🌡️ The Forest Is Not Silent. It's Screaming in a Language We're Only Just Learning.

📖 Read: 

On fungal intelligence, climate grief, and what the oldest organisms on Earth know about survival that we don't.

We are learning, slowly, to listen. To recognize that intelligence does not require a central nervous system, that survival does not require urgency, that resilience is not the absence of damage but the presence of a long, patient plan.

It is a reminder of what we are embedded in — something vastly older and more patient than our anxiety, something that has been practicing survival since long before we arrived, and will be practicing it, in new forms, long after we have figured out whether to.

Breathe easy. Go deep. The forest is still talking.

Link References

1. Language of fungi derived from their electrical spiking activity - 
2. Sampling spores and microorganisms in the stratosphere - .
3. Summers over land and ocean are becoming longer, transitioning faster, and accumulating more heat - .
4. Synthesizing Ecological Impacts and Management Responses from the 2021 Pacific Northwest Heat Wave to Prepare for Future Extreme Heat Events - .

    5. Dangerous fungal spores can surf the stratosphere—and survive - .

This is Heliox: Where Evidence Meets Empathy

Independent, moderated, timely, deep, gentle, clinical, global, and community conversations about things that matter.  Breathe Easy, we go deep and lightly surface the big ideas.

Transcript

0:25

I want you to imagine, like, right now, that you're standing in a forest in Vancouver, British Columbia. Oh, gorgeous area. Yeah, you're right in the heart of the Pacific Northwest. Yeah. You're completely surrounded by these towering western red cedars, Douglas firs, hamlocks. And it's damp, right? Like, you can smell that wet earth. Exactly. The wet earth, the pine needles. And if you stand perfectly still and just close your eyes, it feels utterly silent. You know, peaceful, completely static. Right. But that silence is a complete lie. Totally. It's just an illusion of our own biology, really. We simply don't have the sensory equipment to hear what is actually happening right in front of us. Right. Because if you could suddenly tune in to the actual frequencies of the forest... you wouldn't hear silence at all. No, you'd hear chaos. Yeah, you would hear a massive, highly intelligent conversation. And not just a conversation happening down in the dirt, but one that spans three completely distinct, completely extreme layers of our world. It's wild to think about. It really is. So today on this deep dive, we are going to trace this invisible thread of biological intelligence and environmental shock. We are going everywhere. We are. We're starting deep down in the pitch black soil under your boots. Then we're going to travel up the trunk of that cedar tree into this like scorching, stressed out forest canopy. And then we go all the way up. Exactly. Yeah. Finally, we're going to ride a microscopic hitchhiker all the way into the freezing, irradiated edge of space. I mean, we are really looking at an unseen intelligence that absolutely does not need a brain or a central nervous system to know its world. Right. Or to process trauma, you know, and to engineer its own survival. So, to guide us through this, we are synthesizing a really remarkable stack of research today. It's a hefty stack. It is. We'll be diving into a 2022 Royal Society paper by Andrew Adamansky on the electrophysiology of fungi. Which is just a fascinating piece of work. And we're pairing that with a 2026 Environmental Research Letters paper by Ted Scott and his colleagues at the University of British Columbia. Right. And that one maps out the nonlinear lengthening of our summers. which is, well, it's terrifying. Completely. We'll also use Eva Kohlberg's 2025 synthesis report on the horrific 2021 Pacific Northwest heat wave to see what that climate data actually looks like on the ground. Because you need that ground-level view to understand the math. Exactly. And finally, we have a 2025 European Geosciences Union abstract and a 2026 Science Magazine article.- By Jerome Kasparian and Katia Gindro.- Yes, detailing the capture of living fungal spores Exactly. in the stratosphere.- Now I know it sounds like a totally disparate collection of papers, right? You've got mycology, climatology, atmospheric science. It sounds like three different deep dives. It does. But when you look at the underlying mechanics, it is a single, unbroken story. About communication and survival. Exactly. We are going to look at how the Earth communicates stress, how its deep time rhythms are violently breaking, and how life forms with absolutely no nervous systems deploy these shockingly patient strategies to... to endure. So we have to start in the dark. Way down in the dark. Yeah. Imagine shrinking yourself down to the size of a grain of sand and just burrowing into the forest floor. You're surrounded by decaying wood, minerals, and this endless tangled web of white threads. A mycelium. The