the coming up next, a documentary with an in depth look at some of the oldest living organisms on earth funding. thanks for watching t w. the news young, the rockin immigrants. they know the police will stop. they know that the route is not a solution. they know their flights could be fatal. back is not an option. shattered dreams starts june 18th on d. w. ah,

ah, hidden from sight is a kingdom that rules all live on land. or landing. we have this coding that's falling right down all around there on your food or in your long use or on your scanner on each thing your touch or inch place you've got me. a single interconnectedness could be described as a 3rd mode of it's an alien world of powerful ancient life. this is hire a web of life is connected. it's connected through the findings. some of those will save us some of those threaten us, and we're just beginning to understand which are which i

say shaped our world and hold the key to our future. this is the fungal empire. the news oh, no plans they know animals and change them in their own right. the many people think of some of clowns, perhaps because they don't and they just, they just sit there for the fun, funky a much more closely related to the rules. and they also plans and like animals they have to each other organ the. ready

when we think of fungi at all, we think of mushrooms, but these are just the fruiting bodies, a small part of the fun goes life. that's all around us. the all the main parts and the fungus is a whole months of fine filaments, which together for what is called the my c m the. my sylium is the actual body of the fungus. it spreads through the soil, eating everything in its path, and even penetrates solid wood. they can get there by physical penetrating force, but also by producing enzymes which digest the 2. growing into these enzymes are the teeth and claws of fungi. we're very familiar with single celled organisms can be bacteria and multisite or autism. so plants and animals the

fungi as unusual because they are a single interconnect network. so much is unknown almost every time we do an experiment, we're seeing something that nobody else has ever seen before. the whole is a growth and development depends on what's going on in their environment. animals and plants for an animal. once you've got your arms and your legs, you don't grow a new one, depending on whether you need to know on like animals, the body of the fungus is constantly changing shape, and they really search for food can keep spreading. and it can recycle material that's really useful, unease or that material to grow somewhere else. so it can actually migrate in the environment depending on whether it can find food or during a 1000000000 years of evolution, fungi have become the masters of survival. the funds you have been around so long

means they've had a long time to figure out the best way to do everything. the best way is to be lethal, where they kill the things they fight. you know, they have a 1000000000 years of experience and during the hard work of living, ah, we have much to learn from this mysterious kingdom. we know less than one percent of the estimated $5000000.00 species of fungi. we're still incredibly ignorant about these organisms. every time you breathe, then you're breathing in hundreds of species of fungi, and even those funds you studied for hundreds of years are really basic things. we don't necessarily know about them. microbial explorers rob done. and men want to discover how fungi can change our lives. we don't have to go to far off lands or distant places because there's new species underneath our feet.

with each new species, it's a promise of a new compound that could be the next greatest antibiotic or a chemical that could cure cancer or something that we don't need to know it could do yet. we've become really interested recently and trying to figure out how do we find not just any new fungus bungee that might be useful to people. and so in some cases, that's monday we might use for making new kinds of beer. and other cases though, we're looking for fungi that might be able to break down industrial waste. human ways will need fund you to help us deal with that. most of the cool stuff nature can do, we haven't discovered yet. and so we so systematically look and we bumble around a little bit. it's cool barks like a magical thing you missed in any kind of drama can be playing underneath it. the microscopic mystery in, i'm microscopic,

much me we need some way to guide us toward understanding all of this mystery. and so i think never lucian, or a history serves the company. the guy that appoints is in a direction. ah, this is the great untold story of how fungi shaped all life on land. and to understand it, we need to go way back in evolutionary time. the 1000000000 years ago, the planet or it was waking from a prolonged ice age retreating glaciers, revealed a barren landscape. and yet, from this bleakness came all of the abundance of terrestrial life, me in the lava fields of

