6 ms·

To Restore an Island Paradise, Add Fungi

142 points by Brajeshwar 6mo ago

tastyfreeze 6mo ago
Maybe it is best to think of many plants as photochemical food factory extensions for mycorrhizal fungi. Some plants can do without but many will suffer without a specific mycorrhizae.
- 9dev 6mo ago
  I am more and more convinced that the separation into different living beings is somewhat artificial. If there are multicellular organisms, then an ecosystem as a whole can also be considered a life form.
  - ngruhn 6mo ago
    Maybe a key distinction is collaboration vs. competition. The more collaboration between individual "units" (e.g. cells in a multicellular organism or organisms in an ecosystem) the more they behave like a single thing. Ant colonies are also a strong example.
    - a115ltd 6mo ago
      To an extent, yes. I'd say the difference is government systems. A single organism, or something like the human body, has more evolved, more sophisticated government mechanisms. The body is mostly a cooperative civilisation of cells. Of course, there's still natural competition among them, in many shapes and forms. The cells are held together in a coherent, agile, resilient organism by governance systems strong enough to keep internal Darwinism from becoming civil war.
    - chongli 6mo ago
      Collaboration and competition are simultaneous. Just look at humans working in an office!
  - delusional 6mo ago
    This isn't really a new thought. It's exactly what's meant by terms such as "circle of life" or "ecosystem". The separation of individual beings is entirely artificial, or if your being more charitable and technical, analytical and descriptive. Science is not reality. We abstract reality to make nice and useful models. Reality violates our models constantly.
    - 9dev 6mo ago
      Didn’t claim it was. It’s just something difficult to really accept, at least to me, inhabiting a body that definitely feels very distinct from my environment.
      - Jedd 6mo ago
        Gaia theory - James Lovelock. You find it difficult to accept, or is it just your brain that finds it difficult to accept?
      - delusional 6mo ago
        > Didn’t claim it was I was afraid that would happen. My comment was really more aimed at being a comment to yours, than a reply. The fact that you're starting to "feel" this as being more true is not negated or impacted by it being an existing thought. Thoughts like this take time to settle into experienced truth, and i appreciate that. Had we been conversing that would have been a non-sequitur, and i would not have made it. One of the problems with comment systems though is that we are at once conversing and broadcasting. The comment was more intended on being a broadcast than a direct reply to you, as a breadcrumb for anyone interested in the path you were taking to maybe seek it out in existing literature.
        andsoitis 6mo ago
        Comment system dynamics are partly to blame, but I would add that human nature incentivizes defensiveness. Once one mostly outgrows it, things are much easier and less tense. Even if a discussion dynamic increases the probability for defensiveness. Ego is the enemy.
PeterHolzwarth 6mo ago
Article is a bit short. Here's a few more to flesh out the topic and the plant, tho honestly only by a smidge (none of these links require javascript enabled) https://naturalhistory.si.edu/research/botany/news/plant-press/researchers-split-birdcatcher-trees-genus-pisonia-three https://naturalhistory.si.edu/research/botany/news/plant-pre... https://www.earth.com/news/native-fungi-native-trees-plants-island-forest-restore-palmyra-atoll/ https://www.earth.com/news/native-fungi-native-trees-plants-... https://matjournals.net/pharmacy/index.php/IJPPR/article/view/118 https://matjournals.net/pharmacy/index.php/IJPPR/article/vie... https://ijpsr.com/?action=download_pdf&postid=97498 https://ijpsr.com/?action=download_pdf&postid=97498
aaron695 6mo ago
[dead]
contingencies 6mo ago
Nice looking fern at left of the scientist in the image appears to be Microsorum pustulatum, aka "Kangaroo fern", a climber/spreading rhizome.
_ache_ 6mo ago
Note: coauthor Toby Kiers received the Tyler Prize for Environmental Achievement of 2026. She also created SPUN: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Society_for_the_Protection_of_Underground_Networks https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Society_for_the_Protection_of_...
KaiserPro 6mo ago
I know its not that sexy, but soil is a hugely diverse ecosystem that is barely understood. There is lots of science to be done trying to classify and work out the mechanics of how nutrient is filters transmuted and transported It we want to feed the world, when that world is throwing more extreme weather at us, we need to work out how to do companion planting at scale. (think how east coast indians did farming) IF we can make practical farm robots, we can not only remove the need for herbiscides (direct manual intervention, ie physically weeding buy pulling out the seedlings) but also keep ground cover even after cropping, meaning much less water loss. Soil degradation is a real threat. the way we farm now means we have massive monocultures, large tracks of land that are bare for weeks on end. All of this requires lots of inputs to be productive. The promise of non-pesticide farming is that you get much richer soil, because you're not killing off the stuff that lives there. But we need to understand what makes a soil productive, however that changes based on location and crops.
- jimnotgym 6mo ago