root-like network of fungi. Because we usually treat mushrooms as inert, right? Yeah, like a plant just sitting there absorbing water. Right. But Andrew Adamansky's 2022 research from the Unconventional Computing Laboratory in Bristol just completely shatters that idea. It does. It shows that the soil is electrically loud. He was humming. Adam Atsky approached these mycelial networks not as a botanist but almost the way a neurobiologist would approach a human brain. It's just such a wild pivot. It really is. He took four different species of fungi. There's the ghost fungus which actually glows in the dark. Oh I don't know. Yeah. And the enoki fungus which you might have seen in your local grocery store. So they're delicious. They are. Then there's the split gill fungus and the caterpillar fungus which is a famous parasite. Right, the scary one. The very scary one. And he inserted these iridium-coated stainless steel needle electrodes directly into the substrate they were growing in. And sometimes directly into the food bodies, right? The mushrooms themselves. Exactly. Wait, let's talk about the physical setup here, because plugging a mushroom into a computer sounds like science fiction. It sounds totally absurd. It really does. Like, why use iridium-coated stainless steel? And how does a fungus even generate electricity without neurons? Exactly. Well, the iridium coating is crucial because it's highly conductive but also chemically inert. Okay, meaning it doesn't react. Right. You don't want the metal of the electrode reacting with the acids and enzymes the fungus secretes. Ah, because that would mess up the data. Yeah. Exactly. It would create false electrical readings or worse, poison the organism. You need a completely neutral listener. That makes sense. And as for the electricity itself? You have to remember that all living cells maintain an electrical charge. They have a cell membrane, which is basically a barrier. Like a wall? Yeah. And on the inside of that barrier, you have a different concentration of charged atom zions, like potassium, calcium, and hydrogen, than you do on the outside. So the cell membrane acts like a dam holding back water. Perfect analogy. But in this case, it's holding back an electrical charge. Got it. And just like neurons in a human brain, fungal cells have ion channels. These are microscopic gates in the membrane that can open and close. Oh, okay. So they can let the water out of the dam. Precisely. When a fungus is stimulated by a change in its environment, say a shift in temperature, a chemical gradient from a food source, or physical damage, those gates fly open. And the ions just rush across. They rush across the membrane, creating a sudden change in voltage. That voltage spike travels down the long tube-like hyphae of the mycelial network. Like a wire. Exactly like a wire. It is a wave of depolarization. In neuroscience, we call these spike trains or action potentials. So Adam Ansky hooked up these high-resolution data loggers to the fungi in complete darkness, right? Yeah, and he took readings every single second for days. And what he recorded were undeniable structured trains of electrical spikes. Yes. Not just random noise. Structured spikes. But the scale of it is what completely breaks my brain. Like, if I touch a hot stove, the sensory neuron in my finger fires in milliseconds. Right. It's an immediate jolt. But a fungus is on a completely different biological clock, isn't it? It operates in deep time. The spiking characteristics are highly species-specific. and compared to animals, incredibly slow. How slow are we talking? The duration of a single spike in these fungi varies anywhere from one hour to 21 hours. Wait, 21 hours for one spike? Yes! Think about that. A single beat of their electrical rhythm can take almost an entire day to complete. That is unfathomable to me. And the amplitude is tiny, ranging from.03 to 2.1 millivolts. You need incredibly sensitive equipment to even detect. Let's look at the different personalities of these species, because the data shows they don't all talk the same way, right? No, they have very distinct dialects almost. Like the caterpillar fungus, Cordyceps militaris, is the slow one. Yes, the parasite that takes over insect bodies. Right. In the lab, its electrical activity is the strong, silent type. Very stoic. Yeah. The average interval between its spikes is nearly two hours. It just sits there, sends out a slow pulse, and waits hours to send the next one. Contrast that with the split-gill-funked schizophilum commune. Which is found everywhere, right? Everywhere except Antarctica on decaying wood. And this species is the chatterbox of the commune. the group. I love that. A channer box mushroom. It really is. Its average interval between spikes is just over half an hour. Oh, so much faster. Way faster. And it produces highly diverse electrical activity. Adamaski observed transitions from very low amplitude, low frequency spikes to high amplitude, high frequency. And crucially, when they recorded