iceland, we see evidence of the 1st colonizers. i'm really excited to see. ready what, what's, what's living here, that we're not seeing, we're forgetting some on these rocks. there are signs that microscopic fungi were among the pioneers of life. by the 1000000000 years ago terrestrial earth started to be colonized by microbes in those micros included bacteria and eventually also a fun, gee and for us to like community. the 1st terrestrial fungi survived by mining minerals from rocks. they were literally carving out an existence when we look at a volcanic landscape like this one, it's hard to imagine that funds you have anything to do with the story funds you're fragile. there actually rooms and he little microscopic spores. and yet funds

you're precisely at the center of this story because funds year, what turner rock like this in the soil, ah, fungi eat, rock. they produce floors that release acid, breaking up the rock surface. fast growing fungal filaments. hifi then drill into the rock to extract a meal of minerals using pressure a 100 times greater than inside a car tire. the tips of the hi fi can shatter the rock. the, what we're looking at here is it is a kind of molecular mining operation. it's this sort of process through which bungee turn rock to life by mineralized rocks, fungi, we're slowly laying the groundwork for the arrival of the 1st plants. but that next

step of colonizing earth with a big one. around 500000000 years ago, a group of algae started to move from the ocean to fresh water on land. but to get a foothold they needed to negotiate with the fungi. ah, all the water, all days in a solution of nutrients. when they move to land, it's a very different scenarios. so it's very difficult then to be able to get hold of the water and the nutrients that they need to grow. one of the major strategies very early on would have been to link up with this funky that were published on land fungi. at the time we're living on bacteria and became see we'd washed up on shore. the arrival of land plants offered fungi, an easier way to access food by exploiting

a living organism to get sugar, asked them rather than having to excrete their own so just of enzymes and assimilate all the nutrients, energetically. a lot less expensive for the fungus. so it makes economical sense. the algae that appeared in the lakes struck a deal with the fungi. they offered the fungi, sugars in return for essential minerals. this mutually beneficial relationship is a form of symbiosis. had became one of the most powerful forces of evolution. when the 1st algo sell hits the terrestrial ground, it was already ready to say i'm here. let's form a relationship. ready micro biologist, doctor eric home has re ignited this old romance between fungi, an allergy. i'm always fascinating even in human relationships,

who's going to hit it off and why? doctor holmes experiment shows that even 500000000 years later, fungi and algae still work together. so if i were to ask you how long do you think you guys could maybe form a symbiosis together, it doesn't seem like a foregone conclusion that they would form a partnership. yes. so they do form, they can form a partnership. and this is a result of just 7 days, so not with this amount of, so you put these 2 together, right? that are both just have in life 7 days you get this? yes, they find each other. and so the fact that these are together, i mean the algae are actually embedded somehow and i guess they're actually physically attached like arm in arm. to me, this is pretty fantastic. and i love the idea that you're remaking the thing that

must have happened. yes. and yeah, there's a beauty in that this cindy oh says between fungi and algae opened the door to the evolution of all land plants. it was the biological big bang. that 1st jump with a big one and the greeting of the dark, dark land. 450000000 years ago. the earth was teeming with bizarre life forms. but nearly all of them were still in the ocean. ah, the land was void of animals, trees and flowering plants, only, mosses cushion the lava fields. and simple plants clung to the banks of rivers. ah, they have no leaves, they have no. i'm so they were limited to just staying around the water because

they have no way of storing it or transporting it like they're algae ancestors. these early plans reached out to fungi for help. those funds without been already well established in the, in the earth at that time. and they would have been able to go a lot deeper and get into smaller crevices in the, in the soil, and be able to sort of mine that soil. not in bitter tongue though, studies the interaction between fungi and the oldest land plants, liver words. imagine the funky word making contact with this plan surfaces. this shallow growing plants and they would be going around them rather than into them. as fungi explored them, liver words, they found their way in between the plant cells. some even manage to break inside.

