S2E04 - Undergrove (Mycorrhizae mushrooms)

#Undergrove #AEGGames #mushrooms #fungi #mycorrhizae #mothertree #BoardGames #Science

Summary

Join us for a trip belowground as we explore Undergrove, a game about mushrooms and nutrient networks by Elizabeth Hargrave and Mark Wootten. We cover some basics of fungal biology, how and why these fungi form partnerships with trees, and the controversial idea of a "mother tree" selectively nourishing its seedlings through these networks.

Timestamps

• 00:20 Introductions
• 02:33 Killer vines and efficient fungi
• 07:20 Game overview
• 17:30 What are fungi?
• 20:56 Different types of mycorrhizae
• 27:48 Nutrient exchange
• 30:45 The mother tree controversy
• 41:32 Nitpick corner
• 45:57 Grades
• 56:09 Avatar inspiration
• 58:04 Final thoughts

Links

• Undergrove (Official Site)
• Lovevine parasitizing wasp galls (Current Biology)
  • And Youtube video
• Massive mycorrhizae network experiment  (Nature)
• Ze Frank does slime molds (Youtube) 
• Finding The Mother Tree (Wikipedia)
• Suzanne Simard's TED talk (TED.com) 
• Point-by-point rebuttal (UCD Dublin; requires submitting information) 
• Another rebuttal (Scientific American) 

Find our socials at https://www.gamingwithscience.net 

 

This episode of Gaming with Science™ was produced with the help of the University of Georgia and is distributed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial (CC BY-NC 4.0) license.

Full Transcript

(Some platforms truncate the transcript due to length restrictions. If so, you can always find the full transcript on https://www.gamingwithscience.net/ )

Jason  0:05  
Hello, and welcome to the gaming with science podcast where we talk about the science behind some of your favorite games. 

Brian  0:11  
Today we're going to discuss Undergrove by AEG.

Hey, how's it going? Welcome back to Gaming with Science. I'm Brian. 

Jason  0:23  
This is Jason

Anny  0:24  
And I'm Anny.

Brian  0:25  
Anny, how's it going? We've been talking about trying to get you on literally forever, and we finally found a good game to do it. Can you introduce yourself? 

Anny  0:32  
Yeah. My name is Anny Chung. I'm an associate professor in Plant Biology and Plant Pathology at the University of Georgia, I would classify myself as an ecologist. And what I usually am interested in is the ecology of plants and microbes that interact with plants, usually below ground, which is very appropriate for this game. 

Brian  0:54  
Anny's a fancy professor. She has an endowment. She's the Haynes. What is it? The Haynes professor for underground ecology, or below ground ecology. 

Anny  1:02  
It's very specific. I stumbled into it. But the, I think the full title is The Haynes Endowed Professor for below-ground botany, so specifically only below ground. Yeah, I don't get to do anything above ground.

Brian  1:19  
You have a counterpart who does the above ground stuff

Anny  1:21  
I do have a counterpart, Megan de Marsh, who is the above ground botany person.

Brian  1:28  
anyway. Well, your research is really cool, and I'm really glad to have you on. I know that you've said that you are not a card carrying mycologist, but I also know that you study fungi a lot more than most people that I know. For someone who is not a card carrying mycologist, I know it's a big part of your work.

Speaker 1  1:42  
Yeah, and that is right, in terms of the microbes that we do study below ground. My lab focuses on fungi, quite a lot more than we do bacteria. But yeah, I think the reason I say that I'm not a card carrying mycologist is that, that was never a part of my formal training, as I was doing my degrees coming into this position, but a lot of our work does involve fungi, and I do like them a lot. 

Brian  2:07  
Well, that's fine, Jason and I like bacteria, but you're still allowed anyway. Okay, so before we get into talking about Undergrove, and I am very excited to talk about it, because this is, this might be a spicy conversation. I did a little bit more research on this, and this is, there's some controversy here. Controversy can lead to fun conversations about sort of science and metaphor and how we communicate science. I think that's definitely part of this. But let's talk about some other science for a bit. So Anny, we usually send this to the guests first. Do you have an interesting science fact you'd like to share with our dear listeners? ,

Anny  2:42  
yeah since you did tell me that you were gonna ask me this question, and I actually did, recently find out something super cool, and so a colleague of mine at Rice University recently published a short little correspondence in Current Biology where he and his students found an instance of a plant in some way eating an insect. And so this is a parasitic plant that usually parasitizes oaks, I believe. And this same oak is also parasitized by gall forming wasps. And so what they found is that this parasitic plant also actively parasitizes the galls that have the wasps in them and kills the Wasp, which is really cool. It's like a reversal of what you would imagine, you know, normally think of as trophic levels.

Brian  3:30  
So this is not a carnivorous plant, per se, but this is a plant eating a plant that is being parasitized by an insect,

Anny  3:37  
yeah, and it's while doing so also killing the insect. It's pretty cool.

Jason  3:42  
 Is it getting nutrients out of that? Like, does it kill the insect? Does it? Does it seek out the galls? So, because the insect has, like, extra nitrogen or something in it, 

Anny  3:50  
so I don't think they actually have evidence of that yet. I'm sure he's working on it. This is, I think, just to get the phenomenon out. In the paper they do say that generally, where this parasitic plant attaches is not where galls frequently form on these trees, and so they're using that as evidence to say that, hey, these parasitic plants are maybe actively seeking out galls when they do happen, because that's not a normal attachment place for them.

Brian  4:19  
What is the parasitic plant? Is it one that we would have heard of before? 

Anny  4:22  
It's called a love vine. 

Brian  4:24  
A love vine, what a nice term for a parasite.

Anny  4:28  
The genus name is Cassythia, or Cassytha actually,

Brian  4:32  
okay, well, we will definitely drop this into the show notes for sure, so that people can check it out. 

Anny  4:36  
Fun little paper. 

Brian  4:38  
All right. Jason, did you something you wanted to share, too.

Jason  4:41  
I did. So I was looking up some things that might be relevant to this, and found that just a few months ago, there was a group in Europe that published on mycorrhizae, which are the fungi that we're gonna be talking about a lot. And they were trying to study how they grow their underground networks efficiently. Because we'll talk more about this later. But basically, these type of fungi, they send all these thin little networks of of hyphae, their cells out through the soil to get nutrients and stuff. But that takes a lot of energy. And so how do they do it well.  And so what they did, they had this really cool setup where they had the fungi these mycorrhizae growing in petri dishes, lots of them. And like, half the petri dish was just the fungus. Half also had some roots that they could colonize. And they had a robotic a robotic camera set up to take pictures of this automatically. And so they could scan this and automatically detect all the junctions and the way they formed and the way nutrients were flowing inside the hyphae. And they got, like, half a million junction points, they're able to catalog and study and be able to figure out, essentially, the rules of building a mycorrhizal network underground so that it functions well, okay, which is impressive for something that, I mean, it has no nervous system. It's just a fungus growing through the soil looking for nutrients.

