Thanks to the NYT, and Ms. Klein, for the excellent science reporting, and to Markus Kunzler for the wonderful graphic.
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From a crossover perspective of the morel mushroom my first thought when I read “defending its reproductive caps above the soil, even preemptively, would help its legacy continue” might well mean once again when you pick your morels pick three stomp one.
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What strikes me as telling about the apparent awe of fungal communication is that it reveals what biology students are usually NOT told with enough emphasis: ALL organisms are hierarchies of information-processing networks, from the sub-cellular to the inter-cellular, and of course, ecologically, to the inter-organismal. Biology is at least as much an information science as it is chemistry and physics, which help explain the mechanisms of such communication. We hence are a species very much dumbed-down about the rest of the highly intelligent life on this planet. And that situation probably explains why Homo can't seem to conduct its life without negatively interfering with the lives of other species.
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One of the great remaining mysteries of nature is how Homo sapiens - confronted with case after case of the "incredible sophistication" of other species, in spite of the fact they don't walk on two legs or sing the ABC song- will be just as astonished at the next "simple" organism - which behaves as if it were actually competent to survive outdoors in the wild.
Amazing how simple some organisms can be.
No insult intended to the folks working on fungal signaling; good stuff there. In my remote youth I contemplated working on the orchids that mimic fruiting bodies of their mycorrhizal companions; signaling the fungus to start cytoplasmic streaming into the interior of the orchid's root cells. The signaling has to be fabulous- and yeah, we know diddly about it.
If I recall; a number of those fungi were nearly, or entirely, syncytial. And possibly regulary changed from cellular to syncytial and back when some need - like cytoplasmic streaming - arose.
Totally fascinating stuff. But jeepers, folks - it's not surprising!
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@Greenpa We are not all surprised, but you could have been more instructive with less jargon. It is as you say fascinating stuff.
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Pretty soon vegans/vegetarians are going to have to admit that the plant kingdom is also sentient.
If only they had googly eyes and fur.
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@Matthew Hello! Vegan here. (Also mushroom fanatic.) First of all just because a behavior is similar doesn't mean the underlying mechanism is, especially with wildly different life forms. Secondly if it turns out that mushrooms and plants feel the way animals do, that increases the need to go vegan exponentially, because it takes tens or hundreds of pounds of plants to create one pound of animal-derived food.
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Pretty soon carnivorous humans are going to have to admit that forcing animals to endure the torture of factory farming, before slaughtering them for consumption, causes immense suffering at all stages of their life cycle.
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@Matthew
Broccoli wants to live, too.
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