How About Some Punk Science

Last week the Tyler Prize for Environmental Achievement was awarded, going to Dr. Toby Kiers, a professor at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. She’s an evolutionary biologist and one of the leading experts in mycorrhizal networks, the vast underground networks which fungi use to connect with plants and trees. The Tyler Prize is, apparently, often described as the Nobel Prize for the environment, so I just hope President Trump doesn’t hear about it and feel neglected.

You want punk science? How about a map of fungal networks. Credit: SPUN

Oh, yeah: last year she also won a MacArthur Award and a Climate Breakthrough Award, so she’s having a pretty good few months.

Dr. Kiers’ research has helped us understand how these networks work, and why they are so important to food systems, soil health, and even climate – they take out some 13 billion tons of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, about a third of global fossil fuel emissions. No, wait, you say -- fungi are kind of yucky at best and downright dangerous at worst, as evidenced by a drug-resistant and potentially deadly fungus that has infected patients in at least 27 states and counting.

Well, yes, fungi can be dangerous, but they are also vital. Dr. Kiers is blunt about their importance: "Life as we know it exists because of fungi,” both from an evolutionary standpoint and today.  Fungi are essential to the health of the ecosystem. They “trade” the carbon for minerals that plants need.  As Dr. Kiers described in an interview with Alan Burdick of The New York Times:

We’ve been studying fungal trade as an underground market and developing techniques to track, in real time, when and where important exchange deals take place, how fungi navigate space, how they decide when and how much carbon to send down each pathway, how they build their road systems and how they optimize that supply-chain design. 

Are fungi capitalists? No. They’ve developed a system that is much more sophisticated than the economic system humans use.

Dr. Kiers has helped develop tools that allow researchers to watch fungal networks develop and operate in real time, visually monitoring when and where trades take place across plant-fungal networks. And you thought you had some cool streaming services.

In 2021, she founded the Society for the Protection of Underground Networks (SPUN), whose mission is to “map, protect, and harness the mycorrhizal networks that regulate the Earth’s climate and ecosystems.” When it says “map,” it means it literally: the Underground Atlas allows anyone to “explore the distribution of arbuscular mycorrhizal (AM) and ectomycorrhizal (EcM) fungi to identify biodiversity hotspots and areas with rare, endemic fungi.”

The associated Underground Explorers program is a network of researchers in 58 countries focused on mapping fungal biodiversity in their local ecosystems. Dr. Kiers describes it as “a fungi-without-borders approach.”

SPUN also just announced the Underground Advocates program, partnering with NYU Law’s More-than-Human Life (MOTH) Program, to equip the network of Underground Explorers with tools and support to become effective in translating mycological science into action. Its goal is “to equip researchers and communities with the scientific and legal understanding to drive lasting change.”  SPUN and MOTH see it as “a proof-of-concept for a model of environmental protection that is locally led, scientifically grounded, and connected to a global community of practice.”

“Toby’s work to translate scientific insight into real-world action, most recently with SPUN’s new Underground Advocates program, demonstrates her leadership in advancing global efforts to protect the fungal networks that sustain life on Earth,” said Rashid Sumaila, chair of the Tyler Prize Executive Committee.

“With 90% of our most diverse underground fungal systems unprotected, urgent action is needed to incorporate fungal data into global conservation plans,” Dr. Kiers said. Giuliana Furci, mycologist and founder of Fungi Foundation, agrees, adding: “To better incorporate fungi in policy and legal frameworks, rigorous datasets are needed. The Underground Advocates program can help put fungal data into action, using the Atlas to pinpoint what will be lost if decision-makers do not protect underground ecosystems,”

Most people have become at least somewhat aware of the microbiome that is in us, on us, and around us, and science is slowly starting to understand how that impacts us. We’re further behind in the awareness of our fungal neighbors and their importance. I had to groan when I read that a potential victim of recent federal National Science Foundation (NSF) budget cuts was the International Collection of Vesicular Arbuscular Mycorrhizal Fungi (INVAM), the world’s largest living library of soil fungi.

“INVAM represents a library of hundreds of millions of years of evolution,” said Dr. Kiers, “Ending INVAM for scientists is like closing the Louvre for artists.”

INVAM curator Professor Jim Breyers emphasizes: “The benefits of mycorrhizal fungi are real. Research on mycorrhizal fungi is totally dependent on having these fungi in culture.” Alas, he added, ““The current administration has shifted funding away from basic science, and while there is always a hope that private donors could fill that void, I don’t think there is a real substitute for federal investment.”

Another example of cutting off our nose to spite our face.

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I loved how Dr. Kiers explained SPUN to Mr. Burdick:

We’re a really scrappy organization. We’re super lean and mean; we don’t even have an office. We are everywhere and nowhere. That really helps us. In an academic setting, you almost have to know what you’re going to find before you’re funded to find it.

I use the term “punk science.” We’re trying to cross boundaries and disciplines and not accept the state of the world as a given, while celebrating science that is rooted in creativity.

I also like her views on collaboration: “That’s why I like to work across different fields, with economists, biophysicists, artists. It generates this tension that I think drives big ideas. We’re borrowing tools from other disciplines that allow us to see things in fungi that we had never seen before. We’re hacking the system.”

Punk science indeed.  Hacking the system. You can see why she got that MacArthur “genius” award.

Look, I don’t like mushrooms and it would freak me out if I really knew how omnipresent fungi are in the world, but people like Dr. Kiers are helping us all understand how very important, and how very complex, fungi are. So, kudos to Dr. Kiers and her band of fellow scientists at SPUN, and all those Underground Explorers and Advocates. And here’s to punk science wherever it is practiced!