neighboring fruit bodies of the split-gill fungus, they saw synchronization, right? Yes. A spike on one mushroom would correlate with a spike on a neighboring mushroom within the exact same network. Okay, here is where I struggle, though. I really do. What's the sticking point? Well, we see electrical spikes. We see synchronization. It's why he didn't just stop at observing the spikes. He had to prove it mathematically. Exactly. He subjected the electrical data to rigorous linguistic and mathematical analysis. Right. If we hypothesize that these spikes are processing information and communicating states of the mycelium, we have to ask, can we find syntax? Can we find a real structure? Exactly. But how do you even begin to look for syntax in an electrical pulse that takes five hours to complete? You start by defining what constitutes a word. Okay. Adam Adzky converted the continuous, wavy electrical data into binary strings 1 for a spike, 0 for no spike. Classic computer science approach. Right. Then he used a metric called a theta threshold. A theta threshold? What does that actually measure? Essentially, he calculated the average interval between spikes for a specific species. Oh, I see. If a group of spikes occurred close together, separated by a time distance no larger than that average interval, They were grouped together as a single linguistic unit A word Oh, that makes so much sense It's like listening to someone speak a language you don't understand Yes You don't know the vocabulary But you can hear the pauses The physical breath between clusters of syllables Exactly And those pauses tell you where one thought ends and the next begins That is a perfect way to visualize it And when Adamatsky mapped out the lengths of these fungal words, meaning how many individual electrical spikes made of a single word, the distribution was stunning. What did it look like? The structural distribution of fungal word lengths perfectly matched the distribution of word lengths in human languages. Wait, really? Like human languages specifically? Specifically English and Swedish. That is unsettling in the best possible way. I know, it gives you goosebumps. But matching word length isn't enough to prove it's a language. Right, because a random number generator could occasionally spit out clusters that look like words. Exactly. He had to measure the actual algorithmic complexity of the communication. And how did he do that? He used Lempelziv complexity or LZ complexity along with Shannon entropy. Okay, let me make sure I am wrapping my head around LZ complexity, because I've seen that term in computer science. It's very common there. It's the map behind how we compress files, right? Like making a ZIP file on a laptop. Yes. The Lempel-Ziv algorithm is the absolute foundation of file compression. It measures how repetitive a sequence of data is. If I have a sequence of spikes that is just on, off, on, off, on, off, it's highly predictable. Right. A compression algorithm looks at that and says, I don't need to save every single one of these data points. I can just write a rule that says repeat on, off 10 times. So that sequence has very low LZ complexity. It compresses down to almost nothing. Exactly. Meaning it's just a biological twitch. A drone. Exactly. It's not a language, it's just a metronome. But if the sequence is highly unpredictable… Right. Right. If it features unique patterns, varying intervals, and complex, non-repeating structures, the algorithm cannot compress it easily. It requires more raw information to describe the sequence. Yes. That data has high LZ complexity. So, when he ran the fungi's electrical pulses through the compression algorithm, what actually happened? It held its complexity. Wow. Did it compress down at all? Very minimally. The spiking events firmly rule out mere randomness or simple, repetitive pulsing. Which species was the most complex? The split-gill fungus generated the most complex sentences. The chatterbox. The chatterbox. The caterpillar fungus was right below it. This suggests that these organisms are transmitting information with a morphological complexity that rivals, and in some narrow mathematical metrics, exceed certain human dialects. It is a profound level of biological intelligence. So if they are talking, the obvious question is, what are they talking about? survival. Right. Based on the sources, it seems entirely tied to the state of their environment. Yes, they are constantly monitoring. If a high-full thread finds a rich source of decaying wood, it needs to tell the rest of the network to shift its resources and grow in that direction. Exactly. But more importantly, it communicates danger. a roof is clipped or if a drought suddenly begins they broadcast it I like to think of this as the empathy of consensus the empathy of consensus break down how you see that operating in the soil well think about how our human bodies handle pain Okay. If you touch a hot stove, your finger sends a sharp pain signal directly up your arm, straight into your brain. Right.

