According to the New York Post, the British journal Royal Society Open Science has published a surprising and groundbreaking new study that claims that mushrooms can “talk” to each other. And that the fungi even have “a bountiful vocabulary.”
The study was conducted by Andrew Adamatzky, a computer science professor at the University of the West of England. The professor asserted that his team of researchers “found that the ‘fungal language’ exceeds the European languages in morphological complexity.” So, the “language” of these fungal species is more advanced than French, more complex than English, superior to Italian or German?
Professor Adamatzky reportedly based his study on an analysis of the “electrical impulses of four species of mushrooms: the enoki, split gill, ghost and caterpillar fungus.” He accomplished this by “inserting tiny electrodes into the dirt colonized by the mushroom’s hyphae — the threads that compose the organism’s roots, known as mycelium.” He and his team “found that the electrical spikes often occurred in clusters, mirroring human vocabularies and employing up to 50 words.” He noted, “We demonstrate that distributions of fungal word lengths match that of human languages.” The study found that “split gills — a species that resides in rotting wood — generated the most complex ‘sentences’ of the four fungi.”
Scientists hypothesize that fungi “chat” to make their presence known to other members of their cluster, much like wolves howling to alert the pack. They theorize that mushrooms could also be trying to warn their fellow fungi about potential threats, such as the weather.
Really? What are they going to do about it? “Oh, shit, guys…we’re about to get hailed on! Run for your—son of a bitch!”
Or, it could be that all this is bunk and fungal growth is not particularly chatty or articulate. That there is no split gill in any rotting wood anywhere that is quite as eloquent as, say, Winston Churchill.
Adamatzky himself admitted: “There is also another option — they are saying nothing.” He added, “Propagating mycelium tips are electrically charged and, therefore, when the charged tips pass in a pair of differential electrodes, a spike in the potential difference is recorded.” So, there’s that.
Mushroom, definition of: a fungal growth that typically takes the form of a domed cap on a stalk, with gills on the underside of the cap. (See also Adam Schiff, Brian Stelter)