  There has been an explosion in no-till and low till farming in the UK as energy prices (no till uses less diesel) and fertilizer prices spiked. Cover crops to avoid bare soil became big news. But how do you kill the cover crop so you can grow wheat again? How do you kill the weeds? The answer for hundreds of years has been ploughing, but that is exactly what we are trying to avoid. The only viable answer today is...Roundup (glyphosate). And there is the rub. To farm with better soil health, and less ploughing today requires a chemical that we are not happy with using. A robot to pull the wild oats out of a wheat field sounds practical. A robot to pull 100 acres of white mustard and weeds is what? There is some work with special rollers that can kill leafy cover crops, and there are tractor pulled mowers, of course, but it is a partial solution. Afterwards you still have a field of dandelions and black grass. So they use roundup. Then there is the break crop issue. After wheat you would plant rape or beans, perhaps, but only rape will make you a profit, but this is a tremendous risk. A flea beetle outbreak will kill the entire crop. The solution until recently was neonicitinoid coated seed, but that is now banned. So what do you grow? Part of the solution for me is mixed farming. Wheat followed by fodder beet, graze it off by sheep. Also the drought tolerant lucerne (Alfalfa to the rest of the world). Then seed grass and put cows or sheep (and hat and silage) followed by poultry (bird flu dependent) in a paddock grazing system. Then plough it and back to wheat. Smaller automated machines could allow smaller fields and a more diverse patchwork I suppose. Cooperation needs to increase massively between farms, so a dairy farm partners with a arable farmer on one side and a sheep farmer on the other. All depending on your soil type and topography of course. Lots of ground is grazing only. Then you need to make the economics work. Small farms don't pay. Of course 1000 acres of mountain ground is totally different to 1000 acres of flat arable ground. We definitely need some innovative in the economics. The current model of subsidy is laughable. Farmers being incentivised to grow no crops at all can't be the answer to food security! I would love to work in this sector. I feel with better automation and better economics we could make smaller farms that are more like a market garden with many different crops could work. A practical (and cheap) way to harvest grain on a small field would be the biggest breakthrough for me.
picsao 6mo ago
[dead]
spiderfarmer 6mo ago
It’s always a bit cringe, as an IT guy, overhearing non-technical people debate tech. I know the answers to most of their “why don’t they just” questions, or at least know they’re asking the wrong ones. Jumping in is an uphill battle, so I usually don’t bother. But I’m more of a farmer at heart. For my newsletter/platform I follow agricultural research from the Netherlands on a daily basis. That country is arguably the best center for agricultural R&D anywhere. This particular study is evidence of that. That makes HN threads on farming equally painful to read. The “why don’t they just,” “we should do more about,” and “we need to innovate/research” takes are almost always mis- or superficially informed. The term “mycorrhiza” for example was coined by Albert Bernhard Frank in 1885. So we’ve been doing research on this topic for at least 14 decades already.
- fikama 6mo ago
  Please share links or at least names of your sources. I would love to have a good source for this topic. Agricultural reaserch from Netherlands seems very broad. Are there any particular journals, newsletters that you follow?
- goobatrooba 6mo ago
  The Netherlands has a great agricultural economy, but is it really so innovative/sustainable ? Half seems to be giant greenhouses and the other half just the same planting the Germans or french do, maybe on larger fields. Definitely far ahead on the curve on "how to grow things efficiently in a greenhouse", but then there are usually giant heaters next to those..
  - spiderfarmer 6mo ago
    This is what I mean with superficially informed. > Is it really so innovative/sustainable? Yes. 100% yes. If you're focused on energy use, the Dutch agricultural sector has been a net producer since 2015. Not all of that is "green", but even where they use gas turbines, they're more efficient than all other forms of fossil energy generation, because both heat and CO2 is put to use. Wageningen University & Research is consistently ranked the world's #1 agricultural university. The Greenport regions (Westland, Aalsmeer, Venlo) function as innovation clusters where growers, suppliers, breeders, and researchers are physically clustered. > Half seems to be giant greenhouses and the other half just the same planting the Germans or french do, maybe on larger fields. Please stop guessing numbers. It's 4.500 hectares of (food production) greenhouses vs. 1.8 million hectares of areable land. > Definitely far ahead on the curve on "how to grow things efficiently in a greenhouse", but then there are usually giant heaters next to those.. The greenhouse sector runs gas-fired CHP (combined heat and power) units. They burn natural gas to produce three things at once: heat for the greenhouse, CO2 for the plants, and electricity. The electricity gets sold to the grid when prices are high. By 2015, 30-35% of the Netherlands' grid power came from CHP systems operating in greenhouses. That's already genuinely impressive. But the interesting shift right now is the move away from CHP towards a combination of electrification, geothermal, and rooftop/internal solar. Dutch greenhouses achieve world-leading yields by using high-tech systems that produce ten times more than open-field farming. This efficiency is driven by closed-loop water recirculation, precision nutrient dosing, and biological pest control, which reduces chemical use by 97%. These methods allow the Netherlands to remain the world's second-largest agricultural exporter despite its small size. Open-field Dutch farming is just as exceptional, and for largely the same structural reasons. The environmental pressures are real, but they are also driving much of today’s innovation: variable-rate fertiliser and spot-spraying systems that reduce inputs without reducing yield; mechanical and laser weeding as alternatives to herbicides; strip cropping and pixel farming trials at WUR; precision manure injection; cover cropping and non-inversion tillage becoming more mainstream; and breeding programmes focused on nitrogen-use efficiency and disease resistance to lower both fertiliser and pesticide use. I could go on and on. There are dozens of research projects in soil preservation as well as regulatory changes. There are just 51.200 companies in the agricultural sector, but what they achieve is so damned impressive.
dmos62 6mo ago
Hope all this work won't be under water in 50 years.