Your brain, sitting in its centralized throne room, issues a command: 13:46

"Pull the arm back." It's a dictatorship. That's a great way to put it. But a fungus has no brain. It is a vast decentralized web. There is no central processing unit. Exactly. So when a patch of mycelium encounters a stressor, say, the soil temperature spikes and begins desiccating when it opens those ion channels? It fires off the spike train. Right. It sends these complex electrical words pulsing through the network. And because there is no central brain to make an executive decision, the entire network has to receive the signal. They all have to process it. The whole network has to feel the stress and arrive at a response together. It's an empathy born of consensus. I love that phrase. They physically share the physiological state of trauma so the collective can shift its water resources or alter its growth patterns to adapt. And right now, adapt they must. Because the environment they're continuously monitoring is undergoing a violent shift. A completely unprecedented shift. Yes. The soil is screaming because the sky is burning. And this brings us out of the dark, damp earth and up into the light. Because the subterranean communication network doesn't exist in a vacuum. Right. It is reacting to the rhythm of the world above. And right now, the world above ground is fundamentally breaking its deep time rhythm. So we're stepping out of the dirt and looking up into the canopy of the Pacific Northwest. The fungi are sending out stress signals about heat and desiccation. Why? Let's talk about the summer of 2021. Right. Yeah, we have to talk about 2021. The 2021 Pacific Northwest heat wave was not just a hot week. No, it was a catastrophe. It was an unprecedented extreme climate shock that completely overran the historical boundaries of the ecosystem. system. And we rely heavily here on Eva Kohlberg's 2025 synthesis report, right? Yes, which is a massive document. It compiles data from 92 researchers across Washington, Oregon, and Idaho. And during that summer, air temperatures just shattered records by terrifying margins. They exceeded 43 degrees Celsius, which is about 109 degrees Fahrenheit. And in some microclimates. They hit 49 degrees Celsius, or 120 degrees Fahrenheit. In a temperate rainforest. Exactly. 120 degrees in environments built for mist and moderate summers. It's structurally incompatible with the life forms there. To understand what that temperature actually does, we have to look at the physical devastation outlined in Kohlberg's report. It details mass mortality across benthic, intertidal, riparian, forested, and alpine ecosystems. The images from the field research are haunting. Like you had vast stretches of the Washington coast where the water retreated during low tide. And the sun just hit those mudflats. Yeah, and the shellfish simply boiled inside their shells. It's a horrible image. The report actually includes a photo from researcher Rana Brown showing a beach completely littered with open, empty heat-stressed clamps. It is literally a mass grave. And then you look up from the beach into the forests, and you see widespread canopy scorch. Entire stands of western red cedar, western hemlock, and Sitka spruce. Where the needles just flash-fried. Yeah, turning a sickly, rust-red color basically overnight. It was a profound thermal shock. To analyze why certain organisms died and others survived, Colbert's team utilized a climate change vulnerability framework. Which is a crucial biological concept. It really is. It breaks down an organism's risk into three interacting components. Exposure, sensitivity, and adaptive capacity. Let's walk through those because it explains the mechanics of survival on a micro level. First is exposure. Exposure is the raw physical reality of the threat. How much of the extreme heat did the organism actually experience? And what did the data show? What it showed was that exposure varied wildly, even within a few square meters of the exact same ecosystem. Wow, really? Yes. For example, the report cites studies showing that denser forest canopy cover actively buffered the understory from the extreme temperature. So the thick canopy acted as a thermodynamic shield. Exactly. It intercepted the solar radiation, creating a significantly cooler microclimate below. And downed woody debris helped too, right? Yes. Rotting logs and branches trapped moisture and cooled the soil surface. So you could theoretically have two identical ferns just a few meters apart. one survives while the other burns purely based on the architectural exposure of the forest above them yes that is wild then we have sensitivity sensitivity is the biological degree to which an organism is affected by that exposure so the Western red cedar and sick of spruce exhibited disproportionate amounts of canopy scorch right meaning their cellular structures were highly sensitive to those specific temperature thresholds thresholds. And sensitivity also varied based on the tree's phenological stage, didn't it? That was a huge factor. The researchers tracked the seasonal life cycle of the trees. What happens if a tree was further along in its cycle? If a particular stand of trees had experienced an early bud burst that spring, meaning they had already pushed out their soft, new, water-rich growth, they suffered much greater foliar scores. Ah, because the new leaves are so delicate. Exactly. They were caught at their most biologically vulnerable moment. And the final pillar is adaptive capacity. The ability to adjust, migrate, or behaviorally withstand the heat. The ability to physically do something about the stressor. Yes, and the report highlights a fascinating example from the intertidal zone. With the clams. Right. While millions of shellfish suffered mass mortality, the butter clams fared much better. Why did they survive when the others boiled? Because their natural evolutionary behavior is to burrow deeper into the mud than other co-occurring bivalve species. Oh, that makes sense. That behavioral trait, their adaptive capacity, allowed them to physically escape the highest temperatures of the surface mud during the low tides. And this leads to something incredible that we see happening in the canopy itself. Because the trees obviously can't burrow into the mud. No, they are locked in place. They are completely stationary. So when the heat wave hits, they deploy what I think of as the empathy of self-soothing. I like that.