so the phone you were able to occupy the plants themselves and form these beautiful tree like structures which we call all skills. and it's through these oper skills that the plants are able to take phosphorus from the fungus and in return the plant gives the fungus comp and that it's generated to photo synthesis. katie field can recreate the atmosphere that was around when fungi and liver words began cooperating. so what we've done is we've ramps the theo, 2 right tops around 3 times its level in the current atmosphere. so a quick look and see what to doing in math. so this is one of my favorite live. what does it show you like, you know, so actually the most ancient land on us today. and it's probably really similar to how the very 1st alarm plans were by 400000000 years ago. and you can see it's

really well under those high ceos to concentrations in the cabinet, which suggests that the fungus is doing its job and it supplying it with nutrients from the soil on the plans. they really well because of that, by working with fungi, liver words not only survive, they thrive, sucking up carbon dioxide and pumping out oxygen. these tiny plants gave the planet it's 1st breath of fresh air. and over time, they changed the composition of the entire atmosphere. paving the way for complex plants and so you end up with these much larger plans evolving which have leave tomorrow, which are able to control the sphere to movement into the leaves and routes which are able to allow the plant square really big above ground. ever since nearly every plan has been nurtured by their symbiotic fungi. i am still

captivated by this whole idea of a plant that is alive that is healthy, and that is allowing another organism to grow in between itself and in to itself. and not only is it allowing them to do that, but it's actually their iving a benefit from it. mm. if i had known evolve, it would be a very, very radically different looking kind of planet. we certainly wouldn't be here on the golden age of the dinosaurs, the planet was exploding with life. 3 ferns and conifers darted the landscape. but it was the fungi beneath the ground that was making all this possible kind of classic out of sight, out of mind type of organisms. but if you take a step back, funny are really the organisms that are putting those plans there. as trees

developed, new types of fungi evolved. they formed partnerships with the roots of trees and gave rise to entire forests. lisa lineage funky that, able to do something quite different in the soil than what the early funds that were involved in allowing plans to call a nice land could do both ground. these new fungi are characterized by their fruiting bodies, mushrooms, but beneath the surface they form complex networks. scientists call it the wood wide web. in fact, there are 2 sorts of wood wide web. one source is formed by the decompose, a funky, the rotter's, the breakdown dead plant material and the interconnect between lots of different

data resources. without these d composers, wife and the forest would soon be buried under dead material. fungi eat this material and in doing so, they create new life, the garbage disposal agents of the natural world. they break down dead organic matter. and by doing that, they release nutrients and those nutrients have been made available for plants to carry on growing and other one is all the nutrients on the planet will be locked in dead stuff. the 2nd type of wood wide wind is formed between living plants, especially trees hungry for food, the fungus filaments, cold hyfi search for tree roots. they enveloped the root and some find their way inside. here they provide water and minerals in exchange for sugars.

but this is more than a trade the entire forest is now connected through the fungi. if you summed up the distance traveled by the hifi just beneath a single foot, it would be more than 500 kilometers of hi fi, a vast network, that traffics and everything that for us need. the use is nature's internet and information highway that allows trees to communicate and even send out danger signals to each other. rather than a collection of individual trees. a forest operates more like a super organism ah, connected by the fungal network. a lush and vibrant planet emerged. but hundreds of

millions of years of evolution would be blown away in a single moment. an asteroid strike, wipe down 70 percent of all species. yet fungi, nature's ultimate survivor would turn the cataclysm to its advantage. ers became is fungal composed. think about it overnight. you have to get dust is kicked up. there is no sunlight, and you have all these decaying plant matter. the fungi then can reproduce very rapidly in this expanse of death, fungi inherited the earth and incredibly, without this catastrophe,

we wouldn't be here. and otherwise, insignificant animal groups survived the mammals, from which humans would eventually evolve. its thought that they were immune to the fungi, lethal onslaught. mammals was built in advantage relative to the reptiles, their hot, the reptiles, so quite separate from the diseases. but your typical mammal which maintains the temperatures in mid thirty's or so create a thermal exclusionary zone for fungi. it's an intriguing theory. and if correct, the temperatures of warm blooded animals would be above the temperature, tolerated by most fungi, our total cost devoss team set out to test the hypothesis. so after 2 days in context, either $25.00 degrees, which is ambient room temperature,

or $37.00 degrees because human body temperature, we can see that there are differences in growth. so on the 25 degree plate, we can see all 4 of these strains group. but on our 37 degree plate, we can be 2 of those, and you haven't grown at all. and that's because they don't survive at $37.00, and it happens to be the same ones that cannot infect people. the narrow margin protecting us from fungal pathogens is the difference between life and death. in america, millions of little bats are dying from a newly arrived. fungus. bass are like us, warm bloody. however, tobaz hibernate in the winter. and when the temperature drops, they become susceptible to this fungal disease. here is the interesting thing. if you take the bats when they're infected and you feed them, wake him up, i let the temperatures go up. you're able to control the some of these each thought

