The fascinating world of marine fungi: Emergence of a new research field

Ute Eberle is a science journalist based in in Baltimore, Maryland, where she mostly writes about science, medicine, and nature When researchers pulled up the piece of wood-a log from a tree called ubame oak-it had spent 1302 days on the bottom of the ocean.A pretty deep bottom of the ocean too.At this spot near the archipelago called the Nansei Islands northeast of Taiwan, the sea floor lies half a kilometer below the surface, making conditions for life at the log's resting place challenging.That far down, the water gets chilly, there is very little light, and the pressure reaches 742 pounds per square inch.However, something alive had clearly colonized the wood.After 3 years and 7 months in the water, one side of the log was densely crowded with small black fruiting bodies roughly shaped Anthony Amend's team sampled microbes from the top of a ridge… Photograph: Ronja Steinbach.like miniature figures-or what a layperson would describe as mushrooms.From what is known in the literature, the fungus, a deep-sea species named Alisea longicolla , had only been spotted twice before.Once was in three-quarters of a kilometer deep water off the Vanuatu Islands in the South Pacific.The other was off the coast of Taiwan at depths of about twice that.However, the experiment with the ubame oak log made it "now more evident" that A. longicolla was indeed "reproductive and adapted to deep-sea extreme environments," a team of researchers around Yuriko Nagano from the Japan Agency for Marine-Earth Science and Technology wrote in their paper about the discovery, published in 2019.Why are there fungi growing at the bottom of the sea?It is a baffling question and one that most of science has ignored so far.But a small group of scientists is starting to ask this with increasing urgency-because A. longicolla is far from the only fungus in the sea.Particularly over the last several years, scientists have started to stumble across oceanic fungi anywhere from the water's surface to kilometers below ocean sediments, near boiling hot hydrothermal vents, under arctic sea ice, on driftwood, in salt marshes, and on sandy beaches at low tide."Everywhere you go looking, you will find them," said Amy Gladfelter, a professor of cell biology and biomedical engineering at …to the oceanic bay at its foot.