- I like that.- The trees begin to sweat a volatile organic compound called isoprene.- Isoprene aerosolization. This is a critical defensive mechanism.- How does it start?- When a tree like a western red cedar is pushed into thermal shock, the extreme heat starts damaging the thylakoid membranes inside its chloroplast.- The very engines of photosynthesis.- Right. So to stop its cellular machinery from melting down, the tree synthesizes and releases massive amounts of isoprene gas from its stomata, the pores on its needles. And what does the isoprene actually do? Inside the leaf, it acts as an antioxidant, stabilizing the cell membranes against heat degradation. Okay, but what about when it leaves the leaf? When it exhales that isoprene into the atmosphere, it reacts with the air... It oxidizes, reacting with ozone and hydroxyl radicals to form secondary organic aerosols. And those aerosols do something visible, right? Yes. These microscopic particles scatter sunlight, specifically the shorter blue wavelengths of light. Which creates a literal blue haze over the forest. Exactly. It's incredible. The forest is literally exhaling its own shade. It is a biological SOS. It's altering the atmospheric chemistry directly above the canopy, to shield itself from a sun it no longer recognizes. It is a desperate measure to balance a broken rhythm, but it requires an enormous amount of metabolic energy. So the tree can only keep that up for so long. Right. It's not a permanent fix. Which brings up a terrifying question. The 2021 heat wave was horrific. But if we look at the data, was it a black... swan event. Right. Was it just one freak atmospheric anomaly? Because if it's a freak event, the forest recovers eventually. The clams repopulate. But if it's a trend, if the baseline is shifting, then the resilience of these ecosystems is going to run out. So to answer that, we have to look at the macroclimatology. We turn to the 2026 paper by Ted Scott and his colleagues at UBC. And their data definitively proves this is not a freak event. Not at all. It is a systemic, accelerating shift in the fundamental architecture of our seasons. Scott's team analyzed daily mean two meter air temperatures. from a massive data set called ECMWF ERA5. Yes. Hold on, let's explain ERA5, because it's not just a guy reading a thermometer in a field, is it? No, it's one of the most sophisticated tools we have. ERA5 is a global atmospheric reanalysis data set produced by the European Center for Medium-Range Weather Forecast. What goes into that data set? It takes decades of historical data from weather stations, weather balloons, ocean buoys and satellites and feeds it all into advanced meteorological models. So it's a massive synthesis. It essentially creates a highly accurate three dimensional grid of the Earth's weather hour by hour going back to the mid 20th century. And Scott's team used this data set, covering the years 1961 to 2024. To identify the exact annual timing of summer onset and withdrawal across the global mid-latitudes. But to find those exact dates, they didn't just look at when it felt hot, right? No, they used something called Fourier series analysis. Okay, my understanding of Fourier transforms is mostly in audio processing. That's where most people encounter it. Like taking a messy sound wave and breaking it down into its pure underlying frequencies. How does that apply to a calendar year of temperature data? It's the exact same mathematical principle. Daily temperature data is incredibly noisy. Like static. Exactly. You might have a random cold snap in June or a bizarre heat wave in October. If you just draw a line through the daily averages, it looks like a jagged heart monitor. So how did previous studies handle that? Previous climate studies often used simple polynomial smoothing to average that out. But that creates problems. It can distort the exact timing of seasonal shifts, especially in higher latitudes where the changes are stark. So what does a Fourier series analysis do differently? A Fourier series analysis takes that jagged, messy, year-long temperature graph and breaks it down into a smooth underlying sine wave. It captures the true mathematical rhythm of the year. Exactly. So by finding that pure sine wave, they can pinpoint the exact mathematical intersection where the wave crosses the threshold into summer. And the exact day it drops back down into fall. Stripping away the noise of random daily weather. Precisely. And what that Fourier analysis revealed is staggering. What were the numbers? From 1990 to 2023, the global mid-latitude summer length increased by 5 to 7 days per decade across inland areas. Wow. And they found similarly robust increases over the oceans and coastal margins. Let's do the math on that. Five to seven days per decade. Yes. Since 1990, we've added roughly 20 days to our summer. That is almost three full weeks of summer-like conditions that simply did not exist 30 years ago. That is deeply unsettling. Yes. And the most crucial finding in the paper is the acceleration. It's getting faster. Prior to 2012, earlier studies reported that the trend on land was an increase of about four days per decade. Oh, wow. So the rate at which summer is expanding is actively speeding up. Exactly. When you look at specific urban areas highlighted in the study, the numbers jump even higher. Like where? Minneapolis is gaining 9.3 days of summer per decade. Jeez. Sydney, Australia is gaining a massive 14.8 days per decade. That means in Sydney, the summer season is growing by nearly a day and a half every single year. That fundamentally alters how cities manage power grids, how agriculture plans harvests, everything. But it's not just that the summers are wider on the calendar. No. It's how intense the heat is getting during those extra weeks. This is where we have to talk about the physical mechanism of accumulated heat. Right. The researchers calculated cumulative summer heat stress. This isn't just taking an average temperature. It's more comprehensive than that. This is calculating the