TALES FROM THE MYCELIUM

Mushrooms can turn ants into zombies and talk to each other: 10 facts

Image: Andrew Ridley

Mushrooms might just be the most mysterious living organisms on our planet. In fact, they have always been so bewildering to scientists that they are classified in a different realm to animals and plants, the Fungi Kingdom, as quirky as it sounds. These incredible organisms hold a myriad of secrets and surprises, from medicinal applications to symbiotic relationships with other species.

Get ready to expand your fungi knowledge with these 10 curious facts!

Image: Olli Kilpi

Forget elephants and blue whales, the title of largest organism on Earth belongs to a fungus. A 2500-year-old specimen of Armillaria ostoyae, also known as the honey fungus, was discovered in Oregon's Malheur National Forest. Spanning over 2,240 acres and weighing around 35,000 tons, the "humongous fungus" - as it is endearingly called by Oregonians, proves that there is still a lot we don’t know about fungi.

Image: Mathew Schwartz

Amazingly, scientists have recently found out that fungi are capable of communicating with each other through their underground root-like structures called mycelium. This network of fungal threads allows fungi to absorb nutrients, transport water, and exchange information through electrical spikes. Some researchers even believe that this communication is done in word-like components.

Image: Erich G. Vallery, USDA Forest Service

Cordyceps fungi have a chilling method of reproduction. In order to disperse its spores, first it infects ants and other insects, controlling their nervous systems and compelling them to climb to a higher vantage point. Eventually, the fungus bursts from the insect’s body, releasing its spores to reproduce and infect even more unsuspecting victims. Terrifying, eh?

Image: Igor Omilaev

Some fungi possess the extraordinary ability to produce their own light. While their bioluminescence is usually faint, these mushrooms’ otherworldly glow makes them visible in very dark places, like under the thick canopy of a forest. These luminescent species, such as the jack-o'-lantern mushroom, often use this trait to attract insects to ensure spore dispersal.

Image: Irina Iacob

Fungi have been used in traditional medicine for centuries. Species like reishi, lion's mane, and chaga boast a myriad of health benefits, from boosting the immune system to improving cognitive function. Modern research continues to unveil the therapeutic potential of these fungi.

Image: Nyusha Svoboda

Did you know that certain fungi produce compounds that act as natural sunscreens? A set of compounds called Mycosporine-like amino acids (MAAs) shield organisms from harmful UV radiation and are found on a wide variety of fungal species as well as in lichens, algae, and even some marine animals. Currently, scientists are exploring these compounds for potential human applications, as they could represent a sustainable alternative to conventional sunscreen.

Image: Michael Schiffer

Despite lacking a centralized nervous system, fungi display a peculiar form of intelligence. They can adapt to changing environmental conditions, navigate complex networks to find resources, and even solve puzzles in laboratory experiments. Amazingly, fungi may even be capable of learning and remembering spatial information.

Image: NASA

Fungi can survive in the harshest environments, so it should come as no surprise that it can certainly thrive beyond Earth’s atmosphere. In 1988, the Russian space station Mir was almost completely colonized by an "aggressive space fungus," endangering both the crew and the station’s integrity. Apparently, fungi flourish in the absence of gravity - as their mechanism for spore dispersal is greatly enhanced without any force to bring them down.

Image: PerytonMango, CC BY-SA 4.0

Fungi form intricate partnerships with other organisms, from plants to insects. In particular, mycorrhizal fungi form symbiotic relationships with plant roots, aiding in the nutrient uptake process in exchange for sugars. Meanwhile, lichens represent a partnership between fungi and algae or cyanobacteria, which allows them to photosynthesize and thrive in diverse environments from barren deserts to polar regions.

Image: Maarten van den Heuvel

With the quest for sustainable energy sources intensifying, these complex organisms offer a promising solution. Certain fungi, like Trichoderma reesei, produce enzymes capable of breaking down plant cellulose into sugars, which can then be fermented into biofuels such as ethanol. Who knows, fungi might just be the answer to many of our modern problems!

The wonders of human language

You might be surprised by these linguistic facts

If languages and grammar are not your thing, linguistics might seem complex and boring, but nothing could be further from the truth. While some areas of linguistics require prior knowledge, many linguistic concepts and ideas relate to everyday life and can be understood by anyone. Here are some simple linguistic facts that might surprise you!

