Did you know mushrooms can stab through rock?🔪🪨
Fungi's "roots", called hyphae, can bore right through stone and played a significant role in creating soil.
Yup, thats right, mushrooms are older than dirt. They MADE dirt.
IM ABOUT TO TELL YOU ABOUT THESE RAD STABBY BOYS 🧵
Important context: hyphae are the branching filaments that make up fungi. The mycelium (which is like the "root system") is made of these tiny tendrils, and the mushroom is too, all stacked up! They are long tubular structures, like a hose, but TEENY (4 to 6 microns thick).
1/2 billion years ago, the terrestrial world was mostly just rocks, but then fungi (and other micro-organisms) starting boring into the stone and breaking it up into minerals and eventually soil so that plants could move onto land. BUT THAT'S JUST THE BEGINNING!
Plants are now on land and mushrooms are their best friends. 90% of plants have symbiotic relationships with fungi, they've got matching tattoos and blood oaths, it's a whole thing. Fungi help the plants talk to each other and share nutrients, the ultimate wing man.
BUT WHY STOP THERE? In '97, some scientists noticed that some forests suffering from acid rain in Europe were still thriving, even though the soil was too acidic and the nutrients shouldn't have been accessible to them.
When they looked at the soil under a microscope, they saw that it had grains of sand full of tiny, tubular holes, even in quartz (which is a hard mineral). Turns out the fungi were DRILLING THROUGH STONE to get the "locked up" nutrients for their tree buddies.
Citation for nerds:
van Breemen, N., Finlay, R., Lundström, U. et al. Mycorrhizal weathering: A true case of mineral plant nutrition?. Biogeochemistry 49, 53–67 (2000). doi.org/10.1023/A:1006…
They mine pretty quick, 0.3-30 micrometers per year. Meaning 150 meters of pores are formed each year per liter of “E horizon” soil – a type of forest dirt leached of many minerals. 150 m PER LITER (1483 ft per gallon) !!! That's the tallest godzilla in a bottle of mountain dew!
More citations:
blogs.scientificamerican.com/artful-amoeba/…
&
Jongmans, A., van Breemen, N., Lundström, U. et al. Rock-eating fungi. Nature 389, 682–683 (1997). doi.org/10.1038/39493
Mushrooms can also use their hyphae to hunt! Oyster mushrooms are usually happy to eat dead wood, but when they're low on nutrients, they go on the offensive.
They produce POISON on the tip of their hyphae and use it to spear nematodes, paralyse them, then digest them 😳
Mushrooms are such an important part of ecology, but they are also foundational to the creation of the world as we know it. They are older than dirt. They also taught trees how to grow, but that's another story for another thread 😉 Happy forays!
Also warning, since I'm on the struggle bus rn 🚎 y'all might get more #mycology info-dumping than usual😅 lmk if there's something you'd like me to go through next!
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