Study

Interspecific combative interactions between wood-decaying basidiomycetes

Boddy, L.

FEMS Microbiology Ecology, 2000

Peer-reviewednarrative reviewmixed

What they did

A synthesis of experiments pairing wood-decay fungi against one another, in agar culture and in blocks of wood, and of surveys of the boundaries visible in naturally decaying timber.

Studied in: Basidiomycota
Sample size: review of paired-culture and decaying-wood studies

Encounters between two fungal individuals are usually antagonistic and have consistent outcomes: replacement, where one takes the other territory; deadlock, where neither advances; and the production of dark pigmented barriers along the boundary. Outcomes shift with temperature, water content and which fungus arrived first, so a combative hierarchy in one set of conditions reorders in another.

What it means

The authors' reading, and ours. Where they differ, that difference is the point.

How the authors put it

Combat between individuals is a principal determinant of which fungi occupy a piece of wood and therefore of how it decays.

How NatureHQ reads it

The corrective to a picture of fungi as a cooperative underground network, and the explanation for something readers have all seen: the thin black lines wandering through a rotten log are not decoration or decay stages but boundaries, each one the front between two individuals that could not displace each other. It also supplies the mechanism behind a finding NatureHQ already carries — that which fungi arrive first predicts decay rate better than the weather does.

Limitations

Largely paired encounters; wood in a forest holds many individuals at once.
Agar results transfer imperfectly to wood, and both transfer imperfectly to a standing trunk.
Outcomes are strongly conditional on temperature and moisture, so hierarchies are local.