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-Mystcommunity quote: "Her pancakes were exceptional", 'Sirrus' as depicted in a fanfic-

No interesting dreams the night before last... I didn't post yesterday due to busyness of doom. Very interesting dream last night, but it wouldn't make sense unless you've read Julie E. Czerneda's Trade Pact Universe series. If you have, I was with a bunch of young children and one of them became a Chooser. Naturally, she was whisked away rather quickly.

The world we've been given is pretty neat, isn't it? Take fungi, for example. They look like little sad non-green plants on the outside. But underneath the stuff we can see is this whole huge network of branching hairs called "hyphae". These networks of hyphae (called mycelia) can grow to be so extensive that it's actually a fungus that holds the record of the largest living thing on the planet (Google "humongous fungus"). It's sort of the compensation for not being able to move (like animals) or make their own food by the sun (like plants). And their eating habits are really strange too. They are one of the few types of organisms that digest food outside their bodies, then slurp it up in a slurry.

Most fungi spend the majority of their time underground. A typical fungus will begin life as a spore that falls onto moist ground and germinates. Fungi produce thousands of spores because to grow, the spore has to land on a moist food source, so their options are limited. Given suitable ground, a hypha grows out of the spore and starts a new mycelium. This mycelium will not produce anything visible aboveground until one of the hyphae comes into contact with another fungi's hypha. Even then, there's a complicated mating process that goes on, since to mate, two fungi have to have compatible mating types. Some fungi have hundreds of different "genders", and only certain combinations are allowed to mate. The fungi release pheremones -- pheremones! -- to figure out if they're compatible, which is one of the things that makes them more like animals than plants. Another is their use of chitin in their cell walls -- the same material used in insect exoskeletons (knowledge which strangely makes mushrooms taste better when I eat them rather than just disgusting).

Once the two hyphae join, they grow as one organism, but their genetic material is still separate. It only joins for a brief moment in the fruiting body (such as a mushroom), then recombines and splits into spores, which can then be dispersed in the ground again.

Reality check. Yes, I totally did just give a random lecture about mushroom biology.