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Subterranean fungi networks more than 100 quadrillion km in length
- WalterGR 5mo ago> First ever global mapping of arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi shows scale of hyphal systems that sustain plant life Related and recent: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48209905 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48209905 - "Mycorrhizal Fungi, Nature's Key to Plant Survival and Success" (pacifichorticulture.org) 153 points | 26 days ago | 50 comments
- mkl 5mo ago100×10^12 km is about 10.6 light years. There are about 16 other stars closer to the sun than that. It's a bit like a human body containing blood vessels with total length greater than twice the Earth's circumference.
- p1esk 5mo ago100×10^15 km
- mkl 5mo agoDoh, you're right, it's way bigger. I was in too much of a rush.
- perarneng 5mo agoImagine if a 3year old has only one single blood vessel: The single blood vessel grows by approximately 88 kilometers per day since conception. Here is the quick calculation using that timeline: •Total Days: ~1,365 days (270 days in the womb + 1,095 days of life up to age 3). •Total Length: ~120,000 kilometers. That breaks down to an astonishing 3.7 kilometers of growth every single hour. Typical adult walking speed: ~5 km/h . Next time you are walking then imagine the tiny thin blood vessel growing behind you almost at the same speed you are walking. If you slow down and stop it will catch up to you.
- sambapa 5mo agoThanks for a horror script idea, I will send it to A24.
- N_Lens 5mo agoReality appears to be fractal.
- bookofjoe 5mo agoBest comment of the year
- themafia 5mo agoSo it could be sentient but it's pace of thinking might be absolutely glacial.
- pvaldes 5mo agoEverything that is alive is sentient. No organism can survive without collecting data from their environment and responding to this info.
- uberex 5mo agoHow many light years is the English coastline?
- agos 5mo agoat least 3
- mc32 5mo agoI wonder if these measurements were done in similar fashion to how they measured kudzu coverage in the US. For the longest time it was assumed that one of the initial projections was correct; however, under closer examination that estimate was off by a factor of 30. Kudzu wasn’t enveloping the South. It did like the byways though.
- waterTanuki 5mo agoThe map looks off. No way the American Southwest has 3 meters per cm cubed of fungal density in such an arid region. Plenty of desert.
- kakacik 5mo agoWell South Sudan as highlighted has 8, and thats basically a desert. Tibetan plateau is high altitude frozen desert with permafrost in many parts, and its 11.4. Maybe there is more complexity than meets the first glance.
- NDlurker 5mo agoSouth Sudan isn't a desert. Tibet isn't all permafrost and glaciers.
- reverius42 5mo agoFungi survive in deserts: https://insideclimatenews.org/news/22062025/sonoran-desert-saguaro-cactus-fungi/ https://insideclimatenews.org/news/22062025/sonoran-desert-s...
- Schlagbohrer 5mo agoThe underground in desert regions can be much more humid and hospitable than the surface.
- contingencies 5mo agoInteresting how deeply east coast Australia is colored. I live in Sydney, a city of 5.6 million humans, and yet my yard apparently has at least the following fungi I can identify to species level: Aseroe rubra (alien thing with tendrils), Astraeus hygrometricus, Cladia aggregata, Coprinellus disseminatus, Coprinellus micaceus, Cruentomycena viscidocruenta, Flavoparmelia caperata, Heterodea muelleri, Hypholoma fasciculare, Leratiomyces ceres, Mycena tenerrima, Myriostoma australianum, Omphalotus nidiformis (glows in the dark), Panellus luxfilamentus, Satyrus rubicundus (looks like a red penis), Scleroderma cepa, Scleroderma citrinum, Trametes coccinea, Trametes versicolor, Usnea hirta.
- birdfood 5mo agoI live on the Gold Coast and I have seen in my yard Aseroe rubra, glow in the dark mushrooms (not for a while now) and many others. Just this weekend I found one that looks a bit like a king oyster. Where did you get your list? I was looking for a visual guide to local fungi
- contingencies 5mo agoI got mine from a few years of iNaturalist. I have more, just not confirmed at species level. You can try https://qldfungi.org.au/fungi-id/foq-main-page https://qldfungi.org.au/fungi-id/foq-main-page ... probably the Border Ranges will have a lot, but right on the coast you'll see less.
