Mushrooms and Trees' Symbiotic Relationship 

David Clement explains how fungi grow on and feed tree roots under the ground and sprout above ground as mushrooms to reproduce during wet fall seasons.
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Today we're looking at mushrooms and so a lot of our mushrooms that we have, as you can see, are under trees and tree roots have a special association with mushrooms. Most of the year it basically is just regular, you know, ground or turf or whatever. But in the fall, if we have a wet fall, these mushrooms that are associated with the tree roots essentially then want to reproduce. And these are the reproductive structures that you get. And so there are all different kinds of species of mushrooms that grow and associated association with trees. And we call those mycorrhizal mushrooms or mycorrhizal relationships. Well, what they do is they coat the roots, the surface of the roots, and they send their mycelia out through the turf or through the, through the ground. And they actually absorb nutrients for the tree. So they enable the tree then to get additional nutrients and to go through stressful times.
It's additional food for the tree essentially. So these are the different stages of the reproductive mushrooms. So for example, this is a very young stage. You can see it's very solid. It's sort of compact. And then as we sort of, you know, age a little bit, it fully expands and exposes its reproductive gills. Here in this case, in some cases, they are pores in this particular species, they're gills. So the spores come off the gills, and then if they get a little older, you can see they sort of begin to split. Other creatures then use these as food sources. So insects, for example, other animals and so forth, will feed on them. But as they begin to age and they begin to break down, and then they'll just decompose and disappear again until next fall. And like I said, in this turf area, there's lots of mycelium and it just, it just waits for the opportunity then to basically form this reproductive structure and to continue to colonize these tree roots.