Zine project about mushroom spores.
Mushrooms are not what they seem. But after you have eaten mushrooms, it seems that anything can happen. Do you know that a mushroom is almost a sentient animal?
It's not easy with mushrooms. Did you know that they are quite officially a cross between plants and animals? Zoologists and botanists, acting in the style of “So don’t get you to anyone!”, Even came up with a special science for them - mycology.
What's more, recent research leads us to assume that fungi are intelligent in some way. Yes, it is a very special mind.
Who are these mushrooms?
Mushroom spores live inside you, they are in your food, your brain, your blood, and your intestines. Mushrooms in company with bacteria will eat you after death. According to several biologists, it was fungi, as well as mushroom-like organisms and algae, that created modern organic life on this planet.
Mycelium permeates the earth, creating gigantic, planetary-scale, networks, they unite the entire fertile layer with trillions of kilometers of their threads. Mushrooms are responsible for a lot of processes occurring in nature, but they are not too conspicuous. Their service, as they say, at first glance, as if not visible.
Who are they anyway?
They are not plants because they cannot synthesize food from light. Well, they don’t have chlorophyll! Therefore, fungi, like animals, have to eat substances that plants have developed. Or substances produced by animals that previously ate what plants produced. The biochemistry of the fungus is also much closer to the biochemistry of animals than plants. But the most curious news is that mycelium can show what can be conditionally considered reasonableness.
Research experience.
It has been clearly established that the mycelium is able to plan, collect and use information, use its location in space and, interestingly, transmit this information to its descendants - parts of the mycelium that have separated from the very specific network. This was proved by Toshiyuki Nakagaki, a professor at the University of Hokkaido, who published the results of his experiment in the journal Nature in 2008. The professor "trained" the mycelium of a yellow mold fungus to look for sugar in the maze, which these mushrooms love very much. Since, unlike mice, mushrooms usually do not cause discomfort for movement with fast legs, to get to the sugar, the cellulite string often had to grow. He sniffed it instantly and tipped it in the direction of the sugar. In a few hours, the mycelium easily coped with the labyrinth, and by the evening the sweetness was already bursting with might and main.
