difficult You can’t miss the highlights of Kew Gardens: London’s botanical gardens are home to towering sequoias, Amazonian water lilies big enough to support a small child, and every spring, huge greenhouses are decked out in brilliant colours with a huge variety of orchids.
But to see the really good stuff at Kew, you have to look underground. Tucked beneath the laboratories at the eastern end of the gardens is the Mycology House, which boasts the world’s largest collection of fungi. A series of green cardboard boxes holds around 1.3 million specimens of fruiting bodies, the part of a fungus that emerges above ground and releases spores.
“It’s basically a fungal library,” says Kew Mycological Museum curator Lee Davies, “so we can create a reference resource for fungi. biodiversity“What fungi are there in the world and where can you find them?” Archivists, for some reason wearing mushroom hats, roam the shelves, busily digitizing a vast archive that contains about half of the species known to science.
In the hierarchy of environmental factors, fungi have traditionally been near the bottom, says Davis. He himself was brought into the mycology lab against his will; he had been studying tropical plants when a transfer saw him transferred to the temperature-controlled mycology lab. “I got transferred here in 2014 and it’s been fantastic. It’s the best thing ever, I love it. It’s completely turned me around.”
Davis’s own revelation reflects a wider awakening of appreciation for these overlooked organisms. Intertwined Life: How Fungi Shape Our World, Transform Our Minds, and Shape Our Future The book became an unexpected bestseller, as did the video game and HBO series. The Last of Usit is Fictional brain-eating bacteria From the genus Cordyceps The world will be plunged into a whirlpool of apocalypse. (The Cue Collection includes Cordyceps(Tendrinids of fungus grow out of the soft gaps between the limbs of the dead insect.)
While the world is just discovering these fascinating creatures, scientists are just beginning to understand their vital role in ecosystems. In a lab just above the Kew Mycological Museum, mycologist Laura Martinez Sues studies how fungi help us. Securing carbon in soilAnd it explains why some places seem to be better at storing soil carbon than others.
Soil is a huge carbon store. Around the world, soils store around 1.5 trillion tonnes of organic carbon, roughly twice the amount of carbon in the atmosphere. Scientists once thought that most of this carbon entered the soil when dead leaves and plant matter decomposed, but it is now clear that plant roots and fungal networks are a key part of this process. Forest Island Research A Swedish study found that most of the carbon in forest soil comes from root and fungal networks, rather than from plant matter that has fallen from the ground.
