in balanced ecosystems, similar amounts of material are decomposed to that which has been produced. Many organisms play a role in this process, but on land it is fungi that are by far and away the most important. This is because their fine hyphal filaments can penetrate into solid, bulky organic materials rather than being confined to surfaces. Moreover, it is only fungi – and a relatively narrow range of them – that can significantly breakdown the complex lignocellulose molecules that make up woody plant tissues over relatively short time scales. Without fungi nutrients would not be recycled, and the terrestrial ecosystems of our planet would not function. There is also the potential to harness this amazing decomposer ability to clear up problems of our own making, e.g. decontamination of polluted soils, and breakdown of plastic waste. The fungal rotters are also hugely important in making habitat for other organisms. Consider a hollowing tree – worldwide over 1,000 vertebrate species are dependent on this habitat that fungi have created. In the UK alone 1,700 species of minibeasts depend on this rotten wood.
This talk of breakdown may sound a tad boring, but it is far from it. Not one but many fungi are involved in the breakdown process, and when they meet they fight. These battles are brought about in a variety of ways, including by making chemicals that attack other fungi and bacteria. Antibiotics such as penicillin are one example of such a chemical, and another reason why we are indebted to fungus rotters. All of these aspects and more will be covered in this rotten talk.
Lynne Boddy is Professor of Fungal Ecology at Cardiff University UK. She has taught and researched into the ecology of fungi associated with trees and wood decomposition for 40 years. She is currently studying the fascinating communities of fungi and other organisms that rot the centres of old trees, the ash dieback fungus that is rampaging across the UK from Europe, the ways in which fungi fight each other and form communities, and how they search the forest floor for food resources and respond to their finds. She co-authored Fungal Decomposition of Wood, edited six books, has written over 200 scientific papers, and is chief editor of the journal Fungal Ecology. She was president of the British Mycological Society (2009–2010) andis an ardent communicator of the mysteries and importance of the amazing hidden Kingdom of Fungi to the general public including TV, radio, popular talks, videos, articles and exhibitions. She was awarded an MBE in the Queen’s Birthday Honours list in 2019 for Services to Mycology and Science Outreach.
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