For as long as plants have lived on land, fungi have sustained them. Beneath every giant sequoia, every wheat stalk, every black-eyed Susan, hidden webs of filigreed mycelia permeate the plants’ roots and tie them into the surrounding soil. The fungi’s hollow tendrils forage for nutrients, and they transport those nutrients to the plants’ roots in exchange for carbon, in the form of sugars and fats.

Our entire planetary ecosystem would cease to exist as we know it without this complex relationship. And yet the slow pace of growth and the subterranean environs make these organisms and their partnerships stubbornly hard to study.

Now an international team from multiple institutions including Princeton University has devised a way to watch these mycorrhizal fungi in stunning detail, revealing key mechanisms that have enabled them to solve extraordinary problems for roughly half a billion years.

“Under the ground, there are all these things happening that no one ever thinks much about because they don’t see them,” said Howard Stone, Princeton’s Neil A. Omenn ’68 University Professor of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering and one of the study’s authors.