- N_Lens 5mo agoI believe Planet will talk to us if we are willing to listen. These fungal stalks behave as multistate relays: taken together, the neural net connectivity must be staggering. Can a planet be said to have achieved sentience? - Lady Deirdre Skye, Planet Dreams, Alpha Centauri
- dude250711 5mo agoNo Deirdre, it cannot.
- deleted 5mo ago[deleted]
- jmuguy 5mo agoMeanwhile she's using mind worms as police. I would love for Firaxis to revisit Alpha Centauri.
- throwaway173738 5mo agoThere wasn’t a government in that game that didn’t have a single horrifying policy of some sort. They were living their own individuated utopian dreams, and I feel like what made it real was that the writers never shied away from the dark side of each utopia.
- aaron695 5mo ago[dead]
- TrackerFF 5mo agoSay you have a filament that's 1 µm in diameter, and 1 meter long. You want to fill up a 1m^3 (1m W x 1m H x 1m L) space with these, how many of these can you place in such a space? Over a trillion! And thus, the combined km length of these will also be over a billion km. At such small scales things can become very long when summed up.
- Quarrel 5mo agoEverytime I see people talking about the length of their coastlines ... Look at how long this edge of my fractal is, Ma!
- Keegs 5mo agoI understand the infinite coastline concept in theory but in practice would you even want to measure a coastline that way? Even if your goal was “perfect” precision, coastlines are variable. You’d have to take an average across tides and that would require zooming out enough to get a normal sounding answer.
- euroderf 5mo agoHow would this compare with packing the volume with DNA ?
- gettingoverit 5mo ago550,000 km/mm^3, or 180 m^3 for the whole 100 quadrillion km thing.
- augusto-moura 5mo agoIt is obvious when you think that 3d volumes scale cubicly and 1d lengths scale linearly. Adding another 1 meter to a cube of said filaments would increase the total length by a power of 3!
- reliablereason 5mo agoIf you have a number that is 1000^90000000 that number is larger than the number of atoms in the observable universe.
- xattt 5mo agoLength is ultimately an arbitrary concept, and a measurement like thay can be made even more impressive by going down to some other unit like Angstroms.
- kolinko 5mo agoSo around the length of the coastline of UK.
- metalman 5mo agothere was other work done on nemetodes, that are all over the planet, in glaciers, deap ocean, in rock far underground, etc, where someone did a representation of the earth, but with everything but the nemetodes removed, my speculation is that a large part of nemetode and mycylium networks, overlap.
- animalfarm 5mo agoHighly recommended: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/52668915-entangled-life https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/52668915-entangled-life
- randlet 5mo agoGreat book. I really enjoyed the audiobook version which is narrated by the author.
- adolph 5mo agoIt is on my to-read list, but be sure to take some claims of common mycorrhizal networks (aka "wood wide web") with a grain of salt. A later review paper [0] found that evidence for some claims is weak. 0. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41559-023-01986-1 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41559-023-01986-1
- xvxvx 5mo agoI read to the part where they used machine learning to get the results and lost all faith in this being accurate at all.
- estetlinus 5mo agoAre they trying to say its ChatGPT?
- jakzurr 5mo agoThe article is still pretty cool, even though the discussion brings up some issues with their arithmetic.
- tromp 5mo agoMeanwhile, a single human cell's DNA stretches for about 2 meter, one human's DNA stretches for about 2 x 5.4 trillion meter, and all living human DNA for a whopping 8.6 x 10^22 meters, nearly a thousand times longer than the fungi networks... [1] https://www.reddit.com/r/theydidthemath/comments/1gfq6k2/how_long_would_all_the_dna_in_humans_stretch_out/ https://www.reddit.com/r/theydidthemath/comments/1gfq6k2/how...
- kjkjadksj 5mo agoThose fungi networks also have DNA
- rglover 5mo agoLearning that trees use mycelium like their own internet to communicate about where resources are was my first real..."oh man, I feel small" moment. Even crazier to think about when the scale of the network starts to get quantified.
- teleforce 5mo agoFun facts, fungi are genetically more similar to humans and chimpanzees than they are to plants [1],[2]. [1] Fungi and humans: closer than you think: https://www.cell.com/trends/genetics/abstract/S0168-9525(01)02498-2 https://www.cell.com/trends/genetics/abstract/S0168-9525(01)... [2] Three reasons fungi are not plants: https://asm.org/articles/2021/january/three-reasons-fungi-are-not-plants https://asm.org/articles/2021/january/three-reasons-fungi-ar...