Plants and animals. Everyone knows their importance to the planet. Talk about ecosystems? Flora. Talk about wild spaces? Fauna. Dr. Toby Kiers says we are looking at half the picture. An evolutionary biologist. Founder of the Society for the Protection Underground Networks. She wants you to look down. Fungi. Her work mapping those subterranean veins has won big, a MacArthur Fellowship, a Tyler Prize for Environmental Achievement which some folks call the green Nobel, recognition piled high for tracking what usually goes unnoticed. She spoke with Ian Sample recently about Palmyra Atoll out in the Pacific. A remote speck of ocean life. And what lies beneath it.
Digging into Palmyra
The island itself is just sand and atoll, seemingly simple on the surface. Underneath? Chaos. Complexity. A web of connections that Kiers and her team mapped with obsessive care. Fungal networks here do not just decompose, they link, they facilitate, they act as the internet of the soil.
“Fungi are not just decay; they are communication.”
It is a stark contrast to how we treat the ground in urban settings. Paved over. Forgotten. But on Palmyra, the roots tell a different story, one of cooperation and trade, resources moving through fungal threads from one tree to another, older sapling helping younger sprout. A hidden economy. Does the forest actually communicate? You bet.
The Invisible Network
This isn’t about magic or mysticism, hard science tracks it, carbon moves, nitrogen shifts, all via those hyphae. Kiers found that the diversity above ground hinges entirely on the connectivity below. Break the fungal lines and the plants suffer. Simple as that. Most of us never think about soil structure as something dynamic. It feels static, inert. It isn’t. The Palmyra study proved that distance matters, physical gaps in the network disrupt the flow, showing how fragile these connections really are despite looking like dirt.
The awards mean something. Visibility matters. But the fungi? They don’t care about the press. They keep working, slow and steady, binding the earth together while we look up at the stars or worry about the next headline. There is still so much we don’t know, layers deep, stories untold.
