Mushrooms are the most mysterious creatures on earth. And not only because there are a huge number of them, but also because of their amazing properties, which are sometimes difficult for a person to explain. What are they: are they plants or animals? Are they sentient beings or not? Why does their life activity sometimes not obey any human and biological logic? And aren't the mushrooms a separate civilization existing next to us, about which we have a very vague idea?
Mycologists, scientists who study mushrooms, have long noticed that mushrooms are a completely unique area of the organic world, they can not be attributed either to animals or plants. They live according to their own, they only know the inner laws and have intelligence.
Mushrooms have intelligence
One of the proofs of this is the research of the Japanese biologist and physicist Toshiyuki Nakagaki, who, while testing the intelligence of mice, at the same time decided to check whether the yellow mold he found on the walls of the cell has intelligence. He placed a piece of sugar on the other end of the labyrinth cage and decided to wait for the mushroom to find it. In a few hours, the mycelium network filled all the branches of the maze and finally got to sugar. Having built exactly the same maze, Toshiyuki separated a small piece of mycelium (mushroom spider web) and placed it at the entrance, and placed the bait in the same place. What happened literally stunned the scientist and his assistants. The mushroom no longer trudged along the entire area of the labyrinth, it was as if it already knew (had a memory) where the food was located. Only two processes were formed from the spider web,one went through the maze in the most optimal way already studied (that is, without unnecessary turns), and the other (attention!) stretched along the ceiling, that is, where there were no turns at all. That is, he chose his own path!
The mushroom itself found the most optimal route. The mushroom has intelligence! The Japanese scientist immediately thought that his intelligence would be good to use for laying engineering networks. Live navigator! By the way, Toshiyuki tested his hypothesis on a map of Tokyo, placed pieces of food in large cities and waited a day for the mushrooms to build their cobweb. He was struck by the fact that the movement of the mycelium practically repeated the road network of the metropolis. The scientist was glad for the Japanese road builders and thought that such a universal navigator would make their work much easier, since the mushroom spider web paved the most economical way.
After his research, Toshiyuki concluded that the actions of mushrooms often appear as “the result of a conscious decision. And mushrooms should be given the opportunity to solve riddles."
Although they themselves are already asking us insoluble riddles, as if they are communicating with us in an unknown language. For example, we still do not know what makes mushrooms growing in the forest suddenly appear from the ground in one place or another. A deeply lying branched network of mycelium, which, in fact, is the main body of the fungus, suddenly releases its spore tips to the surface in order to spread the seeds. And we cut off these ends with a knife and put them in the basket. Experienced mushroom pickers know that mushroom places can change, and the change of place does not follow logic. And, indeed, you have to look for mushrooms.
Promotional video:
A mushroom is an analogue of the Internet
The underground network that the mushroom builds is very similar to a computer, where every piece of the spider's web stores all the information that is available to the entire body. It is almost impossible to study all the mechanisms of the existence of a branched mycelium underground. She is very thin. And at the same time it obeys a strict internal order, known only to the organism itself. “And there is no 'central server',” writes mycologist Paul Stemets. - Each cobweb is independent, and the information it collects can be transmitted to the network in all directions. Thus, the basic model of the Internet has existed at all times, only it was hiding in the ground."
Does the mushroom transmit information to us?
Why in one year there are a lot of mushrooms, and in another there are almost none, although the weather is favorable? People have noticed that a year with an incredible abundance of mushrooms is a bad omen. At the very beginning of the summer of 1941, there was an incredible harvest of boletus and chanterelles, everyone was happy with such a gift from nature and carried mushrooms from the forest in buckets. And on June 22, the war began. The same unprecedented mushroom invasion was observed before the Ukrainian events, people were almost carrying mushrooms out of the forest by trucks. Maybe the mushrooms wanted to warn them about something? Of course, biologists are trying to explain such coincidences simply by favorable weather conditions for the growth of fungi. But I don't want to exclude the first option either. After all, mushrooms are truly mysterious creatures.
The mushrooms do play their games. It is almost impossible to deal with them if they have chosen some place, be it your basement or your foot or vagina. You can poison them with various antifungal agents as much as you like, and they can even trick you and leave you alone for a while. And then reappear out of the blue. As if hinting and informing you about something that you have no idea about.
