Anupa Mathew successfully defended her PhD thesis last Thursday. In her thesis, she examined the role of common mycorrhizal fungi for mediating plant-plant interactions in natural and agroecological ecosystems. Specifically, Anupa was interested in trade economics in common mycorrhizal networks. She was able to show that these networks exist and that a substantial trade imbalance exists in these networks. This means, that plants that “pay” for the network are not necessarily the ones that “benefit" from the network in terms of resource gain. Interestingly, however, this trade imbalance does not seem to have a strong ecological effect on the performance of the plants at the community level.