Brian  5:57  
I've seen really cool, like time lapses, like Ze Frank did a thing on slime mold. Slime molds are not fungi, by the way, but of them basically like solving and recreating, like a map of the Japanese subway system. And ants can do stuff like this too. But I've never heard of anyone doing this in three dimensions.

Jason  6:14  
Well, this is on the petri dish, so still probably only two dimensional. Okay, so, but three dimensions would be very cool. Yeah.

Anny  6:21  
So I read that paper when it came out to it made quite a splash. It's very exciting. And I think one of the main one of the main labs that developed the study, or like was driving this study, I think they have these really cool systems where you can actually grow this specific type of mycorrhizal fungi, which usually cannot grow without a host on a petri dish, which, in and of itself is like a pretty difficult thing to do. And the fact that they were able to do all of this at such scale and then collaborate with another lab to develop this, like robotic imaging technology and like the algorithms to go through all of that imaging data is really cool. 

Brian  6:58  
Okay, so there's a bunch of different innovations. First of all, just growing the organism at all is kind of a big deal.

Anny  7:04  
Yeah. I mean, we've known how to do that, but it's hard. Okay, yeah. 

Brian  7:08  
All right, that's very cool. Well, thank you. Uh, should we talk about undergrove? What do you think 

Jason  7:13  
No, let's pick a different game. I think that would be better.

Brian  7:15  
Okay All right, um, let's talk about, I just got the fox experiment. Do you want to talk about that instead? So undergrove is a game that came out recently. It is published by a duo of Elizabeth Hargrave and Mark Wootten. So Elizabeth Hargrave, we've talked about before, the lead designer of wingspan, which we can never get through an episode without talking about wingspan in terms of how it's revolutionized, sort of the science board game space in a meaningful way. 

Jason  7:45  
It wasn't even our fault last time we didn't say it at all, Steven brought it up and still mentioned wingspan.

Brian  7:50  
I know we just, we just, we're never gonna get away from wingspan, and I don't have a problem with that. But undergrowth is a game that I have been hyped for for a year. It's the first game that was coming out. It's like, I have to get this. I was excited to see it on Kickstarter. Elizabeth Hargrave of wingspan fame and Mark Wootton, this is the second game they've done. They did another game for AG, called mariposas, which is about the monarch butterfly migration. It is for one to four players, which all of these games have single player mode now, for 10 and up, which now we know means that they had to test to make sure that the pieces are not toxic for children to eat. 60 to 90 minutes, which How long did it take when we played? Because we actually had the convenience of being able to play together, which is always nice,

Anny  8:30  
I don't think that it took 90 minutes. 

Brian  8:32  
No, maybe that's for slow players. 

Jason  8:34  
I think the 60 to 90 minutes was about right. And especially if you have four players, it's going to take longer. 

Anny  8:39  
Yeah, that's true

Brian  8:40  
for sure. So what does this game look like? So the game has a series of 48 mushroom tiles, very specifically, mushroom tiles with just the above ground portions of the fungi. They seem to have been arbitrarily divided up into four different color groups. They're beautifully illustrated. They have, you know, little abilities on them, which we'll get into in a second. 

Jason  9:01  
They did actually divide it in a rational way. I found the designer diary. So it's based off of whether they have like, pores, which is the one with all the little dots, okay, whether they have a ring around their stalk, which is the one that's the cap, a cap without rings, I think. And then yeah, and then everything else.

Anny  9:18  
Okay. So it is based on like, morphology and identifiable features. 

Brian  9:23  
I'm glad to see that they did that, because, again, you know, with wingspan, there was that deep connection between abilities and actual biology. So they did split them up in some way that made sense. Yes, okay, so you the goal of the game is to lay these mushroom tiles out into a grid. You're kind of building your forest, and at each place where four tiles connect, there's a little round hole where you can put your little baby tree seedling, because in this game, you are playing as a mature Douglas fir tree. Each of the mushrooms will have different abilities on them, and as long as you have a little tiny root touching the fungi, you'll have the ability to use those abilities, and the fungi will let you collect nitrogen and phosphorus and potassium. As a plant yourself you generate carbon through photosynthesis, and a lot of the game is about sort of paying the fungi carbon to activate their ability. So you give them carbon and they will allow you to collect the other resources. The other conceit of the game is that those little seedlings are then able to,you're really only lending the fungi the carbon, like you will put the carbon out onto the fungi, and then the seedlings will say, Okay, I will take that back again. And they suck the carbon back up onto the seedling, so when they've accumulated enough, they sprout into a tree. You'll score points based on the points values of your different mushrooms and the ones that are touching roots with roots on the different mushrooms. Tracking of the game is done by how often do you absorb carbon? Every time you absorb carbon, you move up this little track. There's little benefits. When you get to the end of the track, you'll trigger the end game. And like a lot of these games, there's also sort of a public goals card based on weird things like, Do you how many trees do you have in a row, or how many different types of fungi are you interacting with, or or things like that, and like Earth and like a lot of games where plants are the focus, of course, they put animals only on those public goal cards, because animals are not really important to the bulk of what we're going to be talking about today.

Jason  11:15  
So it's just, it's like, it's a splash image. 

Brian  11:17  
It has a splash image. There's nothing to do with mechanics. It's just the one thing where they actually bother putting animals into the game, is there something that's tangential to the main focus of the game. Which I don't have any problem with that, right? 

Jason  11:30  
We talk about people, how people are blind to the plants and the fungi into the world, like it's okay to flip that around every now and then. It's like the animals can be the side show for a little bit.

Brian  11:37  
It's a beautiful game. The components are lovely. The little cardboard tokens are wonderful. The illustrations are lovely as well. 

Jason  11:45  
Well, one aspect of the game is that it's essentially, it's a resource management game, slash engine builder game, so you're trying to accumulate resources, you're trying to drive them in certain directions. You're trying to build your trees. All of this requires resources which are pretty scarce, I would say, based on how we played, like, we were always like, I always need more of something. Like, there's never a point. I was just like, rolling in resources and was fine with that. And then the engine building is kind of odd. It's like, it builds itself as an engine builder. And I felt that was weird, because I never really felt I got an engine going. But looking over the designer diary, apparently the idea is that you your engine. It's a slow engine. It rolls over several turns. So like, this turn, I do this, next turn, I do this. Next turn, I do this. That's my engine, okay? Because I'm more used to things where it's like, okay, I assemble bunch of things, and this turn, I just fire off, and that's my engine. So it's a, it's more of a slow roll engine,

Brian  12:37  
okay, that kind of makes sense. And I can kind of see that how it's like you have to run through multiple turns to run through the all the different actions. Talking about the resource being limited, I always feel like there's five different things that you can do in the game. In terms of actions, you can sprout a seedling. You can grow roots onto different mushrooms. Both of those, if you pay extra you can place a new mushroom tile to do something. Let's see those two of them. You can activate abilities on the mushrooms that are out there to get them to pull in stuff for you, you can absorb carbon. And then the last action, which always feels terrible, is photosynthesis, which, as a plant seems weird, because you always feel like, well, I don't really want to photosynthesize. That's so boring. 

