Hello, everyone, and welcome to the Indefensive Plants podcast, the official podcast of Ineufensiveplants.com. What's up? This is your host, Matt. Welcome to the show. How is everyone doing this week? I am doing great because I am just currently obsessed with this idea of plants and their microarizal partnerships and how context-dependent those relationships can be. So I want to keep that conversation going. And to do that,

we are talking today to Dr. Jason Hoxema, who studies a myriad ways of which plants and

microisal fungi partner and how complex and often context dependent those relationships are. We, of course,

talk about this concept of the wood wide web and the ways in which journalism

has gotten ahead of the science, often in erroneous ways.

But more than that, we talk about the ways that theory and practical applications of research

can combine to do something really fascinating to teach us about a really complex world going

on underneath our feet.

Before I get to that, I just want to say this podcast cannot happen without support, and there's a lot of great ways to do that, but one of the best is to become a patron over at patreon.com slash indefensive plans. For just a tiny financial contribution each month, you get a lot of great kickbacks, and best of all, you ensure this show has a future future I couldn't be doing this without my patrons and I thank each and every one of them for kicking

in a little bit of support each and every month but that is entirely enough for me I

don't want to keep you from this conversation any longer so let's just jump right into

it without further ado here's my conversation with dr. Jason Huxema. I hope you enjoy.

All right, Dr. Jason Hsima. Welcome to the podcast.

I'm really excited to talk to you today, but let's start off with an introduction.

Tell everyone a little bit about who you are and what it is you do.

Thanks, Matt.

I'm glad to be here.

I'm a professor of biology at the University of Mississippi.

My research focuses on a large part on the interactions between plants and microisal fungi and their ecological consequences and their evolutionary dynamics. And I've been

working on a variety of questions in that realm for decades now, especially focusing on forests and trees, including pines and their

microizedle fungi. And pines have a microizedle fungi called ecto-microysal fungi, including a variety

of really interesting mushrooms that are associated with them.

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