This gigantic mushroom is as massive as three blue whales | Smart News

The blue whale draws a lot of ink to be the largest animal ever to have lived, beating even the biggest dinosaurs. But it turns out that the largest organisms on Earth are not in the oceans, they are under our feet. In weight and area, honey mushrooms of the genus Armillaria has beaten the whales many times. Now, reports Matthew Taub to Atlas Obscura, a new analysis of the "gigantic mushroom" original in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan shows that the huge mushroom is much larger and much older than the researchers had originally thought.

About 25 years ago, researchers discovered that one The Armillaria gallica fungus near Crystal Falls, Michigan, covered about 91 hectares, weighed 110 tonnes, and was about 1,500 years old, setting a new record for the largest organism of the time. For a new study published on the biRxiv pre-print service, James Anderson, a biologist at the University of Toronto and one of the original discoverers of the fungus, returned to the site and collected 245 samples of the fungus and examined his genome. . The team confirmed that indeed the whole mushroom is only an individual.

DNA has also shown a very slow mutation rate, which means that the fungus does not evolve very fast. The visit also led them to review the age of the mushroom at 2,500 years old and determine that it is four times larger than the initial estimate, about 440 tons, or the same. equivalent of three blue whales.

How can a mushroom be so big? What we consider mushrooms are only the fructifications of organisms. The main part of a mushroom is made up of a mass of underground tendrils called mycelium. Depending on the species, these tendrils can feed on soil, decaying plant material or wood. In the case of massive honey mushrooms, they have particularly thick black tendrils called rhizomorphs, reports Sarah Zhang at L & # 39; Atlantic. Rhizomorphs can spread from acre to acre in search of wood to consume. While other fungi prefer decaying wood, the honey fungus infects living trees, kills them often over several decades, and then continues to eat them after death. It is possible to find the underground mass near the honey mushrooms it sends occasionally, but the telltale sign that the mushroom is under the foot is the grove of trees dying above.

The gigantic Crystal Falls mushroom was the gigantic mushroom of origin that showed that these organisms could reach a huge size. But since its discovery, it has been overshadowed by other honey mushrooms. A Armillaria, located in the Blue Mountains in eastern Oregon, covers an area of ​​three square miles and is perhaps over 8,000 years old. He holds the current title of the biggest mushroom.

The size and enormous distribution of these underground fungi are hard to imagine. "I wish all the substrate [soil, wood and other matter the fungus grows on] would be transparent for five minutes, so I can see where he is and what he's doing, "Anderson told Zhang. "We would have learned so much from a five-minute overview."

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