Anny  13:18  
Yeah, it feels like you're wasting, you're wasting an action by photosynthesizing, which was something that I observed as well, because like that should just be happening by default, right?

Brian  13:30  
Yeah. I mean to be you should just be generating a little bit of carbon all the time, right? Yeah, instead of having to make a point of doing it, 

Jason  13:36  
apparently it was like that one of the early versions of the game, and then they changed it, and I don't remember why, or if they even mentioned why. So you mentioned the what the resources are. So we've mentioned carbon. 

Brian  13:46  
Carbon are little black circles, which sort of distinguishes them from the three different cubes. Now we've talked about soil fertility, at least in terms of agriculture, as being based on potassium, phosphorus and nitrogen, right? So you've got three different colored cubes that indicate those three different resources. And a lot of times cubes can be spent to do like, every time you want to place a mushroom, you just have to pay an extra cube. You've got to put some of your resources out to say, like, hey, fungi come out and come out and play. Nitrogen is sort of the weird how do they do this? It's like they explained this in the book. I think they said that phosphorus is important for seeds and you need potassium to, like, pay for moving nutrients around, nitrogen you use for, like, literally everything which kind of is reflected in the game. Because nitrogen is, like the most generic currency you can use it to pay for just about anything. 

Anny  14:37  
What, can I say one thing about the design of the game that I really kind of enjoyed, please is actually the color of the resources, because, well, at least for carbon and nitrogen, they reflect the most common colors that people use when, you know, when in Ecosystem Science, when people talk about carbon cycling, nitrogen cycling. A lot of times they are always black and blue and just kind of in the convention. So it kind of tickled me that that was those were the colors in the game as well. 

Brian  15:07  
I'm not sure why they used purple and orange for the other two. Though that's a little odd, because I don't think that's part of convention, but I actually never checked,

Anny  15:14  
yeah, it's beautiful, but yeah, those two I feel like aren't quite as convention. 

Brian  15:20  
This is one of these games where I feel like, when you're just playing on a regular table, you never feel like you have enough space for all the bits and pieces. It doesn't matter how big your table is. You always feel like something is in the way, and they never give a place where you're supposed to put a bowl of chips.

Jason  15:34  
Yeah, well, I will say, especially because you're building a common playing board, especially if you set it up without that in mind, you're not going to leave enough space around the edges as your mushroom board grows out bigger and bigger and bigger in potentially like very random directions, depending on how people want to lay things out and how people want to isolate themselves from other people.

Brian  15:52  
I think that pretty much covers it for the game. As you move up the carbon track, you'll get little benefits for doing so as you go up things, it's like, Hey, have a free nitrogen here. Get a free route, stuff like that, just like rewards for moving up that track. Yeah,

Jason  16:05  
I think a key part is that at the end of the game, it's a point scoring game, and your goal is to get as many points as possible. You get points based on your little seedlings, and you only get points based on the mushrooms they have roots on, and then also how robust your seedling is, like how much carbon is absorbed. So if you have only one carbon on it, you can only score one of the plant, one of the mushrooms it has a root on even if it has on all four it's touching. If it has two carbons, you do two as three, it turns into a tree. You can do them all. So there's a high incentive to turn something into a tree, because then every root that it has manages to score points at the end. And the different mushrooms are worth different points. And some of them are straightforward, like, Oh, this is worth two points. And some of them are more tricky, like, Oh, this is worth one point for every similar mushroom that is touching it, or this one. And when you use it, you can cache a resource on and it's worth two points for every cached resource and stuff. So there's a few different ways around there, plus there's some the bonus goals and some things you can pick up along the way. But that's it mostly 

Brian  16:59  
the points are actually indicated by pine cones. So I guess it's a it's a gentle nod to reproductive success.

Jason  17:07  
Well, I think in this game, they'd be a fir cone, wouldn't they?

Brian  17:10  
Ah, yes, you're right, of course, a cone. Sorry, but yeah. Basically, the the the you're going to get more points if you have a more robust mycorrhizal network with more trees in it, right? Okay, so, so that's the game. And we've talked about this a little bit, but I think we should talk about the science. So there was an old system. It's actually probably, I don't know, people probably still learn this, the whole five Kingdom systems for life. So everything that's microscopic gets split off into two kingdoms, the Monera and the protist. And we're not going to talk about those. Everything that you can see fall either into animals, plants or fungi, right? So, and I think that that's we don't use that system anymore, because the sort of phylo--, we know that there's a lot more diversity in the microscopic. And actually, everything you can see is this tiny, little iceberg tip sitting at the peak of like everything that has a nucleus all the eukaryotic cells. But what distinguishes fungi from plants? What what makes a fungi distinct from a plant from an animal? 

Anny  18:15  
Well so there are a couple of different things, right? Um, so we think of when we think about plant cells and animal cells, a big thing we talk about is the fact that their cell structures are very different, and that it is that is the same for fungal cells as well. Right? Fungi have very different cell wall structure compared to plant cells. That's one thing a lot of folks bring up, and also they just grow very differently. They have very different reproductive life cycles, and they form hyphae, instead of the kinds of root like structures that we think of plants as forming. What else

Brian  18:53  
so hyphy is just like a ones. It's like a hyphy is just like a single cell filament, right? One cell thick and just a long, thin strand, yeah. 

Anny  19:04  
And they can be, you know, Septate or aseptate. So whether there's actually any divisions between the cells, right? So, fun fact, for arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi, a lot of them just have nuclei floating around all over the place

Brian  19:18  
Just one big cell with lots of nuclei in it, 

Anny  19:21  
kind of, yeah, right. So there's no, like, nice division separating one nucleus per cell, sort of situation. You just got nuclei flowing all over the place. 

Brian  19:31  
So let's see if we had to drill down to the bare basics, like animal cells, no cell walls. Plant cells have cell walls. They have got cellulose in them, and most of them can do photosynthesis, so they're going to use sun energy to go under. This is the problem with biology, right? There are exceptions. Fungi have rigid cell walls and they have chitin in them. They actually the same kind of polymer you'd have in an insect or an arthropod exoskeleton. They use in their cell walls, and they do not do  photosynthesis. 

Anny  20:00  
They do not okay. And they're mostly, they're all heterotrophic, 

Brian  20:05  
meaning they they in the same way that animals have to eat plants, fungi have to also eat plants and other things. They don't make their own energy. They have to break it down, yep, okay. 