. when they're cold, their immune system cannot do it by itself. oh. busy protected by their high temperature, mammals were free to roam, to fungi dominated world ah, this is see the iceman a victim of a neolithic murder. his body was perfectly preserved in the ice for thousands of years. and among his belongings were some intriguing items. there were 2 objects which were big mystery in the beginning. they've turned out to be fungi, poly boars. we were thinking, could it be food, but you would not put them a lot of work in food to make it so nice. your meant that dr.

watson peitner is one of the scientists who studied these mushrooms. the evidence suggests they were much more than decoration. now we know that it's enhanced in your immune system, and it will help you also against cancer against inflammation via p book area. so it has a huge array of medicine, properties, poly pores are the 1st recorded use of mushrooms as medicine. but for the iceman it meant even more. it was a palace, mine was spiritual, like bringing the spirit of god with you to protect you on your journey. ah, in western culture,

the power of mushrooms would soon be forgotten and it's only an accident that revived it. in 1928, fungal spores blew through the window of a london hospital. they landed in a petri dish in the laboratory of alexander fleming. there's fungus called penicillin would change the course of human history. he looked at one of these unusual petri dishes and at that interface between the bacteria and the fun, g was a zone where nothing was growing, but he would come to realize was that was this where the funds were producing enzymes, chemicals that were outside of the body of the fungus and killing the bacteria. and that's the germ of the discovery of antibiotics. for most of history, humanity was decimated by bacterial epidemics. but since the 1st penicillin pill

world population has tripled and allowed us to build vast cities, changing the face of the planet, respected to add another 2000000000 people to the planet will need more food with that number of people will need more antibiotics. and so we're going to need to depend on funding more than we do today. ah, the life saving power of antibiotics is the outcome of an ancient war. fungi and bacteria are sworn enemies. whereas suddenly grow and they come to bacteria and the millions and millions of years they've evolved mechanisms to kill those bacteria. but bacteria are constantly evolving. and as a result, we are now facing a global crisis of antibiotic resistance. unless we find a solution,

hundreds of millions will die challenges, we don't have any new drugs. and what we need to do is find new ways to overcome this problem. micro biologist, jerry, right. wondered if fungi had evolved ways of overcoming bacterial resistance. and that meant returning to the soil, looking for a compound that might help to safeguard our antibiotics. guys, that's more dirt for you. it came from the back of the university. you can get anything cool out of it. we screened 10000 extracts that we had collected from microorganisms around various environments. and from the 10000 extracts we found one that had excellent activity of overcoming

resistance. we call it a m a for short, because that's gillum or asked me nate is too much to say everyday. incredibly, this compound, produced by a common soil fungus, as per jealous can restore the power of our antibiotics. when i saw the results, i actually didn't believe it just seems it just seemed relatively too easy to do, but it turned out to be real. so every week, every month, as we continued to work on this compound and kept saying, well, can be used for pneumonia or can be used for this kind of infection. every time we did this, it's an experiment like this. it's was proving to be really effective. ah, when these fungal molecules were added to antibiotics, even the most resistance super bugs were defeated. i've been working in this field for 25 years and never had any molecule that's shown to be that potent. and that's

insanely exciting. the kingdom of fungi is nature's chemical. factory, offering immense benefits to humanity. already half of our 20 most valuable medicines are derived from fungi, including immuno suppressants and collateral. lowering stephens, many of the new drugs we're thinking about are coming from farm gee, and so in your everyday life, there this magic set of, of compounds that we rely on. scientists are now investigating the benefits of a wide range of mushrooms for their anti inflammatory, anti cancer, anti oxidant, and immune stimulant properties. the challenging thing for as a scientist is trying to understand why they're doing it. and how do we tap into that and actually enhance our chances of finding what we,