area under the curve. It measures how many degrees above the summer threshold temperature are experienced, multiplied by how many days that heat persists over the entire year. season because as the overall temperature profile shifts upward you don't just get more days of summer right the days you already had get significantly hotter it is a nonlinear accumulation the stress compounds it's the difference between holding a 10 pound weight for a minute versus holding a 10 pound weight for an hour that's a brilliant way to put it the weight didn't change but the accumulated stress on your muscle causes failure precisely And the findings show that for northern hemisphere land masses, accumulated heat is growing at 44 degrees Celsius days per decade since 1990. Is that a lot? To put the severity of that in perspective, during the baseline period from 1961 to 1990, accumulated heat was only growing at 14 degrees Celsius days per decade. Oh my god. It is currently increasing more than three times as fast as the historical baseline. Three times as fast. So the thermal stress on the red cedar sweating isoprene, the stress on the clams burrowing into the mud, it's compounding exponentially. It is entirely unsustainable for those organisms. But as dark as that is, it brings us to what I think is the most terrifying detail from Scott's paper. It's not the length, and it's not the peak heat. No. It's the abrupt transition. It's the speed at which we are slamming into these seasons. The steepening of the temperature gradient. This is a critical finding. Explain the gradient steepening. It's not just that summer starts earlier and ends later. It's that the actual slope of the temperature change at the moment of onset and withdrawal is becoming almost vertical. Like hitting a wall of heat. Exactly. The statistical data shows temperatures are rising and falling much more rapidly at the boundaries of the season. Think about the biological necessity of acclimatization. Right. I like to think of it like a runner. If you were going to run a marathon, you don't just jump out of bed and instantly sprint at a six-minute mile pace. You'd collapse. Your heart would pound, you'd flood your muscles with lactic acid, and you would tear a hamstring. You need a warm-up. The body needs to adjust. The human body and the ecological body needs the shoulder seasons spring and fall to warm-up. The sap needs to rise slowly. Right. Animals need cues to shed winter coats. Cellular structures need time to harden against the incoming heat. But Scott's paper shows the shoulder seasons are vanishing. We are forcing the ecosystem to sprint without a warm-up. And Kohlberg's synthesis report gives us the exact physical consequence of that vanishing act. What happens on the ground? When organisms are forced into summer conditions without the transition period, they experience catastrophic situations. system failure. Like the seedlings in Idaho? Yes. The report highlights the Curdalene Tribes Forestry Program in Idaho. They are engaged in vital reforestation efforts. But in 2021? In 2021, they lost 85% of their planted seedlings. 85%. That is devastating. The report attributes this to the compounding impacts of the heat wave arriving on top of a chronic drought. The seedlings simply had no time to establish the deep root systems necessary to handle an instantaneous thermal shock of that magnitude. It is a squeezed breath. The forest is suffocating because the rhythm is broken. So let's step back and look at the whole picture we've painted so far. Okay, let's recap. Down in the pitch black soil, the fungi are pulsing with highly complex electrical signals. sensing the rapidly drying earth, communicating the stress of a changing baseline across vast distances. Up above, the canopy is scorching. The trees are sweating blue haze to self-soothe. The seedlings are dying because the shoulder seasons have vanished and summer is arriving like a hammer. If you are an ancient intelligent organism that is physically locked into the earth, if you cannot run away from the heat, What do you do? You deploy the ultimate long game strategy. What is it? You abandon the ground entirely. You look to the sky. You send your offspring to the edge of space to wait it out. Let's move to the third layer. We are going into the stratosphere. We are drawing now from a brilliant 2025 abstract presented at the European Geosciences Union by atmospheric physicist Jerome Kasparian and mycologist Katya Gindro. Along with the subsequent 2026 feature in Science Magazine. They set out to answer a seemingly impossible question. Could fungal spores, the microscopic reproductive survival capsules of fungi bee, aeroported not just across a forest, but into the stratosphere? And what I love about this research is how they proved it. Oh, it's the best part. They didn't wait for a billion-dollar NASA grant or time on a specialized satellite. They went full MacGyver. They absolutely did. The meteorological service launches weather balloons twice a day from Payern to gather basic atmospheric data. Right. Kasparian and his team realized they could piggyback their experiment on these routine flights, but the meteorological service gave them a strict weight limit. What was the limit? The payload had to be under 2 kg. So Kasparian literally rescued discarded polystyrene boxes, styrofoam coolers from his university's biochemistry department trash pile. They built a space probe out of garbage. It is the pinnacle of resourceful science. He outfitted these styrofoam boxes with a barometric altimeter to measure air pressure. And some basic electronics, right? Yes. and an Arduino Uno microcontroller, which is a cheap open source computer board. And what was inside the box? Inside the box, he engineered a rotating arm sampler driven by servo motors. It's essentially a spinning apparatus holding four small sticks, and those sticks are coated in petroleum jelly. Wait, I have to pause here. Petroleum jelly... Vaseline. Yes. You're building a high altitude atmospheric sampler and you're using petroleum jelly. It sounds like a prank. It sounds absurd, but it's actually a highly effective standard technique in aerobiology. Really? Why? When you are trying to capture microscopic particles out of thin air, especially