Fungi are living below your feet. Roughly 110 quadrillion kilometers of living fungal threads are woven through the world’s soils. Stretched end-to-end they would cover a distance nearly a billion times that from Earth to the sun. Now, scientists have mapped where those networks are, how dense they are, and what threatens them.

Last year, researchers published global analyses in Nature about the diversity patterns of underground mycorrhizal fungal communities along with the Underground Atlas to help decision makers visualize where to prioritize conservation.

Now, they ask the question: How much fungal infrastructure exists, and where?

A new study published in Science by researchers with the Society for the Protection of Underground Networks (SPUN) and collaborators produced the first global maps of arbuscular mycorrhizal (AM) fungal network density and biomass.

“There could be up to 10 meters (32 feet) of mycorrhizal network in just a teaspoon of soil,” lead author Justin Stewart of SPUN said in a press statement.

Nearly all land plants live in partnership with arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi. The fungi exchange water and nutrients for carbon made from sunlight. These underground networks act as a living circulatory system for the planet, and the new study found they move an estimated 4 billion tons of CO2 equivalent into soils annually, roughly 11% of global human-related emissions.

To build the density maps, the team drew on data from more than 16,000 soil cores collected across nine biomes referenced in 322 published studies. They developed machine-learning models to predict network density in unsampled regions, then calibrated those predictions using robotic imaging of more than 300,000 individual living hyphae (the tubular cells that make up fungal networks) grown under laboratory conditions at the Amsterdam research institute AMOLF.

The researchers visualized their results in a new interactive tool called the Mycorrhizal Infrastructure Map with estimates calculated for every square kilometer of terrestrial land. The maps reveal striking geographic variation.

Grassland ecosystems harbor an estimated 40% of all AM fungal biomass on Earth, with especially dense networks in South Sudan’s flooded grasslands, Florida’s Everglades in the U.S., and the Tibetan Plateau in Asia.

Croplands had roughly half the fungal network density of wild ecosystems. While researchers say more work is needed to link specific farming practices to fungal health, less dense networks may diminish soils’ ability to store carbon and cycle nutrients.

Previous research found that 90% of AM fungal biodiversity hotspots lie outside protected areas. The new data suggest the physical infrastructure of those networks is similarly exposed.

“Fungi have been ignored in climate and conservation for too long,” study co-author Toby Kiers, SPUN’s executive director, said. “Now is the time to change that trajectory.”

 Banner image: A screenshot from the Mycorrhizal Infrastructure Map.

SEATTLE (AP) — Lawmakers are demanding the National Science Foundation stop dismantling the Ocean Observatories Initiative, a $386 million ocean monitoring network being wound down under President Donald Trump’s administration. House Democrats on two committees call the action illegal. Democratic Sen. Jeff Merkley says he’s drafting legislation to freeze the removal of instruments until a full scientific review is completed. The National Science Foundation directed the removal of most of the system’s instruments from waters off Oregon, Washington, Alaska, North Carolina and Greenland by 2027. Monday’s pushback against the Republican administration’s actions comes as scientists are set to remove instruments from the Pacific and as an El Niño event is predicted to arrive this summer.

By Annika Hammerschlag, Associated Press

Banner image: In this 2021 image provided by Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, workers walk near buoys used to gather data at Pioneer New England shelf off the coast of Martha’s Vineyard, Mass. Image courtesy of Véronique LaCapra/Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution via Associated Press. 

Founder’s Briefs: An occasional series where Mongabay founder Rhett Ayers Butler shares analysis, perspectives and story summaries.

For the Karajarri people of Kimberley in northwestern Australia, the coastline, reefs, wetlands, beaches and desert-edge country form one estate, held through law, memory, work and obligation.

That relationship now has new recognition, reports Mongabay’s John Cannon. In March, the Karajarri dedicated Karajarri Jurarr Ngurra, Australia’s first Sea Country Indigenous Protected Area. It covers 237,489 hectares (nearly 587,000 acres) of marine and coastal ecosystems, including part of Malumpurr, the Karajarri name for Eighty Mile Beach.

The area is rich in life. Flatback turtles (Natator depressus) nest along the shore of Malumpurr. Migratory birds use the wetlands. Sawfish swim through nearby waters. These species are often recorded through science, surveys and management plans. The Karajarri know them through long presence, close observation and responsibility passed across generations.

