Funga Obscura is a beautifully crafted book by ecologist and environmental photographer Alison Pouliot that explores the world of fungi through a blend of storytelling and photography.
It features Pouliot’s stunning, high-quality photographs of fungi – each thoughtfully composed – paired with personal reflections and engaging insights into her deep passion for fungi and the art of capturing them on camera.
Drawing on years of studying these often-overlooked organisms, Pouliot describes fungi’s role in shaping life on Earth as creators of soil, builders of forests and silent partners in countless ecosystems.
Funga Obscura invites you to wander into nature and study fungi for yourself.
At the recent Tasmanian Mushroom Festival Field Day in Triabunna, Pouliot expanded on some of the book’s themes, including the remarkable resilience of fungi – and their vulnerability.
“As long as no-one disturbs the organic matter, a fungus [can keep] feeding, consuming, living basically – theoretically – endlessly,” she said.
“But what happens? Someone comes and builds a road. Imagine the fungus is under the soil, feeding, and then comes the road, and [the fungus] goes, ‘Oh, yuck, bitumen – can’t eat that!’ So it sends an electrical signal to the back of her mycelium saying, ‘Any food back there? We seem to have a problem; there’s a road here.’ The mycelium at the back replies: ‘Nope, you already ate the food, sorry.’”
In such moments of stress, Pouliot said, fungi may panic – fruiting mushrooms in a last-ditch attempt to send their spores out into the world.
“It’s like an animal, it has to have food to survive,” Pouliot said. “If we cut off the food supply, we lose the organism.”
The ‘Wood Wide Web’
At the Tasmanian Mushroom Festival Field Day, people were captivated by Pouliot’s demonstration of the ‘wood wide web’ – nature’s version of the internet.
A ‘wood wide web’ forms when fungi connect to tree roots and create an underground network that allows trees to share nutrients and water. Trees can also send signals through this network to warn each other about pests and diseases. Older “mother trees” even support younger ones by passing on nutrients to help them grow.
“This is quite an abstract concept [because] you can’t actually see it,” Pouliot said.
She demonstrated the ‘wood wide web’ using a string of stockings to represent fungal threads, or mycelium.
She invited audience members to hold the string at various different points, visually showing how trees share nutrients, water and even warning signals through this underground network.
Then she told a story of when she did this same demonstration with a group of children and a girl missed out on holding the string at a particular point.
“There was only one response she could have to this, and that was a complete and catastrophic meltdown,” Pouliot said.
“I thought, ‘Ah, what are we going to do now?’”
She ended up placing a hard hat on the girl’s head and told her not to cry because she had the most important job of all: the forester who decides which tree needs to be cut down. But Pouliot quickly realised this was a mistake because the girl suddenly flung herself sideways and yanked the boy holding the end of the string to the ground by the throat.
“Everybody else holding the string went flying,” Pouliot said.
“The whole network collapsed, and they understood the whole concept like that.”
Pouliot’s demonstration of the ‘wood wide web’.
Callum J. Jones studied English, History, and Journalism at the University of Tasmania and lived in western Sydney from 2022 to 2024 while working as a journalist for Professional Planner, a leading online publication for financial planners. He has written for Tasmanian Times since 2018 and has also been published in a range of other outlets, including Quadrant and the BAD Western Sydney anthologies.
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