[hinkley]

Looks more to me like self identification, and natural selection.

That’s not a lot of wood for 120 days. This fungus is trying to maximize its chances by reaching out as far as it can to find more wood before it dies of starvation. Away from where it has already searched.

[asveikau]

When you describe the fungus as trying to do something, you just ascribed intelligence to it.

[hinkley]

It’s heuristics encoded in genes.

Things get more confusing when I talk about how fungi are the original farmers. But I don’t mean that anthropomorphically. I just mean farmer as “an entity that farms”

Susanne Simard, who knows trees better than fungi, tries to ascribe a sense of fairness to how forest food web fungi share and disburse minerals, sugars and water. Personally I just see osmotic pressure. Not as the only driver (see also arbitrage), but the one responsible for most of that “fairness”.

[rysertio]

Almost all living beings process signals(especially chemical signals), bacteria for example starts making beta lactamase in presence of antibiotics.

[asveikau]

I think that all living beings and even cells within a living being possess a form of intelligence. Though I don't know enough about biology to defend that intuitive understanding with the rigor that many HN readers would require and many here would possess.

[timschmidt]

Cells are mobile, hunt, some even see using photoreceptive organelles on the inside of a section of cell wall using the cytoplasm as a lens. The function of many organelles clearly visible in cells under microscopy is still unknown. But it's clear they're doing a fair amount of computation and behaving intelligently. I'm struck by how similar gene regulatory network maps can look to function call graphs[1] and ion channel receptors in cell walls behave very similarly to transistors with on/off but also signal amplification applications. The more I watch them under microscopy, the harder it is not to think of cells as little animals unto their own. A great channel for beautiful footage is https://www.youtube.com/@journeytomicro

1: https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Emanuel-Goncalves-3/pub...

[sdenton4]

And where, exactly, does it store the information that it has already searched an area? and how does it avoid dedicating resources to re-searching it?

[hinkley]

How do tree roots know whether they should fuse with other roots or not? How do plant leaves know to grow opposite of other leaves? How do stripes form on a tiger? Chemical gradients.

[interestica]

I was at a fungus event yesterday (really) and they spoke a bit about patterns in nature and how they are similar to Turing Patterns.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turing_pattern

> ... arises due to the interplay between differential diffusion (i.e., different values of diffusion coefficients) of chemical species and chemical reaction.

[hinkley]

There’s an old bonsai trick to force a branch to appear by cutting or bruising the wood above the point so that the cells that differentiate into buds can no longer see the signal from the apical bud, which in species that have them, is telling the rest of the tree to give it all of the energy so it can outcompete other trees reaching for the canopy.

Meanwhile if you prune the apical bud to try to keep the tree small, it will just elect another leader and keep growing on a side branch.

I have a tree in my yard that got nibbled by insects when it was chest high. Killed the crown bud but not its two siblings. One of them won, then stood up straight and two years later you can barely tell.

[saaaaaam]

This is fascinating. Where could I learn more about these sorts of bonsai techniques? Is there a book or website that you would particularly recommend? I’ve always been intrigued by bonsai but if you do a basic web search it’s just people selling trash.

[hinkley]

Try Heron Bonsai on YouTube. I’m actually out of the hobby because I kill trees unless they’re in the ground.

[timschmidt]

Maybe epigenetically in the gigabytes of nuclear material they move around from cell to cell through the mycelium?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y0uffu5XM-s

https://www.youtube.com/shorts/W85G9O9XY98