The new protected area builds on three decades of legal and political work. The Karajarri first secured recognition of their land claims. They then established a land-based Indigenous Protected Area and developed a ranger program. Sea Country protection is the next step. It gives formal weight to an existing relationship.

Jesse Ala’i, formerly the Land and Sea Country manager for the Karajarri Traditional Lands Association, put it simply: “In order to have healthy Country, you need healthy people.” The reverse is also true. “Healthy people need healthy Country,” he added.

Australia’s Indigenous Protected Areas now account for more than half of the country’s progress toward protecting 30% of its territory by 2030.

Protection typically works best when it is not designed from a distance. It needs law, funding, monitoring and science. It also needs people who know a place well enough to notice when it is changing. In the Kimberley, that means recognizing those who have long cared for both land and sea.

Read the full story by John Cannon here.

Banner image: Flatback turtles nest on, and live off, the coast of Malumpurr, also known as Eighty Mile Beach. Image by © glyall via iNaturalist (CC BY-NC 4.0).

A Mexican long-tongued bat, featured above, flies into the blooms of an agave plant, a feeding and pollination technique used to reach nectar. The bats (Choeronycteris mexicana) have unusually long tongues to access nectar while their impact spreads pollen grains everywhere to pollinate nearby agave.

Peter Hudson, a professor of biology at Penn State University, U.S., photographed the moment in 2019 in Arizona’s Sonoran Desert near the U.S.-Mexico border. The region is a biodiversity hotspot, home to native species including trogons and antelope jackrabbits (Lepus alleni).

“These bats just go, like little kids on a sugar rush,” Hudson told Mongabay by phone. “They’re taking in so much of this rich sugar stuff that they’re flying about doing happy laps, as it were, in the sky.”

The bats’ long tongues can extend nearly 8 centimeters (3 inches) from their body and are covered in hair-like protusions, papillae, that help it drink nectar from flowers. They primarily feed on agave nectar, cactus flowers, soft fruits and the occasional insect.

Hudson used a movement trigger and flash to snap the moment. “It all happens so fast,” he said. “You have to get the bat as it’s coming into the plant and see if you can capture it as it hits the plant.”

The agave plant is used to make tequila and mezcal, Mexico’s national spirit. As demand for export has increased, the country has experienced a more than 700% surge in mezcal production in the past decade.

The jump in demand for Mexican spirits has been a double-edged sword for the three bat species that pollinate agave: the Mexican long-tongued bat, the lesser long-nosed bat (Leptonycteris yerbabuenae) and the greater long-nosed bat (Leptonycteris nivalis).

“Planting of the agave has increased as people want more and more agave to make tequila,” Hudson said. “So, there is an industry there which, on the one hand, seems to be benefiting the bats; but on the other hand, the wild agave is getting less.”

Agave cultivation is driving a decline in wild agave and deforestation, though scientists don’t know the true extent of deforestation, Alfonso Valiente, an ecologist at the Institute of Ecology at the National Autonomous University of Mexico, told Mongabay in 2023.

In Matatlán, a major mezcal-producing region in the south of Mexico, forest loss linked to mezcal production between 2000 and 2012 was around 36%, as producers expanded their agave farms onto hillsides with native vegetation. Yet in other agave-producing regions, producers use agroecological systems, in which 30% of agave plants are reserved for bats, limiting the amount harvested for mezcal production to 70%.

The Mexican long-tongued bat is currently listed as near threatened by the IUCN Red List, the global conservation authority.

Banner image: A Mexican long-tongued bat feeds from an agave flower in the Sonoran Desert in Arizona, U.S. Image courtesy of Peter Hudson.

Correction: A previous version of this article misidentified the jackrabbit species. 

A new book from Indigenous scholar Tyson Yunkaporta of Australia explores how human narratives dictate how modern society governs itself and, crucially, how it exploits or protects the natural world.

“It’s a terrible thing to … misrepresent things, make false claims, bear false witness in a way that is bending story, the story that everybody follows,” Yunkaporta told Mongabay’s newscast host Mike DiGirolamo. Yunkaporta is a Deakin University senior research fellow and member of the Apalech clan (Wik) whose traditional lands are located in far north Queensland, Australia.

His book, Right Story, Wrong Story: Adventures in Indigenous Thinking, argues that identifying and correcting “wrong stories” is key to stopping environmental exploitation. A wrong story, according to Yunkaporta, is one that acts as a deceptive “curse” by presenting an illusion as if it were real to justify the exploitation of nature and community well-being through narratives that have no connection to the land.

