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https://reasonstobecheerful.world/fungi-first-responders-eco-crises-mycoremediation/>
"When Mount Saint Helens in southwestern Washington erupted on the morning of
May 18, 1980, the stratovolcano spewed a plume of debris high into the earth’s
atmosphere and spread ash to at least eleven nearby states. The blast produced
lahars — landslides of mud and ash — that barreled down the mountain,
annihilating the landscape of evergreens and wildflowers in their wake. Images
of the aftermath show a near-Martian landscape of grayscale rubble and
broken-off tree trunks — an ecosystem that had seemingly been delivered a death
blow.
But despite the appearance of a mountain-side extinction event, life was
already regenerating. Just 10 days after the eruption, the geomorphologist
Fredrick Swanson surveyed one of the lahars with colleagues and noticed
something intriguing. In the rubble, fine, filament-like threads had attached
themselves to some of the smaller pebbles and stones cast out of the volcano’s
center.
“I came to think that they were probably mycelia of burn-site fungi,” Swanson
recalls in an interview with Oregon State University in 2015. “If the spores
are heated significantly […] they will germinate and start sending mycelia
through the soil.” What Swanson was witnessing was the phenomenon of
“phoenicoid fungi,” aptly named in a nod to the mythical phoenix rising from
the ashes. Fungal organisms such as these are often the first responders to
blast zones and wildfire burn areas where the decomposing landscape serves as a
smorgasbord for their biological needs.
For millions of years, fungi and their fruiting bodies, mushrooms, have played
a role in returning destroyed environments to their healthy baselines by
breaking down pollutants with their enzymes and recycling nutrients — a process
that, until recently, belonged to nature and nature alone. Now the emerging
field of mycoremediation, a fungi-centered branch of bioremediation, seeks to
harness the role of fungi as nature’s ally in rehabilitating polluted
environments. This includes land scorched by volcanic eruptions and forest
fires, but also the likes of abandoned mines and hazardous landfills, and even
regional highways where toxic road runoff enters our water systems.
“Fungi play the role of primary decomposers in many environments,” explains
Brendan O’Brien, the executive director of CoRenewal, a non-profit that
specializes in the use of fungi in ecosystem restoration. “They are in the best
position to degrade a lot of the persistent organic pollutants that we’ve been
shipping off site, into our air, into our oceans, into our natural systems,
into our soil.”"
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