what we want with millions of potential candidates, the search for beneficial fungi needs, clever detective work. you know, the great thing is there a bunch of insects that we know probably have useful fun, gee, but then there are lots of other insects that nobody's ever studied in the context of frenzy. and so what we started to do is to look to social insects, who like us, have many challenges with microbial pathogens that would like nothing other than to destroy their entire society. calling only one promising candidate is nature's worst housekeeper the window and seemingly oblivious to hygiene. the ants live surrounded by waste and decaying bodies right next to the larvae and eggs. we found a whole bunch of ant poop and an skeleton that ants. and so i was certainly that means the answer doing something interesting. think about in the context of your

own life. if you had in your bedroom a bunch of poop and dead bodies, you'd immediately worry about, well, how did they get there? but also about pathogens, right? what, how do you prevent the pathogens associated with those things from killing you? what we're doing here is collecting the amps, but also collecting some of the garbage. and what we want to do is figure out if in that and garbage, there's a fungus which could be useful as an antibiotic. but also that the ants might be using the breakdown. what's the waste in their colony? in the lab and madison recovers the fungi, found on the shedding light on a previously unseen world. so this is my favorite part because you never really know what's going to grow from these insects on a petri plant. it's crazy diversity for one. that's awesome. we're seeing different

fungi here, but it's likely that there are more speed here than we can even see. my biggest hope is if this is got antibiotic producing fungi, and this is got fungi that we can use to clean up human ways. yeah, i guess we don't, we don't know what these are yet. right. right. so we have to do for the genetic sequence thing to find out who they are so that afterwards we can find out what they do. it makes me answer not to now. is that too much? yeah, sorry. we've barely begun our journey into the mysterious kingdom of fungi. there are wonders to be discovered wherever we search. so if we look for many of our problems, and we think about what the challenge is, bungee offer a vast reservoir of possibilities. those because of their mastery of chemistry, and because of their diversity fungi, our natures, grades, survivors. this makes them both powerful allies and given the chance for middle enemies. an epidemic on canada's

west coast is a warning of fungi, lethal power. in 2001 veterinarians on vancouver island, noticed something unusual. many cats and dogs had to lumps under their skin and we're having trouble breathing me. good afternoon, dr. soon people began complaining of stubborn coughs, headaches, and night sweats. x rays revealed shadows on their lungs. they thought they had cancer. they were told that by the surgeons, and so they cut it out alone. behold, it was not a cancer, it was a fungal infection. the culprit turned out to be crypt caucus getting a relatively harmless fungus previously only seen in tropical environments like australia. the question was, how do they get here? we did not know, and this is where we the bit of

a detective story to sort that out. what we are really looking at when we're looking at fungi is evolution itself. karen bartlett, is a micro bonder when fi gaddy, i appeared it was her job to located in the wild. there was no time to lose c gatti, i had already infected hundreds of people killing more than one in 10. once we knew that it was gatti, i then we contacted our australian colleagues where is endemic and primarily associate with you live districts. it gave us at least something to go on. the trees and out was our initial starting point. but i was also taking air samples and that was actually the big breakthrough for you really needed to get this pores airborne. and there is no way to control it

with an infection rate 10 times higher than in australia. vancouver island was declared a hot zone standing in the middle of these trees in the middle of literally a forest. and not knowing whether it was going to be an epidemic curve. it was pretty sobering. the 2nd thing that crossed my mind at that point was that because i was the one they're taking, the samples is if i had a risk of coming down with total disease or not. what made c gatti i scary was that it could also badly affect healthy people. it's very, very unusual. left undetected the infection can be lethal. can james, a former mill worker from duncan was lucky? his life was saved by coincidence. center for disease control issues. here are the