To illustrate the “wrong story” of modern resource exploitation, Yunkaporta told Mongabay the Aboriginal folk tale of Tidalik, a giant frog who hoarded all the world’s water for himself. Yunkaporta compares Tidalik to Wall Street firms and billionaires who gamble on water futures and “park their cash” in housing, exacerbating the affordability crisis while stopping the natural flow of resources.

In the legend, the animal kingdom does not “eat” Tidalik; instead, an eel makes him laugh by tying himself in knots, forcing the frog to “vomit all the water back into the land.”

“A lot of people say, ‘Eat the rich.’ I say, ‘Entertain the rich,’” Yunkaporta said.

The antidote to these destructive patterns lies in “First Law,” an Indigenous explanation of how people relate to each other and the land, Yunkaporta said. “The first relation is between land and people, and the second relation is between people and people. The second is contingent on the first,” Yunkaporta wrote in the book.

By adopting what Yunkaporta calls the “sacred mind,” individuals can see themselves not as isolated actors but as a “collection of relationships, connections, [and] obligations” to the natural world. This Indigenous perspective offers a pathway toward a more sustainable society by shifting the focus from possession to belonging, he elaborated.

Yunkaporta’s upcoming book, Snake Talk, will further detail “S,” foundational narratives shared across many human cultures that he said he believes can bridge global divides and help humans find “leverage points” to heal the planet.

Listen to the full conversation with Tyson Yunkaporta here.

Banner image of eight Australian Indigenous ways of learning, based on Tyson Yungaporta’s 2009 research thesis. Image via Wikimedia Commons (CC0 1.0).

When invasive rats are removed from islands, the ecological benefits can ripple across both land and sea more quickly than scientists expected, according to recent research.

Scientists have long assumed that meaningful recovery after the predators are eradicated would take decades. However, researchers with the U.S.-based NGO Island Conservation conducted a rat-removal experiment on Ulong Island in Palau, which provides the first experimental evidence that ecosystems can rebound far more quickly than previously expected.

Until recently, rats, which are typically nocturnal, were so abundant on Ulong Island that they were regularly seen during the day. They were a nuisance to campers and deadly for wildlife.

As opportunistic omnivores, rats readily prey upon seabird eggs and chicks, devastating nesting colonies on tropical islands. As a result, there were “very few nesting seabirds that we would find,” Coral Wolf, the conservation science program manager at Island Conservation, told Mongabay in a video call.

To measure the effects of rat eradication, Wolf designed an experiment in which all the rats were removed from Ulong, while the rats on nearby Ngeruktabel Island remained, serving as a control site. Before the eradication, researchers collected baseline biodiversity data. On land, they recorded bird calls and took soil samples. In the surrounding water, they measured indicators like fish biomass and coral cover.

One year after rats were removed, the team repeated the survey and found a dramatic improvement in the biodiversity. Freed from rat predation, seabird activity on the island surged. Detections of bridled tern (Onychoprion anaethetus) calls rose by 286% while brown noddy (Anous stolidus) and white tern (Gygis sp.) calls increased by roughly 50%.

Seabirds are critical connector species in what scientists recently dubbed the “circular seabird economy.”

“They’re out foraging, they feed on fish [and] they bring those nutrients back to the island,” Wolf said. Such nutrients accumulate on land, improving soil quality, and are eventually washed back into the sea where they enrich surrounding marine ecosystems, she added.  

Areas with large seabird populations are associated with more phytoplankton in the marine environment, higher fish biomass and better coral health, Wolf said.

On Ulong, researchers found fish biomass increased significantly once rats were removed. One location recorded a 183% increase. Increased nutrients in the water also appear to be supporting reef-building coral. In a statement shared with Mongabay, Island Conservation said early results suggest “seabird-derived nutrients [are] beginning to fuel reef productivity,” around the island.

“It’s powerful proof that terrestrial action spills over into benefits for surrounding reef communities, which people rely on for their livelihoods,” Nathaniel Hanna Holloway, marine ecologist at Scripps Oceanography, said in a statement. 

Wolf said the team had expected such improvements to Ulong Island’s ecosystem would take decades. Seeing measurable gains after just a year, she said, “is pretty remarkable and gives us hope for the restoration of the Rock Islands across this island community.”

The study is currently being submitted for publication.

Banner image: A rainbow over Ulong Island. Image courtesy of Island Conservation.