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!
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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Our alien-looking pasta fungus is 🍄geomyces pannorum🍄 -- and this lil guy is truly WILD. It's an extremophile, meaning it can survive (and thrive) in conditions that are so extreme we consider them *generally* hostile to life. But not this guy.
G. pannorum is a cryophile/psychrophile, meaning it can survive in *very very cold conditions* like the arctic permafrost, or under a glacier, or antarctic soil 🥶
But it's pretty flexible and lives in soil all over! India or Antarctica, he's probably vibing in the dirt.
They even found it on the rock art (cave paintings) at Lascaux!
It will chow down on mining debris, frozen leaf litter, meat, cod, gelatin, flour, gym floors, books - what won't it eat?
Death caps are the MOST LETHAL mushrooms but scientists might have discovered an antidote and it’s… green dye? Like, the exact same colour as my hair?!?!
Buckle up for a deep dive into the most dangerous mushroom toxin ☠️, CRISPR cell mutations 🧬, antidote research 🧪
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The Death Cap mushroom is the kind of snack you only cronch once. Half a cap is enough to kill -- the main toxin has an LD50 (median lethal dose) of 0.3 mg which is similar to PLUTONIUM ☢️
And according to survivors, they’re pretty tasty. A truly forbidden snack.
Keep in mind, death by mushroom is INCREDIBLY RARE-- in the USA, only 3 ppl a year die by mushroom: you're 20x more likely to be killed by a lawnmower, and 100x more likely to be killed by a ladder. Fear them instead!
There are fungi at Chernobyl that EAT radiation and nuclear fallout – and that’s only the start of this wild story 🍄☢️
Buckle up for a wild thread about radioactive boars, fungal space suits, radiation-detecting fungi, black frogs and a good dose of hope! 🧵
On 26 April 1986, a reactor at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant exploded. It destroyed the containment building and caused a reactor core fire that lasted 8 days, spraying airborne radioactive contaminants throughout the USSR and Europe 😨
People started dying of acute radiation syndrome (ARS) (and the WHO predicts that 9000+ people will die of cancer triggered by this event). They created the Exclusion Zone – a restricted area of 2,600 km2 (1,000 sq mi) around the site where radioactive contamination is highest.
I've been thinking about D&D and the expectations we put on DMs 🧵
The DM "should" keep track of (and/or write) the world & all the NPCs, run combat, create a compelling story AND ALSO *out of game* the DM typically takes on organizational tasks and hosting. It's so much 😭
Some systems are designed to be more collaborative. In Kids on Bikes, the players create the world as much as the GM. In GMless systems, everyone shares the cognitive work equally. But it goes beyond the design, I think, into the culture of D&D.
Often D&D players feel disempowered to add to the world. They seem taken aback when I encourage them to add to the lore, or add to their backstory mid-game. There's an expectation that I've written a game that they are going to play through & they don't want to mess with it.
Fungi invented dirt, feed plants, and save the soil 🍄💚
Get your tea because it’s time to chat about how fungi are plants best friends, can revolutionize agriculture, and how the power of SOUND could help!
You really can't overstate how important fungi are to soil.
Back when the world was young, the land was just rock. Plants and fungi emerged from the water into a pretty barren, hostile landscape. The plants couldn’t break up the rocks, but the fungi could.
I wrote a whole thread about this, but short version: fungal "roots" are made up of threads called hyphae. These threads are SO SMALL, like 1/20th the width of a human hair, and they can DRILL THROUGH ROCK.
Equal parts cosmic horror and nature being metal, let's talk about the lichen that grew on the OUTSIDE of the International Space Station!
Get your tea and curl up, because I PROMISE you wanna hear about these fungal cosmonauts 🧑🚀
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Starting at the beginning:
In 1988, we first learned that fungi could survive in outer space in a VERY DRAMATIC WAY. Astronauts on the Russian space station Mir saw a strange film spreading across the OUTSIDE of a window.
This feels like something from the Magnus Archives 😨
The substance KEPT GROWING, destroying the window's titanium-quartz surface and GETTING INTO THE SPACE STATION!
Listen, I know you're thinking 👽aliens👽, but it was the opposite: these were just piggyback astronauts who'd hitched a ride from Earth.