Anny  20:14  
Some fungi form relationships with plants in this, like, very physically entwined way. And these are fungi we called mycorrhizas. And there's actually a whole lot of different types of mycorrhizae. The ones that are kind of modeled in the game are a type called ectomycorrhizae. And so these are the types of fungi that form mycorrhizas, with generally trees, often gymnosperm trees, but also some other trees as well. 

Jason  20:47  
So gymnosperms are kind of like your pines, your firs, the things that form cones, as opposed to things that form flowers,

Anny  20:54  
the things that form cones. Yep, that's right.

Brian  20:56  
So, and let's also break down the term Ecto, mycorrhiza. So Ecto would mean outside. And what's, what's the best thing for Ecto that we would have? Unfortunately, I think everybody thinks ectoplasm, but I don't know if there's a better thing that we could use that sort of helps people remember Ecto meaning outside. Any ideas. The only other thing I'm thinking is ectotherm, and that doesn't really help very much. Ectotherm would be for cold blooded animals, but heated from the outside.

Anny  21:22  
Yeah. Well, they rely on outside forces to regulate their temperature. Well, that's the kind of way to think about it, I suppose. 

Brian  21:29  
But so and they're called Ecto because there's, again, like Anny said, there's several different types of mycorrhizae. Some of them will actually send structures literally inside the plant cell itself. They will form structures across the plasma membrane inside but ectos Don't do that. Their relationship sort of ends at the plant cell wall. They actually don't send things inside the cells 

Anny  21:49  
well, so Okay, so that's not actually fully correct

Brian  21:53  
no? Okay, tell me

Anny  21:55  
so that is the really kind of confusing part about the name Ecto mycorrhiza, because they do actually penetrate inside the plant root, right? They don't just stay outside the plant root.

Brian  22:06  
But do they get past the plasma membrane? Do they actually send things inside the cells? 

Anny  22:11  
They don't usually send things inside the cell, so they go kind of in between the cells and form this structure called a Hartig net, yeah, but it is confusing for I think the name is confusing because a lot of people think about the term Ecto and then assume that they don't penetrate inside the roots at all. 

Brian  22:30  
So they do have this very intimate relationship where the little hyphae, the little mycelial threads, get completely inside the root, all in the cell wall, different tissue layers, but they never actually get inside this the plant cells themselves. 

Jason  22:44  
Well, let's put this way. That's probably how it usually works. Biology is messy. If you look hard enough, you will find an exception, but that seems to be the general rule.

Brian  22:53  
The general rule is that there's usually something that breaks the rule in biology. If you look hard enough,

Anny  22:57  
That's true. That's true. I'm like, Yeah, I feel like that's generally the case. And now that you've got me like making specific certain 

Jason  23:04  
well, let's just contrast this with the other major one, which is the arbuscular mycorrhizae. 

Anny  23:08  
And that's true. We can contrast this group with arbuscular mycorrhizae, which is one other major group of mycorrhizae. And these generally form relationships all across the plant Tree of Life, they form relationships with trees, with grasses, with forbs. One interesting plant that they don't usually form relationships with is arabidopsis,

Brian  23:32  
much to the sadness of plant biologists everywhere since arabidopsis, yeah, since arabidopsis is the model system that most work has been done with on plants, and this very important relationship 

Anny  23:44  
happens to not work with arabidopsis. anyway, but as Jason was alluding to So, these arbuscular mycorrhizae. They form structures inside the plant cells for resource storage and for Resource Exchange. And so the arbuscular part of the arbuscular mycorrhizae refers to the structures that they form inside plant cells, called arbuscules. And so that comes from the Latin root for tree like so it's like kind of a tree shaped structure that they form inside the plant cell. And that's where a lot of the resource exchange happens. They also form vesicles, which are these, like kind of big what's thought of its resource storage bubbles inside plant cells as well. And then there are two kind of other major groups of mycorrhizae that we think about. One is ericoid mycorrhizae, they generally form relationships with plants in the Ericaceae so like blueberries, rhododendrons and so on. And then the last group is orchid mycorrhizae, which are extremely important. And orchids are actually obligate an obligate symbiosis with orchid mycorrhizae, because their seeds are so tiny and have so few resources that they literally cannot germinate without symbiosis with an orchid Mycorrhiza,

Brian  25:06  
so obligate, means they have to do it all the time, and that would contrast with facultative, where they can do it. They don't have to do it. Sometimes they can. They don't really need to. Orchid Mycorrhizae are are crazy because, like orchid seeds are dust. They don't have endosperm. They have no food inside the seed. So if they don't have their they steal their nutrients from the mycorrhizae, right?

Anny  25:31  
Exactly in that very early stage of life, they're essentially the orchids are essentially a parasite. 

Jason  25:36  
So here's my question, a lot of orchids, I know they grow like in the treetops. So are there mycorrhiza spores, just like drifting around in the rainforest canopy?

Anny  25:46  
there are mycorrhizae spores just drifting around anywhere, really, even things that we think of that are, you know, arbuscular, mycorrhizal fungal spores, ectomycorrhizal fungal spores, you know, they're just drifting all over the place. There's actually evidence for in tropical rainforest where you can get these kind of soil mats built up on big tree branches on top of tall trees, right? Just debris falling down on these branches. They decompose. They kind of form these like kind of spongy layers. And then you get epiphytes and other plants starting to grow on top of these, like little bits of soil on a tree. People have found mycorrhizae in those circumstances.

Brian  26:30  
Okay, okay, okay, so we talked about the you've got ericoid orchid and arbuscular mycorrhizae, those are all kind of specialists for that. Or do they have to be mycorrhizae? Or can they live in other ways?

Anny  26:45  
Arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi are like kind of the special group here. They are not known to be very culturable Unless they are in symbiosis with a plant. So these are things that are on the fungal side, obligate with a plant host. Gotcha. Um, whereas for all the other mycorrhizal fungi and groups, you can actually grow them in culture without a plant, they will just do that

Brian  27:13  
So we can grow them in a petri plate, like we know how to do that 

Anny  27:16  
You can them on a petri plate, they sometimes will grow very slowly. You know, especially things like ericoid mycorrhizae tend to grow pretty slowly, if you have them in culture, but they will grow. They don't need a plant in order to, surprise, survive. 

Brian  27:28  
So what's neat about the Ecto mycorrhizae is that a lot of those are kind of like, they're very optional, like a lot of the things that we think of as mushrooms, a lot of like, very charismatic species that we would think of for fungi also form these kind of relationships, these Ecto mycorrhizal relationships, right? Yep. And what is not controversial is that they definitely is resource exchange happening, that is happening, right? 