142 points by Brajeshwar 6mo ago

Maybe it is best to think of many plants as photochemical food factory extensions for mycorrhizal fungi. Some plants can do without but many will suffer without a specific mycorrhizae.

9dev 6mo ago
I am more and more convinced that the separation into different living beings is somewhat artificial. If there are multicellular organisms, then an ecosystem as a whole can also be considered a life form.
- ngruhn 6mo ago
  Maybe a key distinction is collaboration vs. competition. The more collaboration between individual "units" (e.g. cells in a multicellular organism or organisms in an ecosystem) the more they behave like a single thing. Ant colonies are also a strong example.
  - a115ltd 6mo ago
    To an extent, yes. I'd say the difference is government systems. A single organism, or something like the human body, has more evolved, more sophisticated government mechanisms. The body is mostly a cooperative civilisation of cells. Of course, there's still natural competition among them, in many shapes and forms. The cells are held together in a coherent, agile, resilient organism by governance systems strong enough to keep internal Darwinism from becoming civil war.
  - chongli 6mo ago
    Collaboration and competition are simultaneous. Just look at humans working in an office!
- delusional 6mo ago
  This isn't really a new thought. It's exactly what's meant by terms such as "circle of life" or "ecosystem". The separation of individual beings is entirely artificial, or if your being more charitable and technical, analytical and descriptive. Science is not reality. We abstract reality to make nice and useful models. Reality violates our models constantly.
  - 9dev 6mo ago
    Didn’t claim it was. It’s just something difficult to really accept, at least to me, inhabiting a body that definitely feels very distinct from my environment.
    - Jedd 6mo ago
      Gaia theory - James Lovelock. You find it difficult to accept, or is it just your brain that finds it difficult to accept?
    - delusional 6mo ago
      > Didn’t claim it was I was afraid that would happen. My comment was really more aimed at being a comment to yours, than a reply. The fact that you're starting to "feel" this as being more true is not negated or impacted by it being an existing thought. Thoughts like this take time to settle into experienced truth, and i appreciate that. Had we been conversing that would have been a non-sequitur, and i would not have made it. One of the problems with comment systems though is that we are at once conversing and broadcasting. The comment was more intended on being a broadcast than a direct reply to you, as a breadcrumb for anyone interested in the path you were taking to maybe seek it out in existing literature.
      - andsoitis 6mo ago
        Comment system dynamics are partly to blame, but I would add that human nature incentivizes defensiveness. Once one mostly outgrows it, things are much easier and less tense. Even if a discussion dynamic increases the probability for defensiveness. Ego is the enemy.

