How Do Fungi Keep the Planet Healthy? | PODCAST: The Joy of Why
Evolutionary biologist Toby Kiers explains how fungal networks in soil trade nutrients with plants, help keep carbon underground, and strike bargains without having a brain.“The Joy of Why” is a Quanta Magazine podcast about curiosity and the pursuit of knowledge. The mathematician and author Steven Strogatz and the cosmologist and author Janna Levin take turns interviewing leading researchers about the great scientific and mathematical questions of our time. For more episodes visit Quanta Magazine: https://www.quantamagazine.org/tag/the-joy-of-why/
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0:00 Introduction
2:42 What Are Mycorrhizal Fungi?
5:30 How Plants and Fungi Trade Resources
8:00 Inside the Underground Fungal Network
11:30 How Fungi Shape Climate and Ecosystems
16:05 The Underground Marketplace: Cooperation and Competition
26:15 How Fungi Make Decisions Without Brains
29:40 The Hidden Partnership Between Fungi and Bacteria
34:14 Watching Nutrients Move Through Fungal Networks
40:28 Mapping and Protecting Earth's Underground Biodiversity
45:00 The Strange Biology of Fungi
49:35 What Fungi Reveal About Cooperation in Nature
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People may think of soil as just dirt, but it is anything but inert. Beneath your feet, a vast network of mycorrhizal fungi is hard at work, trading minerals with plant roots. This trading system helps enrich the soil, and it sequesters 13 billion tons of atmospheric carbon dioxide each year — roughly equivalent to one-third of the world’s fossil-fuel emissions. Scientists know that these fungi form partnerships with 80% of all plant species on Earth, a relationship that evolved some 450 million years ago. What they have not understood is how organisms with no brain or central nervous system can decide whom to trade with, and on what terms.
Toby Kiers, an evolutionary biologist at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, has spent much of her career making this hidden world visible. Drawing on economics and game theory, and using tools that range from fluorescent quantum dots to imaging robots, her lab is probing how fungi and plants conduct their trade. The work raises new questions about soil, carbon, and even what counts as an individual organism. In this episode, Kiers tells co-host Steven Strogatz how these brainless, decentralized organisms can behave strategically — discriminating between better and worse partners and shifting resources across the network to wherever a plant will “pay” more for it — and how she has built a worldwide community of researchers
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The Joy of Why is a podcast from Quanta Magazine, an editorially independent publication supported by the Simons Foundation. Funding decisions by the Simons Foundation have no influence on the selection of topics, guests, or other editorial decisions in this podcast or in Quanta Magazine.
The Joy of Why is produced by PRX Productions; the production team is Caitlin Faulds, Jade Abdul-Malik, Genevieve Sponsler, and Merritt Jacob. The Executive Producer of PRX Productions is Jocelyn Gonzales. Edwin Ochoa is our project manager.
From Quanta Magazine, Simon Frantz and Samir Patel provided editorial guidance, with support from Samuel Velasco, Kit Sudol, Simone Barr, and Michael Kanyongolo. Samir Patel is Quanta’s Editor-in-Chief. The episode art is by Chanelle Nibbelink and our logo is by Jaki King and Kristina Armitage. Special thanks to Garth Avery at the Cornell Broadcast Studio.
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Quanta Magazine is an editorially independent publication supported by the Simons Foundation. We focus on developments in mathematics, theoretical physics, theoretical computer science and the basic life sciences.
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