Anny  27:52  
That is not controversial, yeah. Okay. And so they do form these mycorrhiza, so the mycorrhiza is like that combination of the fungus and the root, right? And it is not controversial that there's Resource Exchange happening, exchange meaning that there is resource going from one partner to the other partner, right? Whether that is driven by just concentration gradients or source-sink relationships with just surplus carbon flowing places. That's where, kind of the nitty gritty and what exactly is happening. How do we characterize it? So-called controversy can happen

Jason  28:29  
Yeah, but it's a basic idea that there's, there's a trade going on one way or another. The plant has lots of fixed carbon, so food, essentially sugars or fats that it will trade to the fungus, because that's what plants are really good at it is they turn sunlight into food, and so they're giving that to the fungus. And then the fungus, because of all these little hyphae that goes through the soil everywhere, is really good at getting water and nutrients from the soil, like the nitrogen, the phosphorus, the potassium that we talked about in the game. And so this sorts of resource goes from the fungus to the plant, and in theory, it's a great symbiosis. I know there are times where sometimes one or the other essentially is parasitizing its partner, but in theory, it's a good symbiosis where both are benefiting, 

Anny  29:12  
right exactly, and like, not just on the fungal side, not just because they're able to explore a much larger area, given their little hyphae going everywhere. But also they're able to produce enzymes and partner with other microorganisms that produce enzymes that plants cannot, right? So they're able to break down leaf litter, other organic forms of compounds out there, into forms that are easily accessible by the plant.

Brian  29:41  
You know, in a weird way, it kind of reminds me of the human gut microbiome that we just discussed. You've got microbes in your gut that help you break down resources so that you can digest. Now, plants don't have guts, but they do have roots, and they form associations with microbes that effectively are doing a similar thing, helping them access and break down nutrients that they wouldn't have access to otherwise. the symbiosis can be a lot tighter for mycorrhizae and roots, of course, but there's also that same sort of complexity. It's like, yes, it can be symbiotic, but as Jason likes to point out, the harmony in nature is an illusion based on everything pulling as hard as they can right in the same direction, and it all just kind of balances out

Anny  30:22  
exactly, yeah, I think the way, you know one of a lot of people that I talk to in the field think about it is it's a mutual exploitation, right? Yep.

Brian  30:32  
Okay, so there's nothing controversial about plants paying carbon or providing carbon, and that the fungi providing rare soil resources like nitrogen, potassium and phosphorus. Now what is a little controversial here is this idea that the mature trees can focus and move carbon to their seedlings, specifically ones of their own species or genetic makeup. That is the mother tree concept, and that is something that sort of, at least on the there's a lot of people who think that the evidence for it is pretty scant.

Anny  31:06  
Yeah, I think that, you know, I think that whole part of it has a combination of different things, right? I think there's no disputing the fact that there have been experiments done where folks have shown using labeled carbon, where carbon from a mature tree or one tree seedling can go via the fungal connection to another tree. There, there are some studies showing that there are there is discrimination based on different species and how related they are, I think, kind of where some of the controversy happens with what we don't really know yet for sure is how frequently this actually happens in nature, in the field, right? Most of these studies have been done in the greenhouse, where you can actually do a lot of these more complicated manipulations to really, really drill down on the mechanisms. But as you can imagine, it can be really, really difficult to actually measure any of this in the field when you're dealing with an actual mature Doug fir tree, right? And so the evidence that we can get from the field can sometimes be more circumstantial, right? We can't drill down in every single mechanism that needs to happen in order to fully support this. And also, I think, just to kind of address the term "the mother tree", right? Hypothesis, I feel like that whole concept is something that has been born out in the public imagination, right? It's not necessarily a term that the original authors came up with as a scientific hypothesis, but because of a combination of the public imagination and future work that has been done in the area, it kind of became something that people refer to as a hypothesis, which adds to the confusion in the literature, as you might imagine.

Brian  33:03  
So it comes from a popular science book written by the ecologist Suzanne Simard. And a lot of this work and this idea comes from her specific research project. So there, there was an incredibly popular public science book on, you know, again, the it also invents this term of the world, wood Web. Am I saying that right?

Jason  33:25  
The wood Wide Web

Brian  33:25  
The wood Wide Web, which is this idea of the network of fungi and exchanging information and resources and sharing them. The the point of the book and this idea of, like, mature trees nurturing their offspring, was really purposely introduced as this idea of like helping people sort of connect to trees and anthropomorphize them. But the problem is, is that maybe it went a little farther than the evidence would fully support, or it's not clear, or there was a a lovely point by point, a counterpoint to some of these claims in these experiments about the dangers of anthropomorphizing, anthropomorphizing trees, and particularly the Mother Tree concept, how it doesn't match up with ecology, how we actually see that mature trees tend to heavily compete with seedlings in the soil, and that actually they don't really benefit from having a mature tree available. They do much better if there's no mature tree around, because you're not seeing as much of this competition for bare resources, but this very careful point by point was published in Trends in Plant Biology, and it sits behind a paywall. It took me forever to actually find any place where we'll be able to share this with our listeners. So the people that are trying to counter this as sort of pseudoscientific or not well supported, are not getting their message out in any way that the public in general would be able to access.

Anny  34:47  
Yeah, and just to kind of make sure that a lot of this is also represented on both sides, I will say that there is now a counter point-by-point paper that was just published at the end of last year from Simard's group, kind of countering the point by point that you had probably read the paper published by Justine Karst. And so there is this very active back and forth that is happening right now. 

Jason  35:16  
And I think it's important to point out like, this is how science gets done. It's like one experiment never completely seals off anything. You need to replicate it. Sometimes, if things are ambiguous, people argue, people have their own opinions, and it's by the community, engaging with each other and doing the experiments and looking at the work that it gets settled. And, I mean, it probably won't get settled until you get hard data, because ideally it's like the one arbiter of all of this is the data. Now there's the caveat that there are sometimes different ways to interpret that data, but at the end of the day, it's like, if it comes to if there's a conflict between your hypothesis and the results you got, the results win. And so at least that's how science is supposed to work. And so this back and forth, this arguing is the process of how we discover truth. I like to say that in science, truth, truth is not what emerges like shining and brilliant. Truth is what survives everything you can throw at it, and that's how we slowly, slowly, slowly, get a better idea of how the world works.

Brian  36:16  
 But what if you're publishing your science in a popular science book that captures the public imagination. There's no peer review and automated correction problems. Process for things like that.

Jason  36:26  
 That's where science communication has to work. And again, that process is part of it, of trying to get that out through good science communication. I mean, I have faced this. I have had to essentially contradict people who bring up these like 50 or 60 year old books talking about how plants can sense people's emotions, and it's like that did not hold up to replicated study. That was probably an error, and so some of those, yes, they still float around, because the popular science books have a much wider reach than the specialized scientific literature. That's why the communication of science is so important, and let's be honest, that's part of the reason why we do this podcast, is because we want to commute to communicate stuff like that out.

