And then, of course, there are yeasts that coat the fruit and yeasts that coat other parts of the plants as well. There are fungi that live in plant leaves and shoots as well, which provide essential services to the plant - defense from pathogens and other pests being a big one. So there are fungi in the roots which are mediating the connection between the plants and the soil. And how that might compare to indigenous rootstocks.
It also ties in with considerations about rootstock and growing vines on different rootstocks - where its rootstocks have come from how those rootstocks relate to the fungi in the soil. And also the way that people think about terroir, because terroir is a relationship between the plant and the soil and fungi are the prime mediator between the plant and the soil. So this obviously has implications for flavor and other such considerations. This means that much of the mineral nutrition that ends up in the vine will be filtering through a fungus.
So the fungus would then be foraging for nutrients, which it would exchange with the plant for these energy compounds. The fats are lipids - basically energy containing carbon compounds. And the plant will be supplying sugars and fats to the fungus which would power its growth. "Vines depends on their mycorrhizal fungal partners to supply them with nutrients. Tell us about the interaction of fungi and the grape vine. How do they communicate with themselves? How do they communicate with other networks? How do they grow? How do they fuse?" I’m really interested in these basic questions of how mycelium is able to be mycelium. How fungi are able to behave as integrated wholes given how they constantly revise, reshape, resculpt their networks and how they are able to behave as coherent entities without having a centralised place to coordinate activity from. "One basic question is how fungal mycelium coordinates itself - there is a lot of confusion about this. You have studied fungi for years - what are some of the key unanswered questions? We caught up with him ahead of the event. In his talk at Alive! he will be talking all things mushroom - sharing stories and findings to explain the fundamental role that fungi play in our lives as well as the lives of plants. in tropical ecology from Cambridge University for his work on underground fungal networks in tropical forests in Panama. This book is an international bestseller, winner of the Wainwright Prize 2021, and has been nominated for a host of other prizes, including the British Book Awards Book of the Year 2021 for Narrative Non-Fiction and the Rathbones Folio Prize 2021. Merlin is the author of Entangled Life: How Fungi Make Our Worlds, Change Our Minds, and Shape Our Futures.
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