Heart-rot is not a disease: reframing wood decay in living trees
When fungi are seen fruiting on tree trunks, branches and twigs, they are often automatically thought to be causing disease. Likewise, the hollowing of dead woody tissue in the centre of trunks is often instantly thought of as harmful. Yet there is a wide diversity of tree–fungus interactions, and the majority of those involving wood decay fungi do not have negative consequences for the tree.
