(Roughly) Daily

As Frank Landymore explains, we’ve been underestimating fungi…

Scientists have mapped the Earth’s entire underground fungal network, showing that it’s so extensive that if it were stretched into a straight line, it would reach other star systems — and span a sizable chunk of the Milky Way galaxy, for that matter.

The groundbreaking work, published in a study in the journal Science, focused on microorganisms known as arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi. Forming the hidden backbone of our planet’s soil, they circulate water and nutrients and regulate the climate by locking away vast stores of carbon. 

Altogether, the global fungal network weighs around 300 megatons, the study found, which is four to six times more than the biomass of all human beings. Around 40 percent of that fungal mass resides in high-altitude or flooded grasslands, like the Everglades in Florida. 

The authors hope that their work will highlight the indispensable but overlooked role that these fungal networks play in the Earth’s ecosystems, with around 70 percent of all ground-based plant life depending on the fungi.

“People just aren’t paying attention to these ecosystems,” coauthor Toby Kiers, an evolutionary biologist at Vrije University Amsterdam and director of the Society for the Protection of Underground Networks (SPUN), told The New York Times. “What we want to do with these data is really shine a light on some of these hidden patterns underground.”

“I hope this builds into the conversation for their protection because wild grasslands are going away quite quickly,” lead author Justin Stewart, a fellow SPUN biologist, told Live Science. “These are areas that people are really ripping up because it’s much easier to rip up a grass than it is to rip up a tree.”

To unearth this subterranean network, the researchers used data from over 16,000 soil samples across 300 previous papers that calculated the local density of fungal filaments, or hyphae, across the globe. They then fed this data into a machine learning model to predict the density of these hyphal networks per square kilometer of topsoil.

The results were staggering. In all, the model found that the planet is lined with more than 110 quadrillion kilometers of hyphae, or 68 quadrillion miles, which is almost a billion times the distance between the Earth and the Sun. On a cosmic ruler, that equals nearly 12,000 light years, or about a tenth the diameter of our galaxy, which is enough to take you to the Westlund 1 super star cluster.

It’s the clearest picture yet of just how much fungal networks underpin our terrestrial ecosystems. What’s fuzzier from the model, though, is what it says about their health. The density of the fungal networks were lower in soil used for growing crops, but “we don’t know where networks are very healthy and where they’re threatened,” Kiers told the NYT…

“Earth’s Underground Fungus Network Is So Gigantic That If You Stretched It Out, It Would Reach to Other Star Systems,” from @futurism.com.

* Derrick Jensen

###

As we muse on the mycorrhizal, we might ponder a different kind of massive spread, as we recall that it was on this date in 1937 that Hormel introduced Spam. It was the company’s attempt to increase sales of pork shoulder, not at the time a very popular cut. While there are numerous speculations as to the “meaning of the name” (from a contraction of “spiced ham” to “Scientifically Processed Animal Matter”), its true genesis is known to only a small circle of former Hormel Foods executives.

As a result of the difficulty of delivering fresh meat to the front during World War II, Spam became a ubiquitous part of the U.S. soldier’s diet. It became variously referred to as “ham that didn’t pass its physical,” “meatloaf without basic training,” and “Special Army Meat.” Over 150 million pounds of Spam were purchased by the military before the war’s end. Indeed, Nikita Khrushchev said that without Spam, the Soviet Army would have starved. And Spam was not only eaten but was also incorporated into many other aspects of the war (e.g., grease for guns, cans for scrap metal).

During the war and the occupations that followed, Spam was introduced into Japan, Korea, Guam, Hawaii, Okinawa, the Philippines, and other islands in the Pacific. Immediately absorbed into native diets, it has become a singular part of the history and effect of U.S. influence in the Pacific region.

Today Spam is regualrly eaten in 50 countries around the world. According to the Spam website, there are 12.8 cans of Spam products consumed every second; over nine billion cans of Spam have been sold (so far). Big Ben is 1,163 Spam cans tall, and it would take 415,469,599 cans of the stuff to circle the circumference of the Earth. Need to know more? There is a museum devoted to anything and everything related to the Spam brand in Austin, MN.

Contrary to rumor, Spam is only made from six ingredients: pork with ham, salt, water, potato starch, sugar, and sodium nitrite.

source