Why are some mushrooms healthy and tasty, used by us as a delicacy and protein-rich food, while others are extremely poisonous? Having studied more than one hundred and sixty species of mushrooms, scientists were able to reproduce and decipher only 20 chemical compounds in them. By the way, many mushrooms are used for the production of medicines. There are mushrooms that introduce a person into a state of altered consciousness. And if mushrooms are not plants or animals, then by using them don't we become partially some kind of mysterious creatures?
Mushrooms - the digestive system of the planet
Some scientists believe that mushrooms are something like the digestive juices of the earth, if you consider the soil to be its stomach. And if there were no fungi that digest nutrients not inside their body, but outside it (that is, releasing enzymes outward, decomposing adjacent organic matter and absorbing the resulting nutrients), then the earth would have ceased to exist long ago.
Mushrooms are capable of recycling harmful substances, even plastic. Two Yale students once studied the properties of a mushroom and put one (Pestalotiopsis microspora) in a plastic container. So the fungus soon ate this container and did not choke. This can be considered a real breakthrough in the study of the properties of mushrooms, because, as you know, plastic is one of the heaviest pollutants on the planet, which neither technology nor modern scientists can cope with.
In Chernobyl, a mushroom was found on the wall of a destroyed power block, which has been feeding on radioactive products for many years. At the same time, it cleans the air around it and feels quite comfortable in conditions when all organisms die.
Some mushrooms are able to recycle heaps of petrochemical waste, turning them into an edible product. Microorganisms are killed and we use them as raw materials for antibiotics.
It turns out that the mushroom, which some consider a primitive organism, does something that is beyond the power of modern science? How can this be?
The secret life of mushrooms
What we see in the forest above the surface of the earth is just a small part of the majestic mycelium. In the state of Michigan, a mycelium with an area of 9 square kilometers was discovered, scientists believe that it is more than two thousand years old. Why she throws her fingers out in this place, no one knows. Scattering seeds around, the mushroom can lie in the ground for years and not be born. That is why forest mushrooms are so difficult to domesticate by sowing in your garden. For their appearance, many other factors are needed, which we may not even guess about, taking for them deciduous and moss forest cover or soil properties.
Why do mushrooms like to grow in cemeteries and in battlegrounds? Why can they grow through asphalt and glow in the dark? Why they do not need light for life, but oxygen. Mycologists believe that by throwing out the fingers, that is, those mushrooms that we observe, the network saves itself from hunger, that is, it sends its scouts in search of new territories. Why do mushrooms grow after rain? Because the rain washes away organic substances from the earth that they feed on.
Moreover, the "scouts" can not only sprout from the ground to get into our basket. Some mushrooms spread their spores through animals that are attracted by their smells. Everyone knows that pigs can search for white truffles, and this is because the pheromones they release attract females.
Some fungi spores enter the brain or body of an insect and "force" it to do something that is not typical for it. For example, ants infected with spores of one of the species of African mushrooms climb high up the tree trunk, bite into its bark and remain there forever, unable to open their jaws. And mushrooms calmly sprout through the body of an ant and live happily at the height that they needed.
The question arises: "If mushrooms can control insects, making them dance to their tune, do they not control a person?" Maybe it's not us who eat mushrooms, but they feed on us and do with our consciousness what they want?
Professor David Hughes studied mushrooms that can control spiders, lice and flies. And Carlos Castaneda, in his famous books, described don Juan, whose brain was controlled by hallucinogenic mushrooms. And it is not a fact that the old man Juan, an Indian from the Yaqui tribe and the Mexican magician Juan Matus, preached his own teaching, and not the ideology of the mushrooms that he used.
Some dreamers, I think mushrooms are the remnants of an extraterrestrial civilization that uses our planet and us, including for its nourishing life. As long as they like us, feed them, they are with us. And when our self-destruction reaches a critical point, who knows, maybe they will leave us and go looking for new territories, scattering their omnipresent spores into outer space.
When used correctly, mushrooms can become our assistants in cleansing the planet of dirt, microbes, and harmful substances. They have learned to cope with this and, perhaps, exist on the planet precisely for this. Save her from the nasty things that people do on her.