A photo from open sources
Do you think mushrooms are plants or animals? Hardly anyone will be able to answer this question straight away. Even scientists over several hundred years puzzled over this issue. Only at the end XX century biologists and botanists put an end to the dispute, highlighting mushrooms in separate kingdom along with animals and plants. This strange the world is still tormenting scientists with its riddles. Many researchers mushrooms consider this species of the living world reasonable, otherwise explain the results of their experiments they are simply not in condition.
Familiar strangers
Among all types of animal organisms, mushrooms are the oldest, more than 185 million years. They survived both abnormal heat and glaciation, and Perm extinction and radiation impacts. They first appeared on planet and the last to disappear. Scientists have long dreamed of learning a secret this survival, but to study the world of mushrooms is very difficult, and almost impossible.
What we habitually call a mushroom is just intended for the release of spores the process of a huge organism. The main part is mycelium (scientific mycelium) is hidden in the ground. Hundreds of thousands of threads intertwined, connecting into a huge web, extending over great distances – up to 35 km! And still no one He came up with how to extract it from the earth without damaging it, for study.
But even the little that can be found does not stop surprise.
Toshiyuki Nakagaki experiment No. 1
A photo from open sources
Japanese biologist put moldy at the entrance to a small maze mushroom, and at the exit – a piece of sugar. Looking for food, the mushroom released threads. “Feeling” with them every nook of the maze, mushroom in the evening got to the sweet. Then the sprout of the fungus was laid at the entrance to such the same maze. The mushroom did not begin to study the whole maze, but released one thread and the shortest way went straight to the point where he was waiting “dessert”.
A photo from open sources
The second thread released rose to the ceiling and went to exit strictly in a straight line!
Subsequently, it turned out that mushrooms not only possess memory, but able to collect and analyze information, shutting up while belt of mathematicians from their PC.
Toshiyuki Nakagaki experiment No. 2
In the next experiment, the scientist took a map of Japan instead of a maze. Pieces of food lay at the locations of the largest cities country, the mushroom itself was at the point corresponding to Tokyo. “Having studied” space, in the evening the mushroom created a network on the map, exactly repeating pattern of the railways of Japan. What over months dozens of mathematicians worked – to calculate the most rational the system of transport routes of the country, the mushroom built in less than day.
Mushroom picker – the same Internet
A photo from open sources
Where is the “brain” of this miracle of nature – mushrooms? Answer: nowhere. None of the strings have intelligence, but here they are the totality is already making decisions that cannot be called otherwise as “reasonable.” Scientists call this effect “collective intelligence”, “herd intelligence”. Larger number of individual elements enters the system, the higher the level of “reason” she possesses.
If we take into account the already proven fact that individual parts of the mycelium are able to exchange information with each other, then mycelium can be compared with the Internet, where each individual PC connected by information threads with millions of their kind. Only if the world wide web is under human control, then what a single mycelium is plotting – only to God it is known.
Mushrooms Plants Japan
