The “wood wide web” — a popular term for mycorrhizal fungal networks connecting trees — captured public imagination as a story of underground cooperation. A 2023 meta-analysis found that fewer than half the citations of foundational wood-wide-web field studies accurately represented their results. The narrative outran the evidence.
But underground fungal networks between plants do exist. The organisms running them are not the ones anyone expected.
Dark Septate Endophytes — DSEs, a group of fungi distinct from mycorrhizae — can form common fungal networks between sorghum plants, increasing biomass and enabling water movement between connected individuals. The networks are real. The protagonist was wrong.
Mycorrhizal fungi are mutualists that trade nutrients for carbon in well-studied, well-documented symbioses. DSEs are poorly understood, frequently ignored in ecological surveys, and taxonomically messy. They colonize roots, form melanized hyphae, and were generally treated as neutral or mildly pathogenic — background organisms in a mycorrhizal world.
The most important actors in a system are sometimes the ones nobody thought to name. The popular narrative centered on the charismatic mutualists. The functional network was being built by the overlooked background cast. The “wood wide web” may exist, but it may run on different infrastructure than the one described in the TED talks.
Sometimes the real story is happening in the organisms that don't have a good common name.