People like to list languages such as Mandarin, Japanese, or Hungarian as "the most difficult languages in the world", but this is not true. Think about the ease with which babies pick up a language, becoming fluent at a similar rate, no matter the place. The difficulty of a language lies not in its structure, but in its similarities or differences with your own language. Mandarin might be extremely difficult for an English speaker, but quite manageable for someone who speaks Cantonese. So, there isn’t a "most difficult language", but a "most difficult language for you".

This might come as a shock, but you already know everything about your native language. Native speakers learn by imitation, not through methodical study, so they don’t rationalise their language; they simply speak. They might later approach the language from an academic perspective and put a name to different structures and concepts, but they will not learn anything that is actually new.

This might seem obvious, but most people don’t think about it. While differences in grammar and structures are evident, it is common for language learners to approach vocabulary as a set of labels: If I’m learning Spanish, I take an apple and label it "manzana". But languages are not labels, but a way of seeing the world, such as cultures near the North Pole having dozens of words for snow or languages in hierarchical societies changing according to the people speaking. While at a basic level we can often find one-to-one translations, the more we learn about a new language, the more we adopt a new worldview.

Does your family have certain words or phrases that mean something unique to you? It might be a funny mispronunciation that stuck, or a phrase that you use in a specific circumstance, sometimes passed down for a few generations. This is called a "familect", and it happens in most families, but also in tight-knit friend groups. The repetition and preservation of this private code reinforces familial bonds and identity, functions as an emotional anchor, and provides a sense of belonging.

Each language carries a worldview, so it is not surprising that our personality changes slightly when we change languages. We don’t become someone different, but we adapt to the cultural norms and values attached to that language. People who speak more than one language also tend to link specific interests, knowledge, and memories to each language, and specialists have noted that not only do our tone and volume change with each new language, but that we are most likely to swear or discuss sensitive or taboo subjects in a second or third language, as they provide an emotional distance impossible to avoid in our native tongue.

English is a fairly flexible language, meaning that many of its components can be placed in a different order without the sentence becoming unnatural or impossible to understand. But this flexibility does not apply to adjectives, at least when we have to use many of them in a row. English speakers naturally place adjectives in a specific sequence: opinion, size, age, shape, color, origin, material, and purpose. While this is done subconsciously, changing this order results in unnatural-sounding phrases, such as "a red new nice car".

Have you ever wondered why people refer to sign language as ASL or "American Sign Language"? Not only are there multiple sign languages, classified in families in the same way spoken languages are, but each one is a language of its own, with unique grammar, rules, and vocabulary. This way, American Sign Language (belonging to the French Sign Language family alongside its Russian, Brazilian, or Italian counterparts) is not a signed version of American English, but a distinct, unique language with more than half a million native speakers.

Languages change and shift with use and time, which causes some words to gain positive meanings, but also others to become negative. This downgrading of a word’s meaning is called "pejoration" and is connected to many factors, one of them being whether the term is considered masculine or feminine. English is not a gendered language, but it has gender-specific pairs, such as "master/mistress", "fox/vixen", "bachelor/spinster", or "governor/governess". While initially mistress, vixen, spinster, and governess were merely counterparts to the male-specific term, over time they developed a negative connotation, while the masculine term remained positive or neutral.

Babies typically start using meaningful words around the 12-month mark, so it is natural to think that, before that, babies "don’t speak". While they don’t use meaningful spoken language, they communicate from birth with cries, sounds, and gestures, and these communications have an accent. How is this possible? Third-trimester babies in utero have fully functional hearing and recognize sound patterns, pitch, and intonation. Once they are born, their cries, and later their babbles, mimic the intonation, pitch, and rhythmic patterns of the language of their environment.

What sound does a sheep make? Well, a sheep from where? English-speaking sheep go "baa", but Korean-speaking sheep go "me-e". While sheep don’t care about linguistic differences, humans adapt animal sounds to the available sounds and phonetic rules of their language. This happens not only with animals, but with all kinds of sounds, such as machines, strikes and collisions, physical and natural phenomena, human sounds, and more.