I glanced at an ant crawling over from a nearby nest as tall and wide as my seated silhouette. The nest quivered with thousands of workers. Moving, stacking, and stockpiling millions of Douglas-fir needles that littered the forest floor. The ants also carried spores of brown decay mushrooms on their legs and in their fecal pellets into the nest, accelerating infection and decomposition of the needles, which settled and stabilized the thatch. And into stumps and fallen trees, aiding decay otherwise hindered by the summer drought. I remembered the saprotrophic oyster mushrooms at Mabel Lake,
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