Brian  37:04  
 In an interview with Elizabeth Hargrave, Mark Wootton, they kind of tangentially say that maybe it's not all figured out. They kind of don't, they don't handle it face on. They kind of like move to the side,

Anny  37:16  
right? But I think the main part of the mechanism of the game that really reflective of this kind of mother tree idea, right? Is the is when in the game you photosynthesize as a mature Doug fir, and then you move that carbon into one of the mushroom tiles, one of the fungi tiles, right? And then, in order to produce a seedling in and around those mushroom tiles, you have to then move that carbon and pay some sort of carbon cost from the mushroom specifically in order to make that seeding right. So I think that is the part of the mechanism that I found really interesting that they chose to do that because that that kind of very specifically introduces the idea that that is the way the carbon flow should be happening. And I might argue that even if right, let's say that there are, because we have some evidence that there is some carbon flow going I think most folks would agree that that is not the vast majority of carbon, the way the carbon flows through the system. That's not the vast majority of where a seedling that is germinating is getting their carbon from, yep. 

Jason  38:27  
And they actually mentioned that in the rule book that the amount of carbon that a seedling could take up through these networks is very, very small relative to the amount it can photosynthesize. And then put in the caveat, but maybe when you're a newly emerging seedling, that little bit can be important. I'll be honest. I'm not sure, I'll be honest. I'm not sure I get the metaphor of like. I know I'm supposed to be like the the mother tree. Like, doing all this work, but all the work is around the seedlings. I can only activate the mushrooms that my seedlings have roots on. It's like, I like. I can only move the nutrients around to use it for the seedlings. There's no actual Mother Tree anywhere in the game, except in, like, the abstract part of here's my player board, but it occupies no space. I almost feel like the game works like, Oh, you're just a bunch of little seedlings trying to make a go at it. And this is how it works.

Brian  39:17  
 Carbon should just get fed into the network naturally, right? 

Jason  39:20  
Something like that, technically, is kind of what happens there is that one. So with the starting tile, there's a central mushroom, and then four on the outside, and the central one has the ability that if there's no carbon anywhere in the network, it will put carbon out there. And so it kind of has that, 

Anny  39:35  
yeah, but it's just weird that that's coming from a mushroom, right? Like, I think the part that the game doesn't make very explicit, is that all of this carbon flowing through a system is coming via photosynthesis, either from the seedling or from mature trees or any other plants in the ecosystem. If you want to think about this more realistically, 

Jason  39:54  
yeah, but it actually does make a little bit of sense of why that one's doing it, because it turns out that central tile on the starting tile is like the mycorrhizae that is in like every paper ever published, in terms of what is forming associations with, with the Douglas firs, it's apparently super, super common, and it doesn't have a common name because it doesn't actually form a mushroom, so it only has a Latin name. So Elizabeth Hargrave had to make up a name. She called it Earth lover, because that's basically the anglicization of its Latin name geophyllis. I think

Anny  40:27  
I dind't get that at all.

Jason  40:29  
 So it's essentially the one that's networking with the entire forest, most likely, and that's probably where that carbon is coming from.

Brian  40:36  
Okay, so undergrove does a reasonable job of modeling this particular hypothesis, this particular of like the sharing of carbon, of carbon being used by seedlings, of the exchange of nutrients, representing mycorrhizae, in particular, Ecto mycorrhizae, which again, much more sort of dynamic, because a lot of them form mushrooms that people would recognize.

Jason  40:59  
much more photogenic

Brian  41:00  
photogenic. Photogenic. That's the best way to put it, because you can actually, like we talk about the all of the macroscopic life, and it's really like fungi. I guess mycelia can be visible, but usually the only part we ever see is the above ground part that comes up sometimes when it rains a bunch,

Anny  41:18  
right? And that's like such a small fraction of total fungal diversity that exists the world, right? All the things that I study in my lab None, none of them form mushrooms, so we just keep them on plates, and they look pretty drab. Sometimes they look really cool. But

Brian  41:32  
 I feel like we don't need a distinct nitpick corner with this because, or maybe we do make I feel like we've already had some nitpicks at this point about things that maybe we don't think are quite as they should be. It's mostly it's been about photosynthesis being misrepresented.

Jason  41:44  
I just have one is that I wish the roots, little, little root triangle tokens you put on the board were higher contrast or something, because as the game progresses, you end up with more and more of these roots around it. They determine what you can do, which means your turn gets more and more complicated as you can only do one thing, but you, instead of having five things to choose from, you actually have like, 12. And finding my roots on the board can actually be kind of tricky. It's like, where do I have roots? Which mushrooms can I activate? It's like, okay, I've got that one and that one. And just like having a little bit higher contrast, maybe, like a white outline around them or something would have been nice.

Brian  42:20  
Color choices in these games are always hard because it just ends up as a blegh rainbow and like for for the trees, they used very tree like colors. It was like green and brown and beige and gray. I think I don't know, very neutral tones. Anny, did you have a nitpick? 

Anny  42:37  
Well, I think I we talked a lot about our my science nit picks, I think I was just very confused by the carbon economy in this game that just did not reflect my understanding of how the carbon economy generally works in these systems. So I guess that's not really a nitpick. That's just a pick. The part where you have to activate a mushroom was also a little bit funny to me, but it was interesting to me that there was a there was a component of competition that emerged in this game that I wasn't expecting, I think, as we were playing at one point where we all had little tree seedlings that were tapped into, quote, unquote, the same mushroom. And I remember at one point in when playing the game, we all kind of were trying to get carbon from that one mushroom, but we didn't want to get let anyone else have the carbon. I was trying to think really hard, like, Is there, like, a nat--, actual analog to this that would actually happen out in a, yeah, a type ecosystem? And I'm still trying to think whether that would actually happen if there is competition via mycorrhizal provided resources, if that's something that we know for sure can actually happen? 

Brian  43:50  
Interesting. I would be surprised if it, if you've got multiple individuals tapped into the same sort of individual, hyphael body, it would it not be reasonable to think that there would be competition?

Anny  44:00  
 yeah, I think it's a very reasonable assumption that something could happen. I'm just trying to think if there's a good way to test that. I've actually seen more tests of the opposite, where you have multiple mycorrhizal taxa, the different mycorrhizal fungal species that are connected with the same plant. And so there are many studies in which folks have done what are called split root studies, where you kind of split the same plant and its various root structures into different pots, and then in each pot you inoculate kind of different fungi. And then, in some cases, people have shown that there is preferential carbon allocation to the fungal partners that are providing more nutrient benefits. Oh, interesting, yeah. So it's kind of, kind of, from the plant side, fungi competing for the plants resources. 

Brian  44:53  
Okay, that's interesting. But then I imagine there's also that, that counter argument, of like, maybe there just being a better sink for those nutrients.

