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Fungi Are Becoming Invaluable First Responders in Eco-Crises
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.
Geopyxis carbonaria, also known as the charcoal loving elf-cup, is a phoenicoid fungus. Its fruiting bodies are commonly found on soil where brush has recently been burned. Credit: Henri Koskinen / Shutterstock.
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.”
The fungi used for environmental clean-up come in a variety of shapes and sizes. Mycorrhizal fungi work in symbiosis with a plant and its roots, and can be used to re-establish native plant populations, which in turn leads to the presence of more pollinators, spurring even greater floral diversity. Saprotrophic fungi, on the other hand, are a decomposing fungus that can be used to break down pollutants. Take oyster mushrooms, which many are more likely to associate with a restaurant menu than toxic waste. These saprotrophic decomposers can break down petroleum and hydrocarbons, putting them top of the list when it comes to cleaning up deadly oil spills. Swanson’s phoenicoid fungi also fall under the saprophytes umbrella.
Understanding how these fungi work enables scientists and conservationists to explore how fungi might be deployed in times of urgent need, from cleaning up road run-off threatening important salmon spawning waters in the Pacific Northwest, to oil spills in San Francisco Bay and oil pits in the Ecuadorian Amazon. Researchers are even investigating the role fungi can play as bioremediation agents in tackling nuclear waste.
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If there’s an environment in need of remediation, chances are there’s a fungus for it, and yet the full catalogue is only just beginning to be understood. It’s estimated that experts have identified less than ten percent of an estimated 2 to 3 million different types of fungi that currently exist on earth. And the organisms face little-to-no geographical limitations. “Fungi are ubiquitous across the planet,” says O’Brien. “They’re present in every single ecosystem in the world.”
Because of ongoing drought conditions, the Pacific Northwest — where Mount Saint Helens erupted — and the west coast more generally have become a living lab for mycologists and other scientists seeking to understand the opportunities and limitations of mycoremediation.
But unlike the lahars that re-engineered the wild landscape after the volcanic blast, the fires that Washington, Oregon and California face today often involve the towns we live in, the cars we drive and all the other infrastructure we encounter in our daily lives.
In the aftermath of the South Obenchain wildfire in southwestern Oregon, for example, which burned more than 32,000 acres of land in September 2020, the landscape was unrecognizable. The area’s rugged, grassy hills were transformed into tough, gray turf, dense stands of evergreens became singed matchsticks, and the roadsides were littered with scorched cars and other piles of heat-twisted debris.
When human-made structures burn, all the materials used to build them plus all the things inside them — batteries and electronics, cleaning supplies, plastics from tupperwares, toys and other trinkets — go up in toxic flames, releasing dangerous ash that then settles to the ground where vegetation loss has occurred. Without plants and trees, soil erosion is much more prevalent, making flooding more likely when rains eventually come and all but guarantees the dispersal of the contaminated sludge far and wide, most likely into our watersheds and elsewhere.
The South Obenchain fire was one of several that devastated the west coast in 2020 and again in 2021. Despite the havoc they wrought, these fires were the perfect opportunity for researchers like Mia Maltz to gain insight into the effectiveness of mycoremediation. Maltz, an assistant professor of microbial ecology and soil health at the University of Connecticut, had seen this sort of disaster unfold firsthand, having lived in California where fires have become much more of a pressing issue.
Oyster mushrooms have been used to help clean up toxic oil pits left in the Ecuadorian Amazon by the oil giant Texaco (now owned by Chevron). Credit: Lost_in_the_Midwest / Shutterstock.
Typically, the strategy for remediating a burn area is to scrape away the affected soil and truck it to an off-site location. This is expensive and labor intensive, and doesn’t necessarily address the fire’s main byproduct — the toxicity of the soil itself. By introducing fungi into a burn area, not only do you reduce the clean-up cost and effort, but you are also using the ecosystem’s pre-existing toolbox to fix it.
So Maltz, in a cohort of other scientists and researchers, got to work at the South Obenchain burn site and four others spanning into southern California, setting up wattles — bags of straw and other organic matter — inoculated with microbes from the local ecosystem to study the capabilities of fungi and bacteria to break down pollutants left in the fires’ wakes and control erosion.
What the team has found to date in terms of soil remediation is encouraging, notably when it comes to reductions in polyaromatic hydrocarbons. These are the type of toxic organic compounds left behind in the wake of a fire that burns human-made structures, and which Maltz describes as “some of the real heavyweight compounds that are really difficult to degrade.”
While Maltz’s team is still analyzing the data collected over the past five years, there is no doubt, she says, that remediation is underway at several of the sites.
Novel applications of mycoremediation are being studied and proposed with increasing frequency. A 2023 study conducted in Massachusetts, commissioned by MassDOT, found that there could be benefits to integrating mycelium into the state’s pre-existing stormwater management infrastructure to serve as a filtration system to improve water quality, although it concluded that there isn’t currently enough scientific peer-reviewed literature to support deploying mycofiltration yet.
This year, a new U.K. government-funded research initiative was announced that will see modular water filters filled with local saprotrophic fungi installed on agricultural land to capture and neutralize pollutants from farming activities before they reach freshwater environments.
Kate Kennen, the founder and owner of landscape design company OffShoots and principal investigator of the MassDOT study, says that the study of mycoremediation is only just beginning, not least when it comes to mitigating and adapting to climate change by using fungi to support the restoration of urban tree populations.
And O’Brien also sees potential in fighting one of the most insidious issues of our contemporary moment: PFAs. “We hear a lot about how PFAs are forever chemicals and these are very, very, very stable carbon-based molecules in the environment. That’s why they’re so persistent,” he says. “If there’s anything out there able to degrade those compounds, it’s gonna be fungi.”
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Despite its potential, the field of mycoremediation faces some of the typical headwinds that so many novel strategies come up against in their nascent stages — going from study to implementation. “The greatest challenge for mycoremediation right now is scaling up a lot of the proof of concept applications that have been demonstrated for years,” says O’Brien.
And there is the worry of inadvertently introducing non-native species to environments. In Wisconsin, golden oyster mushrooms, which are useful decomposers, are considered an invasive species, crowding out native species of fungi and damaging the local ecosystem in the process.
Like Swanson in 1980, Maltz, Kennen and O’Brien all seem to marvel at the ingenuity of fungi and its ephemeral, immeasurable potential. Scalability and the threat of introducing non-native species don’t serve as obstacles so much as simply puzzles in need of solving, so the work can — and will — continue.
“We’ve just kind of cracked open the door,” says O’Brien. “The possibilities are truly limitless. I think the more and more we learn, the more we discover what the fungal Kingdom has to offer.”
The post Fungi Are Becoming Invaluable First Responders in Eco-Crises appeared first on Reasons to be Cheerful.
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