#mushroom

#mushroom

Watch Bioluminescent Mushrooms Grow, Glow, and FadeThis video comes across suspiciously like an art film, but it's a nature documentary. Or both, as this time-lapse adds funky music to accompany the quick life cycles of bioluminescent mushrooms. There are dozens of mushroom species that glow in the dark, somewhat like fireflies. They harness a chemical called oxyluciferin to make themselves glow. Mushrooms developed this talent because it attracts insects, which are crucial to spreading their spores around the forest. -via Boing Boing#bioluminescence #mushroom #timelapse

Do Mushrooms Communicate with Each Other with Electrical Impulses as "Words"?The short answer is: sort of. The rest of the scientific community still wants more studies to be conducted, though.Experts have noticed that fungi tend to send electric signals to one another. A mathematical analysis of these signals shows a pattern that is somehow similar to human speech. Scientists hypothesized that there is a possibility that fungi use this electrical “language” to share information about food or injury with distant parts of themselves, or with hyphae-connected partners such as trees.Sure, it's like a messaging system. With the similarities noticed in the electrical signals sent by fungi and human speech, an interesting question was raised: do they actually use human words [or the equivalent of it]?University of the West of England’s Andrew Adamatzky aimed to answer this question by analyzing the signals sent by a species of fungi – enoki, split gill, ghost, and caterpillar fungi. “We do not know if there is a direct relationship between spiking patterns in fungi and human speech. Possibly not,” Adamatzky said. “On the other hand, there are many similarities in information processing in living substrates of different classes, families and species. I was just curious to compare.”Image credit: Hans Veth#fungi #mushroom #communication #science #research #electricsignals 

The Avatar Tree Glows at Night with Bioluminescent MushroomAmateur mushroom enthusiast Taylor Lockwood (who was recently profiled in this fascinating NPR article) took a time-lapse video of this otherworldly glowing rainforest tree:"Somewhere in the mountains of Costa Rica, there's a tree that the locals call the Avatar Tree, which by day might look much like any other rainforest tree, but by night shows that it's covered by glowing green bioluminescent mycelium ..."#mushroom #TaylorLockwood #Avatar #GlowInTheDark #mycelium #tree #timelapseView the full video clip: