Walk into any damp forest after a rainstorm and you’ll see them. Little caps poking through the leaf litter. Silent. Still. They look like they aren't doing much of anything besides rotting or growing, but beneath your boots, there is a massive, invisible conversation happening. People love to call it the "Wood Wide Web," but that’s a bit of a cliché now, isn't it? Honestly, the reality is way weirder than a botanical internet. If you've ever wondered if mushrooms talk to each other, the answer is a resounding "sorta," but they aren't gossiping about the weather. They’re pulsing.
Think of it like this: instead of words, they use electricity and chemistry.
For a long time, we thought fungi were just primitive hitchhikers. We were wrong. They are the architects of the soil. Professor Andrew Adamatzky at the University of the West of England has done some of the most mind-bending research on this. He hooked up electrodes to four different species of fungi—ghost fungi, caterpillar fungi, split gill fungi, and enoki. What he found wasn't just random noise. It was spikes of electrical activity. These spikes often clustered into groups that look strikingly similar to human vocabulary.
The electrical vocabulary of the forest floor
It sounds like sci-fi. It isn't. When Adamatzky analyzed these electrical pulses, he noticed they weren't just steady hums. They came in bursts. Some of these fungal "words" or "sentences" averaged about 50 "words" in length. The split gill mushroom, which you’ve probably seen growing on decaying wood without a second thought, produced the most complex "sentences" of the bunch.
Why though? Why would a mushroom need to "talk"?
It’s mostly about resources and threats. Imagine a fungus finds a particularly delicious patch of rotting wood. It needs to tell the rest of its body—the mycelium—to head that way. Or maybe there’s a chemical threat nearby. The electrical spikes could be a way of sending a "hey, watch out" signal across the network. It’s not fast. It’s not like a 5G connection. It’s a slow, rhythmic pulse that travels through the hyphae, which are the tiny, thread-like filaments that make up the mushroom's actual body underground.
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We often make the mistake of thinking the mushroom is the whole organism. It’s not. The mushroom is just the fruit. The actual "brain" and body is the mycelium. When we ask if mushrooms talk to each other, we’re really asking if this massive underground web is coordinated. And the data says yes.
Mycelium as a biological circuit
The hyphae act almost like neurons. In a 2022 study published in Royal Society Open Science, the spikes in fungal electrical potential were compared to the way nerve cells in humans transmit information. While it’s tempting to say mushrooms have "brains," that’s a stretch. They have a distributed intelligence. There is no central command center. Instead, the whole network reacts to stimuli.
If you pinch one end of a mycelial mat, the electrical frequency changes at the other end. That is communication. It’s a biological telegraph.
Mycorrhizal networks: The ultimate trade deal
This isn't just a private chat between mushrooms. They are talking to the trees, too. This is where the "Wood Wide Web" concept, popularized by Dr. Suzanne Simard, really takes off. Most land plants have a symbiotic relationship with fungi. The trees provide the fungi with sugar (which they make from sunlight), and the fungi provide the trees with phosphorus and nitrogen (which they extract from the soil).
It’s a marketplace.
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But it’s also a warning system. When a tree is attacked by aphids, it can send chemical signals through the fungal network to neighboring trees. Those neighbors then start pumping out repellent chemicals before the aphids even reach them. The fungi are the cables for this signal. Are the mushrooms talking to each other in this scenario, or are they just the fiber-optic cables for the trees? It’s probably both. The fungus has a vested interest in keeping its host tree alive. If the tree dies, the sugar supply gets cut off.
- Ghost Fungi: Known for bioluminescence, they also show high-frequency electrical spiking.
- Split Gill Fungi: The "chatterboxes" of the fungal world with complex pulse patterns.
- Mycorrhizal Fungi: The bridge builders connecting different plant species.
Is it actually "language" or just chemistry?
This is where scientists start to argue. It’s a healthy debate. Some researchers, like Adamatzky, are bold enough to compare these patterns to human speech. Others are much more cautious. They point out that a pulsing heart or a rhythmic digestive tract also produces electrical patterns, but we don't call that "language."
You've got to look at the nuance. Language requires intent and a specific set of rules (syntax). We haven't proven mushrooms have syntax yet. We just know they have patterns.
But does it matter? If the result is the same—information being passed from Point A to Point B to influence behavior—isn't that communication? If a fungus in a lab can "learn" the shortest path through a maze to find food (which slime molds, a distant relative, famously do), it’s clearly processing information.
The limitations of our understanding
We are still in the dark ages of mycology. We’ve only identified a tiny fraction of the fungal species on Earth. Most of our studies happen in controlled lab settings on agar petrie dishes. A forest is infinitely more complex. In the wild, you have thousands of species of fungi all overlapping. It’s not a single conversation; it’s a crowded room where everyone is shouting at once.
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What this means for your garden (and your mind)
Knowing that mushrooms talk to each other changes how you look at a landscape. It’s not a collection of individual plants. It’s a single, breathing system. When you use heavy fungicides or till your soil aggressively, you aren't just killing "weeds" or "pests." You are tearing up the communication lines. You are essentially cutting the internet cables of your garden.
This is why "no-dig" gardening has become so massive lately. By leaving the soil undisturbed, you allow these fungal networks to mature. A mature network means healthier plants, better water retention, and a more resilient ecosystem.
Next time you see a cluster of honey mushrooms or a random toadstool, don't just think of it as a biological leftover. Think of it as a node. A tiny, organic transmitter sending pulses into the dark, damp earth.
Ways to support fungal communication in your backyard:
- Stop tilling. Let the mycelium grow. Every time you turn the soil, you shatter the hyphae that have taken months to build.
- Use wood chips. Fungi love carbon. A thick layer of wood mulch is like a playground for mycelium.
- Ditch the synthetic fertilizers. High doses of phosphorus can actually make plants "lazy," causing them to stop communicating with fungi because they're being "hand-fed" nutrients.
- Plant diverse species. Different trees and shrubs host different types of fungi, leading to a more robust underground network.
Fungi are the planet's great recyclers and its great communicators. They were here long before we were, and they'll likely be here long after we're gone, still pulsing away in the silence of the dirt. We're just finally starting to learn how to listen to the frequency.
To really see this in action, grab a field guide and head out after the next big rain. Look for "fairy rings"—those circles of mushrooms. They aren't random. They represent the outer edge of a single mycelial colony expanding outward, talking to itself as it grows. It's a living map of a conversation that's been happening for weeks, or even years, right under your feet.
The forest isn't quiet. We're just deaf to the electrical hum of the kingdom fungi. Start by observing the fungal diversity in your local park; even the smallest patch of mossy bark can host a complex network that is actively "talking" right now.