PeterHolzwarth 6mo ago

Article is a bit short. Here's a few more to flesh out the topic and the plant, tho honestly only by a smidge (none of these links require javascript enabled) https://naturalhistory.si.edu/research/botany/news/plant-press/researchers-split-birdcatcher-trees-genus-pisonia-three https://naturalhistory.si.edu/research/botany/news/plant-pre... https://www.earth.com/news/native-fungi-native-trees-plants-island-forest-restore-palmyra-atoll/ https://www.earth.com/news/native-fungi-native-trees-plants-... https://matjournals.net/pharmacy/index.php/IJPPR/article/view/118 https://matjournals.net/pharmacy/index.php/IJPPR/article/vie... https://ijpsr.com/?action=download_pdf&postid=97498 https://ijpsr.com/?action=download_pdf&postid=97498

aaron695 6mo ago

[dead]

contingencies 6mo ago

Nice looking fern at left of the scientist in the image appears to be Microsorum pustulatum, aka "Kangaroo fern", a climber/spreading rhizome.

_ache_ 6mo ago

Note: coauthor Toby Kiers received the Tyler Prize for Environmental Achievement of 2026. She also created SPUN: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Society_for_the_Protection_of_Underground_Networks https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Society_for_the_Protection_of_...

KaiserPro 6mo ago

I know its not that sexy, but soil is a hugely diverse ecosystem that is barely understood. There is lots of science to be done trying to classify and work out the mechanics of how nutrient is filters transmuted and transported It we want to feed the world, when that world is throwing more extreme weather at us, we need to work out how to do companion planting at scale. (think how east coast indians did farming) IF we can make practical farm robots, we can not only remove the need for herbiscides (direct manual intervention, ie physically weeding buy pulling out the seedlings) but also keep ground cover even after cropping, meaning much less water loss. Soil degradation is a real threat. the way we farm now means we have massive monocultures, large tracks of land that are bare for weeks on end. All of this requires lots of inputs to be productive. The promise of non-pesticide farming is that you get much richer soil, because you're not killing off the stuff that lives there. But we need to understand what makes a soil productive, however that changes based on location and crops.

jimnotgym 6mo ago
There has been an explosion in no-till and low till farming in the UK as energy prices (no till uses less diesel) and fertilizer prices spiked. Cover crops to avoid bare soil became big news. But how do you kill the cover crop so you can grow wheat again? How do you kill the weeds? The answer for hundreds of years has been ploughing, but that is exactly what we are trying to avoid. The only viable answer today is...Roundup (glyphosate). And there is the rub. To farm with better soil health, and less ploughing today requires a chemical that we are not happy with using. A robot to pull the wild oats out of a wheat field sounds practical. A robot to pull 100 acres of white mustard and weeds is what? There is some work with special rollers that can kill leafy cover crops, and there are tractor pulled mowers, of course, but it is a partial solution. Afterwards you still have a field of dandelions and black grass. So they use roundup. Then there is the break crop issue. After wheat you would plant rape or beans, perhaps, but only rape will make you a profit, but this is a tremendous risk. A flea beetle outbreak will kill the entire crop. The solution until recently was neonicitinoid coated seed, but that is now banned. So what do you grow? Part of the solution for me is mixed farming. Wheat followed by fodder beet, graze it off by sheep. Also the drought tolerant lucerne (Alfalfa to the rest of the world). Then seed grass and put cows or sheep (and hat and silage) followed by poultry (bird flu dependent) in a paddock grazing system. Then plough it and back to wheat. Smaller automated machines could allow smaller fields and a more diverse patchwork I suppose. Cooperation needs to increase massively between farms, so a dairy farm partners with a arable farmer on one side and a sheep farmer on the other. All depending on your soil type and topography of course. Lots of ground is grazing only. Then you need to make the economics work. Small farms don't pay. Of course 1000 acres of mountain ground is totally different to 1000 acres of flat arable ground. We definitely need some innovative in the economics. The current model of subsidy is laughable. Farmers being incentivised to grow no crops at all can't be the answer to food security! I would love to work in this sector. I feel with better automation and better economics we could make smaller farms that are more like a market garden with many different crops could work. A practical (and cheap) way to harvest grain on a small field would be the biggest breakthrough for me.

