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by contingencies
105 days ago
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"Computers are useless, they can only give you answers" - Pablo Picasso, via https://github.com/globalcitizen/taoup I was looking at the fungi in my garden recently and realised there's such a variety of forms, there's no obvious reasons for many of them to exist. Are the fuzzy ones fuzzy because it creates vortices in the air affecting spore distribution? Or is it simply to avoid being eaten by certain types of critters? Are the tiny ones tiny because they are resource-starved, because their strategy is to avoid greater dehumidifying airflow and direct sun exposure above the grass-protected layer, or because they somehow produce greater viability spore distribution and don't need the volume of surface area to do so? Or are they planning to be eaten and have spore travel through digestive tract of slugs? The same question could be asked of huge ones, which are often found with chunks bitten out of them. Then there's some sort of weird fluffy one that occurs on moist ledges where you'd normally only expect bryophytes. Then you've got the slime molds which are sort of proto-fungi that just spam spore everywhere when it rains. All this makes me want to study them or possibly model some of the forms or strategies with biomimicry to better understand them. The main thing I take from all this is: if you have a large plurality of disparate fungi in your garden, it's healthy, because it's a bioindicator of multiple successful strategies in the local micro ecosystem. |
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Now, keep in mind that 99% of the cell mass of most fungi exists as sheets, globs, or relatively uninteresting white mycelia - tiny meandering threads. Apparently not a lot of differentiation is needed there for their jobs!
But for reproduction, a mass of white threads that even mycologists can't identify without DNA equipment can suddenly (in hours to a couple days) sprout a GIGANTIC (0.1-6 inch tall!) fruiting body, that is either white, yellow, orange red, purple, blue, green, brown, gray, or (rarely) black. Or mixes thereof. Sometimes emerging from an egg-shaped wrapper like an Alien(tm); sometimes erecting a lattice structure to speed construction up; sometimes building itself into a ledge a 200-lb human can sit on.
It's as if you could take home from the big-box DIY store a small, gray pellet, and when you soaked it in water it would transform overnight into a shed, or house, or driveway, or supporting wall, or French drain, or lit walkway (Oh, yeah: mushrooms can visibly glow!), or stairs... Only thing is, all the pellets are in one giant bin.
Yet, despite that huge diversity, there are only about 7 "kinds" of mushroom bodies worldwide, and all non-antarctic continents have all the kinds (mushroom, bag-o-spores, creepy thick hairs, mushroomy but with teeth instead of gills, I forget the rest). The antarctic continent has at least two kinds: Agaricus bisporus (pretty much all the ones you've ever eaten), and another kind generally brought in as spores...