Fire-loving, Charcoal-eating Fungi
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What unique adaptations do fire-loving fungi have?
We work hard to strike the right amount of intelligence and ignorance. The Last Show with David Cooper.
Fungus, you gotta love it. So when I heard some mushrooms don't just survive wildfires, but in fact wait for them, sleeping underground, burying, and then eating charcoal, the after effects of a burn, I knew we had to learn more about it. And that's why Sydney Glassman, a microbiology professor at the University of California, Riverside, is here to talk about fire-loving fungi.
How do wildfires impact forest ecosystems?
Or is it fungi? I don't know. Sydney? I like to say fungi, but either way works. Welcome to the show also. All right. Thanks for having me. Okay. Before we get to like genes and enzymes and cells, can you paint a picture for us? What happens to a forest right after a wildfire?
What happens to fungi after a wildfire occurs?
I always imagine that like the forest was ruined. That's it. Life ends. I know that I'm wrong. Okay. Yeah. So it depends a lot on the severity of the fire, but let's say you have a high severity stand replacing fire where all trees die. So, which is our most trees die. So a lot of trees will die. It produces a ton of ash. A lot of nutrients are released. You have a higher pH, a ton of nutrients. The wood is now turned into pyrogenic organic matter or charcoal. And then the upper layer of soil with all the bacteria and fungi is mostly dead. However, there are microbes that are in deeper layers in the soil that can move up and, or there are things that like have spores or like resistant propagules that could survive high temperatures that might have survived.
How do fungi survive and thrive in post-fire environments?
And then there's things that basically were not there before the fire, but are able to bloom after the fire in absence of the competitors and other things that were there before. So there's this bloom of microbes that do really well after fires. This has actually been known about for over 100 years. There was a paper in 1909 that described these fireplace fungi. And they're these orange cups that can sometimes make like a carpet of fungi across the soil. Like it can all be carpeted in these orange cup fungi if you have a really hot fire. Okay, and so this stuff just waits underground waiting for a fire. I always thought forest fire bad. Smokey the forest bear trying to prevent us from forest fires or whatever Smokey did.
Hope he wasn't smoking. That's bad for your health. But it turns out fires are not only completely natural, they kind of need to happen for our ecosystems to be balanced. Yeah. So in California and other Mediterranean ecosystems, fires are definitely natural and things are adapted to them. And there's whole books written about the plants and their adaptations to fire.
What role do fungi play in forest regeneration after fires?
For example, they have underground tubers. They have thick bark. Some plants even have cones that require heat in order to release their seeds. So they actually require heat in order to reproduce plants. So there's whole books on this. We know a lot about plant adaptations to fire, but plants are all associated with microbes as well. And these fungi and bacteria also have adaptations to fire. And that's basically what my career is about. What are these adaptations to fire and how are these microbes, both the bacteria and the fungi surviving and thriving after wildfires? That's what I want to know. I was in a pizzeria the other night. A piece of charcoal from the wood burning fire got on my pizza. I thought it was like burnt crust.
I took a bite of it and my mouth still feels weird. I cannot eat charcoal.
How do fungi break down charcoal and pyrogenic organic matter?
Not good for me. But it's great for these funguses or fungi. How do they do it? How do they eat charcoal? So what we did with this study is we sequenced their genomes. And we found that they have a lot of them, not all of them, but a lot of them have a really increased genetic capacity to break down pyrogenic organic matter or charcoal. So they have a lot of different genes and they've evolved the way to increase these genes in a lot of different ways. One is by gene duplication. So they basically just copy and paste and replicate their genes. So they have a lot more that enable them to break down charcoal.
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Chapters
8 chapters
1
What unique adaptations do fire-loving fungi have?
0:05–0:38
2
How do wildfires impact forest ecosystems?
0:38–0:54
3
What happens to fungi after a wildfire occurs?
0:54–1:40
4
How do fungi survive and thrive in post-fire environments?
1:40–2:39
5
What role do fungi play in forest regeneration after fires?
2:39–3:21
6
How do fungi break down charcoal and pyrogenic organic matter?
3:21–4:10
7
What are the reproductive strategies of fungi?
4:10–5:22
8
Can fungi be used for environmental cleanup beyond wildfires?
5:22–8:59
Speakers
3 identifiedMore from The Last Show with David Cooper
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