at high altitudes where wind speeds are extreme, you need a capture medium that is incredibly sticky but also biologically inert. Oh, I see. You don't want a chemical adhesive that will destroy the DNA or the cell wall of the spore upon impact. So petroleum jelly is perfect. Exactly. It's viscous enough to catch and hold a spore impacting it at high velocity. And it won't chemically degrade the biological material. Okay, so how does the actual flight sequence work? Because they only want to sample the stratosphere, not the regular air near the ground. The Arduino is connected to the high-pressure sensor. As the weather balloon ascends through the troposphere, the box remains completely sealed. So no contamination from ground air. Right. When the altimeter registers exactly 12,000 meters, which is the lower boundary of the stratosphere, the Arduino triggers the servomotors. And the box opens. It opens two small ports on the top and bottom of the styrofoam box. The thin stratospheric air flows through the chamber. The petroleum jelly sticks spin to maximize surface area contact. And they collect whatever happens to be floating up there. Exactly. And then it keeps going up. The balloon ascends to about 35,000 meters. That is over 114,000 feet. For context, commercial jets fly at around 35,000 feet. Right. This balloon is three times higher than a 747. At that altitude, the atmospheric pressure drops so low that the helium gas inside the balloon expands until the balloon physically bursts. And what happens to the box? The balloon bursts and a small parachute deploys to bring the box back down. But the ports are still open. No, crucially, as it descends, the Arduino senses the pressure rising again. When it drops back down to 12,000 meters, it slams the port shut and locks the box. Oh, that's brilliant. This prevents any contamination from the lower atmosphere on the way down. Yes. And to be absolutely sure the results were valid, they also flew a completely sealed control box that never opened during the flight. Just to prove their pre-launch sterilization techniques worked. Exactly. They sterilized everything in a clean room with UVC light before launch. So when the box finally landed in a field or a forest, How did they find it? They used a custom mobile app linked to a GPS tracker to hike out and recover the payload. Okay, so they recover the box. But let's talk about the physical reality of what those open ports were exposed to at 35,000 meters. It's brutal. Because the stratosphere is not a place meant for life. It is fundamentally hostile. It is an extreme environment that challenges our basic definitions of habitability. Tell me about the temperature. At 35,000 meters, the ambient temperature is around negative 63 degrees Celsius. And the pressure? The atmospheric pressure is a near vacuum, a tiny fraction of what we experience at sea level. Any moisture is instantly freeze-dried. And worse than the cold and the vacuum is the radiation. The radiation is the real fuel. Right, because they are flying above the protective bulk of the ozone layer. Yes. So anything inside that box, anything floating in that air, is getting blasted by unshielded shortwave ultraviolet radiation from the sun. UVC radiation literally shreds DNA. It absolutely shreds it. It causes the chemical bonds in the DNA double helix to break and fuse together incorrectly. Creating pyrimidine dimers, right? Yes, which makes cellular replication impossible. It is basically a microwave inside a deep freeze. It should be an instant death zone for any biological organism. It should be a death zone. But fungi are unparalleled masters of structural and chemical resistance. So what did they find? The researchers ran five of these test flights between October 2023 and June 2024, when they recovered the matchsticks, brought them back to the lab, and performed deep DNA sequencing on the petroleum jelly. Yeah. The results were astounding. They identified DNA from 235 distinct fungal genera floating in the stratosphere. 235 genera. Yes. There is an entire invisible ecosystem floating in the death zone. But as any biologist will tell you, the presence of DNA does not necessarily mean the organism is alive. Right. The DNA they sequenced could just be the frozen shredded remains of dead spores that got swept up in a storm. Exactly. the true breakthrough of this research happened when Katya Gindro and her mycology team took those stratospheric samples and what did they do with them they attempted to culture them on fungal nutrient medium as in a climate controlled lab they tried to wake them up they succeeded wow out of those samples they successfully revived and cultured 15 live species of fungi they brought them back from the dead. Or rather, they pulled them out of a state of extreme suspended animation. What kind of fungi were they? They cultured living plant pathogens, including species that routinely infect agricultural crops like blackberries and carrots. That's amazing. They cultured Epicochum nigrum, a very common hardy fungus that They even successfully cultured Naganicia albeda, which is an opportunistic fungus known to infect immunocompromised humans. And these spores had survived the near vacuum, the deep freeze of negative 63 degrees, and the DNA shredding UV radiation. Survived at all. And the moment they were brought back down to hospitable conditions, they germinated and began to grow mycelium. How is that physically possible? How does a single cell survive that? The abstract notes that it all comes down to the chemical and structural nature of the fungal spore wall. What's in the wall? Many spores are packed with melanin. Wait, like the pigment in human skin? The exact same pigment that protects human skin from sunburn. In fungi, melanin acts as an incredible radiation shape. shield it absorbs the UV rays it absorbs them before they can penetrate the nucleus and damage the DNA additionally they have incredibly thick complex cell walls that prevent total desiccation in a vacuum it's like a biological spacesuit it truly is the researchers reference but right a scenario a common gray mold oh I've heard of that it's can India which are a type of asexual spore and are so resilient that they can be stored completely dry, in a freezer at negative 80 degrees Celsius, and still successfully germinate over 20 years later. 