Scientists studying fungi which discharged their spores using hydrostatic pressure came up with some interesting results. Using ultra high-speed cameras, recording at a blistering 250,000 frames-per-second, the researchers recorded 4 different species of fungi, measuring for distance, velocity, and acceleration. While they found the spores’s launch speeds of 25 meters-per-second impressive, it was their airborne acceleration that surprised them as the spores traveled a distance of up to one million times their length in a single second, making for the fastest airborne acceleration yet found in nature.
This ability is crucial for the fungi’s survival. These particular species, like Pilobolus seen in the footage above, all make their home in dung. The fungi rely on herbivores consuming them to propagate their species, yet cannot rely on them getting too close, requiring more extreme methods to put them within grazing reach.
Let me lay this on you, Jim: Sometimes you surf the tubes, looking for strange diversions with which to entertain your readers. Sometimes you find something a little too strange. Maybe it’s a nude man. Maybe this nude man is wearing a number of different, inventive thongs. The aforementioned, mostly nude, thong wearing man may, perhaps, also be wearing a horse mask and maybe, just maybe, he’s dancing while he gathers, sautés, and consumes wild mushrooms. Make no mistake friend, when that time comes, you better be prepared.
“The young fruit-body is spongy and characteristically exudes droplets of red fluid. Later the fruit-body becomes tougher and teeth develop on the underside. This common and widespread species fruits under conifers.”
In sheer defiance of the World Wide Web Consortium's will, Ectomo was designed using a non-web-standard font. Luckily, it is included in the excellent font pack released by the H.P. Lovecraft Historical Society, which can be freely downloaded in Mac and PC formats here. Ectomo should still look fine without it, though.