symptoms to watch oh for or they were doing a report on this crypted caucus disease on channels like news out of victoria. they started going through the symptoms and i was like, check, check, check. and basically i had pretty much all of the symptoms that, that it described, undiagnosed fever nights with the next business. and doctor jeff squire got a sample, took it and cultured it and came back and said that i did. in fact, of cryptic office, invasive fungal infections are difficult to treat, and early diagnosis is essential. it's very hard to treat us to give you an example. if you have that tyria pneumonia, you can often be treated for 2 weeks and you get better. when you have a fungal disease, you often have to treat for many months. i was on the medication for

a year. had i not seen tv show, i might not be here talking to you today right now. i mean, the people have died from it. not everyone is as lucky as can. the infection can become lethal when the fund is, finds its way from the lung to the brain. you've got this fungal infection that was surround your brain, and then some people would actually convey to brain tissue. so we could see is small lesions that would look like cause swiss cheese in their brain. but how can a harmless yeast, the thrives and soil find a way to invade and kill healthy humans? because the ecology of the soil, there are other organisms there including omega. so now they are animals. they do move around and they each other organisms for their food source in this evolutionary arms race. she gaddy, i build

a protective shield to avoid being even now shift that whole concept to the human body. as humans, we have a primary defense system that it's called white blood cells. and if you were not usually looking at them under the microscope, they don't like a whole bunch of different to say, let me do just like me, but in the soil, our white glove jones, the microphone ages in gulf invading microbes. but c gatti is equipped to deal with this challenge the same traits that allow them to survive them, eva, allow them to survive. macro flashes in the long, long before the 1st human dis, fungus had evolved the means to kill us. should we cross paths? probably would have lived out is happy little life without our even knowing it was here. crypt caucus getting the peacefully in the environment until conditions

changed and the change was global warming. we know that over the last 40 years, the average mean temperature has gone up by a degree or 2 in this particular area. we have longer dry spills. and so as soon as you get that just stirred up the possibility of people inhaling, the proper fuel goes up. and so the possibility of people coming down with critical disease goes up see, got a is on the move. it was localized australia then in a blink of an eye. this becomes a worldwide problem is spreading through united states. and we think that this has dollars itself in the continent. we're going to be seen a lot more of the vancouver outbreak is

a cautionary tale in the warming world. given the opportunity fungi are always ready to invade new territory, including us. it has only been by very good fortune, that humans in general have only a few pathogenic fungi, because there are only a few pathogenic franchise that can grow at 37 degrees. i eat human body temperature, that's been our savior. but as the planet warms, more and more fungi are forced to adapt to new conditions. therefore, organisms arrived there, but i'm not capable of causing disease today because their temperatures keep a mouth who become lu pathogens. fungi will continue to evolve in unpredictable ways to ignore them is both a lost opportunity and a dangerous mistake. and so i think it's more important than ever to understand

what this relationship we have is with bungee because we don't have control over them. and we're hoping that we can keep this mostly peaceful relationship going. since the dawn of life fungi have been the driver of evolution on land. they ate the rocks, they created the soils and nurtured the plants, the turn, the planet green. to has the planet that we have today, we had to have funding. it was fungi that brought back life after each global catastrophe. if there were no fungi, there would be no other life. there are keystone, you know. it was fungi as it paved the way for civilization. they have made us who we are all around, are those funds that are falling on you that are going to alter our fate as human.

and we're just starting to figure it out as we continue to explore the fungal empire, our most exciting discoveries are yet to come me no more protection. denmark is the 1st country in europe to expel the refugees. argued in the people affected by this ruling are done, they will be arrested and detained upon arrival. ah, focus on your ah 90 minutes on d. w. ah,

how it feels the jewish life in europe. what film producer? bona and journalist eve cooper, mont more exploring? delving into history and the present to that i would never think you could be live so openly. i'm so freely and closely and remind myself because i grew up in a completely different way. it's broad explorer listings. jewish in years, the to part documentary starts july 5th on dw

ah ah, this is the w news live from berlin. another blow to press freedom in hong kong editorial staff at a pro democracy newspaper, arrested after a massive police raids accused us concluding with foreign powers. also coming up blocked off.