20 years in a deep freeze, and it just wakes up when the temperature's right. The patience is staggering. So let's look at this through the lens of everything we've discussed today. Let's tie it together. In the soil, we have the empathy of consensus. the electrical chatter coordinating a response to the drying earth. Right. In the canopy, we have the empathy of self-soothing, the trees sweating blue haze to survive the vanished shoulder season. Yes. And here in the stratosphere, we are looking at what I would call the empathy of persistence. Explain how you see the empathy of persistence operating here. Well, we look at a scorched cedar tree, or the boiled clams on the beach, and we think nature is incredibly fragile. We think the ecosystem is just collapsing. But life is not fragile. It is strategically patient. When the climate below becomes a chaotic, extended summer, when the soil dries out and the heat wave hits like a hammer. The fungi don't just sit there and die. They take action. They aerosolize their offspring. They inject millions of microscopic spores into the thermal updrafts. And those updrafts carry them. Yes. Those spores are swept up past the forest canopy, past the storm clouds, past the jet streams, and injected directly into the stratosphere. They utilize the extreme atmospheric currents as a global distribution. network. Exactly. They act as space bound ambassadors. I love that. They enter this deep frozen sleep, surfing a high altitude superhighway across continents. Drifting for weeks. Weeks, maybe months. Crossing oceans, entirely disconnected from the burning forest they left behind. They are essentially waiting. They wait with absolute perfect patience until they finally catch a ride on a hospitable raindrop that washes them out of the sky and brings them back down to Earth. And they land in a completely new, perhaps more survivable microclimate. Ready to germinate and start the network all over again. It is the ultimate biological escape pod. And it works flawlessly because they do not experience time or urgency the way humans do. Their operational time frame is vast. Vast. And that brings us to the core realization of our journey today. Human beings tend to view nature as disconnected, isolated pieces. Vast. We really do. We see a news report about a heat wave causing clam mortality in Washington state. Six months later, we see a mushroom popping up in our yard after a rainstorm. And then on a science blog, we read about a weather balloon collecting data in Switzerland. Exactly. We view these as completely separate phenomena happening in separate scientific disciplines. But they aren't isolated. That's the entire point of weaving these papers together. Precisely. These sources, when synthesized, prove that the Earth operates on an interconnected scale that completely dwarfs human perceptions. It's all linked. The electrical signaling in the soil isn't just random noise. It is actively reacting to the thermal shock in the canopy. And that thermal shock is driven by the macroclimatic shifts of lengthening summers and vanishing shoulder seasons. And that extreme environmental stress directly necessitates the stratospheric dispersal of spores. It is a single continuous loop of biological data processing, trauma response, and survival mechanics. If you only look at the scorched leaves of the cedar tree, you miss the electrical conversation happening underground. If you only look at the heat dome on a weather map, you miss the microscopic astronauts surviving the stratosphere. You have to look at the whole patient. You have to look at the entire messy, brilliant system. Yes. Okay, let's bring it all home. Let's do it. We started our journey in the damp, dark soil of the Pacific Northwest, listening to the slow, complex electrical words spoken by fungi. A subterranean internet sensing the earth and coordinating survival through consensus. Then we traveled up into the forest canopy. feeling the squeezed breath of the 2021 heat wave, unpacking the mathematical reality, showing how our summers are abruptly rewriting the rules of survival, growing longer, hotter, and arriving without warning. And finally, we ascended to the frozen, irradiated edge of space. Discovering that patient spores hitchhike across the globe on atmospheric superhighways. Utilizing extreme resilience to weep for their chance to start again. It is a profound testament to the hidden architecture of life on Earth. It really is. The intelligence of the unseen isn't just about individual survival. It's about interconnectedness across entirely different scales of reality. From the electrical hum in the dirt, to the chemical haze in the sky, to the spores touching the stars. Everything is trying to hold the line forever. It really is. And it leaves me with one final thought, something I want you listening right now to take with you and mull over long after this audio stops playing. I'm ready. Think back to that electrical network in the soil. We know fungi are capable of decentralized, complex electrical communication underground. Yes, we saw the data. We know they process environmental data without a brain. Right. And we now know they are simultaneously utilizing the stratosphere, the very edge of space, as a global distribution network to escape rapidly warming microclimates. Right. So what if the atmosphere itself is acting as an extension of their neural network? That is a staggering implication. To view the air currents not just as weather, but as a biological conduit. Oh, wow. Right. If the Earth's oldest organisms are already using the stratosphere to wait out our climate crisis, communicating their genetic material across continents on stratospheric winds. And maybe. Perhaps we aren't destroying the planet. Perhaps human industry and climate change are just a temporary localized fever in a biological intelligence that operates on a much grander, far more patient scale. The diagnostic x-ray machine might be broken, and the timeline might be shifting, but the patient. The patient is playing a game of survival. We're only just beginning to understand. Thank you so much for joining us on this deep dive. We'll catch you next time.