picsao 6mo ago

[dead]

spiderfarmer 6mo ago

It’s always a bit cringe, as an IT guy, overhearing non-technical people debate tech. I know the answers to most of their “why don’t they just” questions, or at least know they’re asking the wrong ones. Jumping in is an uphill battle, so I usually don’t bother. But I’m more of a farmer at heart. For my newsletter/platform I follow agricultural research from the Netherlands on a daily basis. That country is arguably the best center for agricultural R&D anywhere. This particular study is evidence of that. That makes HN threads on farming equally painful to read. The “why don’t they just,” “we should do more about,” and “we need to innovate/research” takes are almost always mis- or superficially informed. The term “mycorrhiza” for example was coined by Albert Bernhard Frank in 1885. So we’ve been doing research on this topic for at least 14 decades already.

fikama 6mo ago
Please share links or at least names of your sources. I would love to have a good source for this topic. Agricultural reaserch from Netherlands seems very broad. Are there any particular journals, newsletters that you follow?
goobatrooba 6mo ago
The Netherlands has a great agricultural economy, but is it really so innovative/sustainable ? Half seems to be giant greenhouses and the other half just the same planting the Germans or french do, maybe on larger fields. Definitely far ahead on the curve on "how to grow things efficiently in a greenhouse", but then there are usually giant heaters next to those..
- spiderfarmer 6mo ago
  This is what I mean with superficially informed. > Is it really so innovative/sustainable? Yes. 100% yes. If you're focused on energy use, the Dutch agricultural sector has been a net producer since 2015. Not all of that is "green", but even where they use gas turbines, they're more efficient than all other forms of fossil energy generation, because both heat and CO2 is put to use. Wageningen University & Research is consistently ranked the world's #1 agricultural university. The Greenport regions (Westland, Aalsmeer, Venlo) function as innovation clusters where growers, suppliers, breeders, and researchers are physically clustered. > Half seems to be giant greenhouses and the other half just the same planting the Germans or french do, maybe on larger fields. Please stop guessing numbers. It's 4.500 hectares of (food production) greenhouses vs. 1.8 million hectares of areable land. > Definitely far ahead on the curve on "how to grow things efficiently in a greenhouse", but then there are usually giant heaters next to those.. The greenhouse sector runs gas-fired CHP (combined heat and power) units. They burn natural gas to produce three things at once: heat for the greenhouse, CO2 for the plants, and electricity. The electricity gets sold to the grid when prices are high. By 2015, 30-35% of the Netherlands' grid power came from CHP systems operating in greenhouses. That's already genuinely impressive. But the interesting shift right now is the move away from CHP towards a combination of electrification, geothermal, and rooftop/internal solar. Dutch greenhouses achieve world-leading yields by using high-tech systems that produce ten times more than open-field farming. This efficiency is driven by closed-loop water recirculation, precision nutrient dosing, and biological pest control, which reduces chemical use by 97%. These methods allow the Netherlands to remain the world's second-largest agricultural exporter despite its small size. Open-field Dutch farming is just as exceptional, and for largely the same structural reasons. The environmental pressures are real, but they are also driving much of today’s innovation: variable-rate fertiliser and spot-spraying systems that reduce inputs without reducing yield; mechanical and laser weeding as alternatives to herbicides; strip cropping and pixel farming trials at WUR; precision manure injection; cover cropping and non-inversion tillage becoming more mainstream; and breeding programmes focused on nitrogen-use efficiency and disease resistance to lower both fertiliser and pesticide use. I could go on and on. There are dozens of research projects in soil preservation as well as regulatory changes. There are just 51.200 companies in the agricultural sector, but what they achieve is so damned impressive.

dmos62 6mo ago

Hope all this work won't be under water in 50 years.