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>> FUNGAL SALT BARRIERS notes and experiments with mycelium, sand and salt water |
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posted 22 April 2005
OK so a few people on the forum asked me to write up experiment 7 properly so here it is.
THE QUESTION: can a layer of living mycelium slow down the movement of salt water through beach sand?
SETUP:
- 4 x 2 litre ice cream containers with holes in the bottom
- filled with beach sand (collected from my local beach)
- containers A + B: plain sand
- containers C + D: sand with a 3cm layer of oyster mushroom spawn mixed with sawdust + biochar in the middle
- poured 500ml of sea water in the top of each one every day for 3 weeks
- tasted the water that came out the bottom (yes really)
RESULTS:
A + B: water out the bottom tasted the same as the sea water. salty.
C + D: for the first 9 days the water out the bottom tasted noticeably LESS salty. after day 10 the mycelium started to die off (too much salt i think) and it went back to normal.
So it worked... for a bit. My theory is the hyphae are taking up the salt and holding it in the network. Fungi are very good at moving minerals around (look up mycorrhizal networks) so it makes sense they could move salt as well. Need to find a more salt tolerant species. Someone on the forum suggested trying spores collected from driftwood. Will try that next.
Note: I did not have equipment to measure the salt properly so this is all based on taste. If anyone has a salinity meter they can lend me please get in touch!!
I am now convinced biochar is the missing piece. It is like a sponge with millions of tiny holes and the fungi love living in it. Biochar + mycelium = a living filter. You could in theory put a strip of this along the top of a beach and it would catch the salt as it moves through the sand. Nobody is doing this research and I don't understand why.
Recent forum posts: (forum is read only at the moment due to spam)
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