I’ve been confidently telling people that underground, beneath every forest, fungi weave an internet of roots that cooperate with trees, sharing nutrients and communicating like some sort of subterranean utopia. It’s beautiful. It’s hopeful. But it’s basically wrong.
The truth, revealed through David Satori’s DNA work mapping Britain’s temperate rainforests and discussed in this article by MycoStories, is not so simple.
Complex Systems
The ‘wood-wide web’ caught on because it’s elegant. It says mycorrhizal fungi connect all trees in a singular unified network, like some earthly internet where plugged-in trees send and receive nutrients via fungal threads. It satisfied our craving for wholeness and connection.
But Satori – a mycorrhizal ecologist working with the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, Imperial College London, and Forest Research – spent years collecting and sequencing DNA from mycorrhizal roots across Britain’s entire rainforest zone, from Scottish coastal hazelwoods to Cornwall’s ancient dwarfed oakwoods. What he found shatters the unified network narrative.
A single tree can harbour dozens of fungal species (and hundreds of genetic individuals) each occupying less than a square metre. But they’re not cooperating in some unified web. They’re competing, specialising, and carving out micro-territories. Some excel at mining minerals directly from rock. Others transport nutrients over metres through rhizomorphs (those thick fungal highways). Some retain ancient abilities to break down woody debris, evolutionary holdovers from their decomposer ancestors.
For example, to grow a single Porcini mushroom requires an estimated 3–14 million root-fungus connections and 1,800 kilometres of fungal threads. Not a unified network, but a mycorrhizal metropolis thats crowded, competitive, and full of specialists doing their own thing.
The Hidden Architecture
Satori’s photographs reveal what words struggle to capture. Ectomycorrhizas (the fungal sheaths wrapping tree root tips like gloves on fingers) come in staggering variety. Smooth yellow-orange surfaces criss-crossed by fine white lactifers, the veins carrying the same milky latex that seeps from milkcap mushrooms when broken. Thick rhizomorphs extending metres to forage nutrients from distant patches of soil. Multiple species coexisting on the same root segment, each carved into its own territory.
These aren’t passive conduits. They’re active metabolic interfaces, constantly exchanging resources, adapting to soil chemistry, responding to tree signals. The Hartig net (the zone where fungal hyphae grow between root cells) is where nutrients get exchanged. Sugars from the tree flow to the fungus. Minerals mined from rock flow back to the tree.
Each fungal individual may occupy less than one square metre of woodland soil. A single tree harbours dozens of species made up of hundreds of genetic individuals, all occupying their own little space across the tree’s root architecture.
This hidden half of a woodland isn’t a unified network. It’s an organic constellation. Each species has its strengths. Each individual is embedded in networks of cooperation and competition, seeking to obtain nutrients and fulfil its life cycle.
Decentralisation
The wood-wide web was a comforting story because it implied coordination, intention, and fairness. The reality sounds chaotic. But chaos isn’t the right word.
What Satori’s work reveals is decentralised resilience.
No central processor. No command centre. No single fungus managing the whole show. Just countless local interactions that, in aggregate, sustain the forest. When one fungal species fails (due to disease, drought, or environmental stress) others compensate. When soil chemistry shifts, specialists adapted to new conditions expand their territories. The system adapts because it’s not unified.
This is the architecture of living systems that persist across millennia. Britain’s temperate rainforests have endured because their below-ground ecosystems are diverse and locally responsive. The same principle scales across nature, whether coral reefs, gut microbiomes, or prairie grasslands. Resilience emerges from decentralisation.
Circular Economies
Forests are circular economies before we had a word for it. Fallen leaves become nutrients. Fungi break down debris and feed it back to trees. Dead wood hosts saprotrophic fungi that eventually give way to mycorrhizal species. Nothing is wasted and everything cycles.
Satori’s photographs show ectomycorrhizas growing through leaf litter in temperate rainforest soil. That fallen litter is a vital resource. Those ectomycorrhizas ensure nutrients get cycled back to host trees. The whole system runs on matter and energy flowing in circles rather than lines.
This isn’t romantic. It’s thermodynamically efficient. Linear systems leak energy and material. They require constant inputs. Circular systems run on internal cycling, minimising waste, and maximising what already exists.
We talk about circular economies as an innovation. Forests have been doing this for hundreds of millions of years. The mycorrhizal metropolis is a working model of circularity at scale.
And it works because it’s decentralised. No central authority deciding which nutrients go where. No top-down plan. Just local actors responding to local conditions, and the system self-organises into coherence.
What Forests Teach Us About Health
Here’s the brief connection that matters to me and my work with Mushies. Your body works the same way.
You’re also not a unified system with a control centre. You’re a decentralised metropolis of 86 billion neurons, trillions of gut bacteria, and countless mitochondria in every cell – all competing, cooperating, carving out territories, and responding to local conditions. Health is about creating conditions for coherence.
When inflammation steals metabolic space, when mitochondrial function declines, and when gut diversity collapses, you lose rare specialists. Your cognitive abilities falter, energy drops, and resilience goes down.
Mushrooms – Lion’s Mane for nerve growth factor, Reishi for immune modulation, Cordyceps for ATP production – are ecological interventions, supporting the metabolic foundations that modern life erodes. They help restore substrate-level conditions for your body’s decentralised systems to self-organise.
This is first-principles health.
The Bigger Picture
After many years of abstract metaphors describing mycorrhizal networks, Satori’s work offers a truthful glimpse into mycorrhizal life. He hopes his work will bring understanding to the complexity of mycorrhizal ecosystems, breaking down misconceptions and making them relatable.
The wood-wide web metaphor fails because it’s too simplistic.
The mycorrhizal metropolis that’s chaotic, competitive, and decentralised challenges that notion. It says: living systems don’t work like your technology. They work through distributed intelligence, local adaptation, redundancy, and diversity. And they persist precisely because they resist centralisation.
This matters beyond forests. It’s a template for resilience in any complex system. Economies. Communities. Ecosystems. Health. The systems that endure aren’t the ones with the strongest centres. They’re the ones with the most robust edges, the most diverse specialists, and the most local responsiveness.
Satori’s work mapping mycorrhizal diversity isn’t just about protecting Britain’s rainforests (though that alone is vital). It’s about learning to see complexity without simplifying it into metaphors that flatter our technological worldview.
The truth is always more interesting than the metaphor. And the truth says that decentralisation is resilience. And that regeneration is about creating substrate-level conditions for systems to restore themselves.
Your brain is a mycorrhizal metropolis. So is your gut. So is the soil beneath your feet. Protect the diversity. Create metabolic space. Trust decentralised intelligence.
The forest has been doing this for millennia. It’s time we learned.
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Sources & Further Reading:
Article by David Satori, published on Mycostories. David is a mycorrhizal ecologist at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, Imperial College London, and Forest Research. His large-scale DNA study mapping mycorrhizal fungal diversity in Britain’s temperate rainforests reveals these ancient woodlands as overlooked biodiversity hotspots. Learn more at Rewilding Mycology and follow his work on Instagram @rewilding_mycology.