Anny  45:00  
Exactly, right? That is the count, and that's why, that's why this whole field is so hard to get, like, 100% ironclad. This is exactly what's going on, right? Because you can measure, you can measure the flow of certain elements from one part to another part. You can measure how much of it there is. But there's always this question about, Hey, is it just a source sink dynamic? Is it just that plants have lots of surplus carbon that they need to get rid of, and they happen to do it in this way, and that causes the Exchange, or whether there is, like this sort of active, what's called biological markets theory, where people apply the concept to kind of the economic exchange rate to the rate of exchange of carbon versus other elements. And so those are kind of two very big theories that are somewhat in competition with each other when it comes to how this exchange sort of actually works in the real world. 

Brian  45:57  
I am terrified to do the science grade for this one, because I really just, I don't know how to judge it anymore. So actually, it is hard. It is difficult. I actually would love to hear each of your so let's move on to grading. We're going to do a grade for science and a grade for fun. We each kind of have our own scale. We definitely do great inflation on gaming with science. We usually assume a B, and then go from there. And I'd love to hear about the science grade and your rationale. You're going to help me make my own decision here, because I kind of went into it with some like, I don't know about this one, but I'd love to hear the arguments. So who would like to go first? Jason or Anny? Who's up? Who wants to be first up?

Anny  46:33  
I want Jason to go first.

Jason  46:35  
Okay, so I'm just kind of making my gut feeling here based off of the science it's trying to portray, and all of the science it's trying to portray, because we focus a lot on the mother tree, but there's also a bunch of the mycorrhizal symbiosis and the nutrient exchange of I would probably give it a B plus, and I would do that because a lot of the science it shows is correct. It's like plants make associations with mycorrhizae, there's nutrient exchange that way. It's especially important for getting these, the nitrogen and the phosphorus and stuff. It's like that part, like that interconnection between the plants and the fungi, and kind of getting to the point that these, this fungi, form this whole invisible ecosystem and network underneath the forest, forest floor, I think is correct, the whole Mother Tree thing, okay, yeah, that dings its grade a little bit because I don't know, maybe the controversy or the counterpoints of that weren't fully developed when they first started the game. You can imagine, if you get halfway through developing a game, and suddenly the science changes like, well, now what do we do?

Brian  47:39  
It's the danger of science is, it tends to be sort of shifts as we learn more, right? 

Jason  47:43  
Yeah. So, yeah, okay, that part, but I'll be honest, based on my playing of the game, that part of the metaphor is actually pretty dispensable. It's like, I forgot that that was actually part of the metaphor for most of my play of the game. 

Brian  47:55  
That's unfortunate. That's the whole thing.

Jason  47:59  
I don't think it's necessary. I'm playing with seedlings and fungi, and it works just fine. And a little bit of abstraction about the shared pool of resources, but I never really remembered, like, oh, right, I'm playing a tree that is trying to help its own little seedlings. I was like, whatever. So it's like, I'd say B plus for those reasons, like, what, most of what it shows is good. Some stuff, maybe not so much. 

Brian  48:21  
Okay, all right, Anny, what do you think you can abstain. You can abstain. You don't have to give a grade.

Anny  48:27  
Okay. Well, I think it's fun to give a grade. I'll give it a B minus. I think I'm a little more disturbed than Jason about the carbon economy that'sbeing represented in this game. I just can't get over it. I'm sorry, yeah, but I just like, remember thinking through the carbon economy of the game, and I'm just like, this is very confusing to me. And I think I appreciate, Jason that you brought up the fact that it is in the booklet, or somewhere where the game developers clarify that, like, you know, the amount of carbon that any seedling is getting from its fungal symbiotic partner is like a tiny, tiny fraction of all the carbon that it needs to actually grow and become a tree, which that is very important. And I think that is a really important thing. And I would hate for someone playing the game to, like, get the sort of misguided idea that when tree seedlings grow up like they're literally relying on the fungal partner to provide all the carbon they need to get into being a tree. So I feel like that's what brings my grade down to a B minus. I agree with you, Jason and that, like, the whole Mother Tree metaphor isn't super you can play it without really thinking about it. And honestly, I wasn't really thinking about it until, like, after being done with the game, I was like, Oh, why did we do that? Oh, I bet it's because of this thing. But yeah, I think the things that it does well is introducing the fact that plants interact with fungi and often in a mutualistic way, and that mutualism involves a resource flowing from the plant to the fungus, and then the fungus to the plant, and they work on different they capitalize on different resources and mutually exploit each other for different resources. So I think that part was well developed in the game. 

Brian  50:16  
Maybe if they had done orchids instead of Douglas firs, because we know orchids actually do need to exploit very specifically. So I think I'm gonna stick with my original opinion, and I think I'm gonna give an Elizabeth Hargrave game a C, 

Jason  50:33  
oh, that's harsh.

Brian  50:34  
It is harsh.

Anny  50:35  
I was trying to be a little less harsh

Brian  50:37  
yeah. And I think, you know, if she wants to apply for a regrade. That's fine, I understand. But the problem is, is that when I think about a science game, my biggest concern, and the games that have gotten low grades from me, is feeling like I'm worried that people will get their good facts mixed up with their bad facts. And unfortunately, the metaphor here, while it's clarified in a in a footnote in the game, in the rule book, that there's only a small fraction of the carbon. That is not how the game plays. You cannot grow your seedling into a tree until it's gotten three carbon and the ability for it to get carbon off the fungi is the most important thing in the whole game. That's how you score. That's everything is based on how much carbon are you absorbing. You literally move up the track to win the game based on absorbing carbon from fungi. It's the whole thing. And if that's the weakest part of the whole story, then unfortunately, and I hate this, because this is very cool. I love that it's a game about mycorrhizae. I love that the things about getting other rare nutrients, that's fine, but this whole idea of then moving that carbon back onto the seedlings, that's not nearly as solid as it's being portrayed. So I do worry that if somebody just plays this game, it reinforces ideas that may not actually end up holding up to the test of time. So I'm going to stick with my C I'm very sorry. You know you can apply for a re grade. Okay? We can discuss it in more detail.

Jason  51:58  
Now, we talk about the Yeah, we talk about having to make compromises between fun and reality, I know, and I'm gathering that there were some of those compromises made at when I skimmed the designer diary, they specifically mentioned that earlier versions were much more scientifically accurate, but really not all that fun. So they definitely intentionally made choices to try to make it a game you would like to play first, and that hopefully reflect the science. So let's get to the gameplay. Yeah,

Brian  52:22  
I yeah, I still think they could have done the same thing with orchids, and then it's orchids, and everybody loves orchids. Orchids are so cool,

Jason  52:28  
yes, but orchids don't make mushrooms 

Brian  52:30  
well, but we could orchid one way. 

