Hi, my dear Fungi Friday folks!
It's the second week of January! Day after day, week after week, we are steadily approaching the time when we will once again roam the poiles with a camera and hunt for mushrooms.
In the meantime .. for now, I personally review my photo archive and rummage on the Internet in search of interesting information about mushrooms. It's also not entirely useless. In the end, you can’t just walk and shoot all the time😉
So, this week I was looking for interesting facts about mushrooms.
Fungi Are Genetically Closer to Humans Than Plants
Who would doubt that! We are practically cousins! 😁 I have long suspected that there is a catch here. Is it that every time we eat mushrooms, we almost commit an act of cannibalism? Horror!!! 😬 Although, of course, in everything else, I do not mind at all such nice silent relatives who never come to my house without an invitation.😉
Here are some of the things that make fungi more like animals:
-They absorb nutrients from organic matter, unlike plants that produce their food through photosynthesis.
-Fungi have a fibrous substance called chitin in their cell walls, the same as animals. Plants do not.
-Like us, fungi need food, water and oxygen to survive. They use their hyphae to absorb nutrients, water, and oxygen from their surroundings and expel waste products and CO2.
Fungi Are The Largest Life Forms on Earth
Mushrooms are like pigeons: both have no idea about the reproduction.control 😄 Although mushrooms are probably the winners in this competition, as they amaze not only with numerical superiority, but also with the number of species:
14,000 species of 🍄 vs 303 species of 🕊
The largest living organism on the planet is a single honey mushroom (Armillaria ostoyae) in the Malheur National Forest, Oregon, USA.
It’s around 3.5 miles (5.6 km ) wide, occupies an area of 96.5 hectares (2,385 acres), and is at least 2,400 years old. But could be much older.
Fungi Allow Trees to Talk to Each Other
In 1997 Prof Suzanne Simard realized that trees were talking to each other using mycorrhizal networks and came up with the term “Wood Wide Web.”
Transfer and exchange of information - what could be more relevant in the modern world? We are so proud of the achievements of mankind in this area, but it turns out that the forest has had its own Internet for centuries! I've always suspected mushrooms of something like that... I wouldn't be surprised if they're aliens from other planets with more advanced technology. And here they are sitting under the Christmas tree and quietly laughing at our achievements, which from their point of view look like the Stone Age 😉
Mushrooms Are The Fruit of a Fungus
In this formulation, it was news to me! But maybe I just never thought about it. What I should be thinking about is that the school course in botany has completely disappeared from my head. 😉Well, now I will know who is the fruit of whom😁
Mushrooms Can Stay Dormant For Years
Oh, yes, we are definitely related, because I can too! Maybe I'm a mushroom? 😁
In fact, for reproduction, mushrooms need certain weather conditions and, waiting for them, can freeze for years in this dormant state. By the way, I once said that we can observe something similar in bats. Not so literally, of course: a mother bat can become pregnant, but the development of the fetus can freeze if environmental conditions are unfavorable, but as soon as conditions change, the pregnancy continues to develop and a wonderful baby bat is born.
This is what I wanted to tell you today. But I want to keep the intrigue and say that next Friday we will continue to talk about the features of mushrooms.
I wish you a good Friday night and a wonderful weekend!