There’s a Mushroom in the Network: Filamentous Fungi Control Multiphase Flow and Fluid Distribution in Porous Media
Filamentous fungi are everywhere: in forest soils, in agricultural fields, maybe in your pizza (hopefully not) and even deep underground in rocks. Yet beyond their familiar fuzzy, cotton-like appearance lies a remarkable physical ability: when these thread-like organisms grow inside porous materials, they can reorganize fluid flow by selectively clogging pathways, much like a cotton ball blocking a kitchen pipe and diverting water elsewhere. This ability becomes especially powerful in contaminated soils, where injected remediation fluids often bypass tight pores and leave pollutants trapped. By preferentially colonizing and clogging the wider, high-flow channels, filamentous fungi can redirect fluids into previously inaccessible regions, improving contact with contaminants.
In this talk, I will show pore-scale visualizations from dual-porosity microfluidic experiments demonstrating how filamentous fungi actively regulate multiphase flow. We observe that fungal growth not only clogs dominant channels, but also induces pore invasion, mobilizes trapped fluid phases, and enhances oil–water interfacial area. These results reveal the physical mechanisms by which fungi modulate fluid distribution in complex porous media, offering new strategies to harness fungal processes for applications ranging from bioremediation to carbon sequestration.
Short Bio: I am a researcher working in the PoreLab group at the Physics Department of the University of Oslo. I obtained my BSc and MSc from the Federal University of Pernambuco, Brazil and my PhD from the University of Oslo, Norway. My main areas of activity are within the domain of fluid mechanics (flow in porous media, vortex dynamics in classical fluids and hydrodynamic instabilities).
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