Jason  52:34  
Yes, they do make orchids, but I think they This was because Elizabeth Hargrave makes games around things she loves she made she's a mushroom fan because she's a, yeah, she's a birder, she's a mushroomer, butterflyer,

Brian  52:47  
but she's not an orchid per- an orchid-er

Jason  52:50  
I don't know. Maybe that will be the next one. So anyway, Brian, your turn to go first. What's the grade?

Brian  52:56  
For fun? Um, I'm just a solid B on this. I liked it. I think you probably from talking to you, Jason, I think, you know, it would be nice if it was a different sort of engine game, right, where you kind of get to do a whole bunch of things all at once, the separation in time I didn't love. I love the little mushrooms. I think the components are great. I think it's a pretty game, and it's a game I'd be happy to play. So I will give it a B. 

Jason  53:16  
Anny what about you? 

Anny  53:17  
I don't play board games a lot. 

Brian  53:19  
Oh, you're not a nerd?

Anny  53:21  
I am a certified nerd. 

Jason  53:22  
Hey, hey, hey, there are many, many flavors of nerds. Not just board game nerds. Don't be elitist, Brian

Brian  53:28  
Sorry, sorry, sorry

Anny  53:30  
I'm just gonna give it an A because I don't play a lot of board games, and it was really fun. I had a great time, and I love the mushroom art. I'm very excited and happy that, like, mushrooms are entering the just like regular art zeitgeist, and now there's mushroom themed anything you can get, like at Target or anywhere. That's very true. And yeah, I just like, when I was playing the game, I found myself picking the mushrooms that looked the prettiest and play them becase why not?

Jason  54:01  
Oh yeah, you were always going after the You were always going after the purple mushrooms. That's true.

Anny  54:05  
I was always going after the purple mushrooms because they looked really cool. And that's right, that it's okay, that you don't have a whole lot of strategy when you put down mushrooms. So I'm gonna give it an A. It was a fun time. 

Brian  54:16  
All right. What about you? Jason?

Jason  54:18  
I'm probably gonna give this about a B plus as well, just because, like, it's fun, I felt a little frustrated because I kept feeling like I wanted to do more. And maybe it's because it was billed as an engine building game, and I never felt I got an engine going. to me, if I built an engine then turns late in the game should be more powerful than turns early in the game. And I never really felt like I got to that point. There's also just a lot to keep track of. So like the little flipping the tokens over to say, Oh, I've used this type of mushroom. I can't do that again until I refresh it somehow. that was, I'm sure it involves some sort of control over like and strategic choices, but mostly it was something that I tended to forget about. And it's like, oh, wait, could I do that? It's like, okay, yes, I can, and I'd do it, like, after the fact. So there's a lot of things to keep track of. Is a little bit it's kind of like getting a flow state is like, there's just enough to push you, but not so much you feel overwhelmed. And when there's near the end of the game, when there were like, 10 different mushrooms I could activate, and trying to figure out which one is the most strategically optimal one for me to activate like that was that was starting to get a little bit of outside that range. So I wouldn't mind playing this. I would actually like to play this again several more times. Yeah, now that I

Brian  55:30  
I'll bring it on Saturday. We'll play it on Saturday. 

Jason  55:32  
Okay, because basically part of that is the learning the game. The more I play a game, the more I'm able to make some of that sort of unconscious and assumed, and so I'm able to focus more on strategy. So I want to play this a few more times to see if I can get to that point.

Brian  55:45  
This is another problem with the gaming with science project is we're constantly playing something new. We play something a couple of times, and then we have to move on to the next thing, right? 

Jason  55:54  
Let's be honest, most of the board games on my shelves have gotten played like half a dozen times or less total in their entire lifespan, a game you go back to 10,20 times is like a winner. It's solid,

Brian  56:05  
yeah, but they look beautiful on the shelf. So they do

Anny  56:09  
Brian and Jason. I just, I actually just thought of this, like, fun, funny example for, like, the mycorrhizal network thing. Um, 2... 2, 3 years ago now, I was hiking in Patagonia, so in southern Chile, in the Torres del Paine National Park. And one of the people that I ended up kind of walking a lot with was this woman who was from Chile. She mostly spoke Spanish. I speak very little Spanish, and she spoke very little English. And those were very long hikes. And at some point we were trying to, like, talk about what we each did. And she was asking me about my research, which I was extremely incapable of explaining in Spanish. So it was trying to really hard to, like, you know, talk about plants and fungi. And then at a certain point she suddenly said, oh, like, Avatar, 

Jason  57:02  
yes, I was gonna bring that up. Like, the whole mycelium network was the inspiration for Avatar. There's that one scene with the two scientists

Anny  57:09  
That one scene where they connect, they're like, like, little cables into the tree, and then they, like, have a little, like, their USB, course, right? Like,

Jason  57:18  
yeah. But there's an earlier scene with the two scientists, like, one is poking, is like, look here, and you see over here, like, Look signal transduction. And it's like, yeah, those are actual scientists, because they're so excited that they've put wires on trees and there's a signal going between them, yeah.

Anny  57:33  
And so, like, this was just like, a crazy moment for me, like, right this, just like, complete stranger I met in Chile while hiking. The moment of connection that she could make to me, trying, very poorly to explain my research in Spanish, was Avatar, right? Like, that's the image that came to her mind when she suddenly made that connection. And I mean, I was kind of just like, yeah, kind of not exactly like, yes, kind of right, like,

Brian  58:02  
Less bioluminescence,

Jason  58:04  
yeah? But I think that's an important point for we talked about, like, the the mother tree and stuff, these things, even when they get it kind of wrong, it can form an entry point where you say, okay, yeah. Like, that's sort of based off of this. And now we can talk about the reality, which is more complicated and messy and stuff,

Brian  58:21  
narratives are useful, right? That's, I mean, we're telling stories in science all the time, and even a bad story can be a good starting point. All right, well, I think with that, it's been a great conversation. Thank you for talking about a spicy scientific controversy, which what that means for us is that people write passive aggressive papers every couple of months, that's right.

Anny  58:45  
Well, thank you so much for having me on. This was really fun, and I had a great time playing the game with you guys. 

Brian  58:49  
So Jason, do you want to take us out? 

Jason  58:52  
All right. Well, I think we're going to wrap it up there. So thank you, Anny, for coming on the show. Thank you everyone for tuning in. Have a great month and happy gaming 

Brian  59:01  
and have fun playing dice with the universe. See ya. This has been the gaming with Science Podcast copyright 2025 listeners are free to reuse this recording for any non commercial purpose, as long as credit is given to gaming with science. This podcast is produced with support from the University of Georgia. All opinions are those of the hosts, and do not imply endorsement by the sponsors. If you wish to purchase any of the games that we talked about, we encourage you to do so through your friendly local game store. Thank you and have fun playing dice with the universe. You.