Research found: Mushrooms speak to each other in a language of up to 50 words
It turns out that mushrooms can talk - and they use their special language to warn each other
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04/05/2022
Wednesday, 04 May 2022, 20:45
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Mushroom picking in Hulda Forest (video editor: Maya Ben-Nissan, photo: Ziv Reinstein)
Scientists from the UK have discovered that mushrooms can talk to each other - and even have abundant vocabulary.
A study detailing their alleged fungal talk was published in early April in the journal Royal Society Open Science.
"We have found that 'fungal language' surpasses European languages in morphological complexity," reads a study by UWE Computer Science Professor Bristol Andrew Adamecki.
To find out if mushrooms do communicate - and not just with psychedelic adventurers - Adamtzky analyzed the electrical impulses of four species of mushrooms: anoki, split gill, ghost mushrooms and caterpillar mushrooms.
The fungal linguist obtained this data by inserting tiny electrodes into the webs that spread within the soil and made up the roots of the organism, known as mycelium.
He then documented the results.
As it turns out, the scientist was right: Adamtzky discovered that the electrical signals often occurred in clusters, mirroring human vocabulary and using up to 50 words, the Guardian reported.
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"We show that the distribution of fungal word lengths is consistent with that of human languages," the researcher wrote in the study.
Split gills - a species that lives in rotting wood - created the most complex "sentences" of the four mushroom varieties.
Scientists assume that mushrooms "talk" to each other in order to announce their presence to other companies in their cluster - similar to howling wolves to alert the band, the scientist explained.
The fungus may also try to draw the attention of other fungi both to potential threats - such as weather or pests - and to food sources.
This is what the experiment looks like
However, there is a possibility that everything is in our head.
"There is another possibility - they say nothing," Adamtsky said.
While researchers may agree that the patterns are not random, more research is needed before the mushroom language becomes official.
"While it's certainly interesting, interpreting things as language seems overly enthusiastic, and it will require much more research and testing of critical hypotheses before we see the mushroom language in Google Translate," said mycologist (mushroom researcher) Dan Barber of Exeter University, co-author In previous studies on the subject, he suggested that electrical impulses may indicate active food collection.
In a similar linguistic study from 2018, researchers from the United Arab Emirates found that insulting plants can be harmful to their health.
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