A team of researchers in Japan made a surprising discovery while studying an obscure fungus called Phanerochaete velutina: it can not only recognize shapes, but also transmit information about its surroundings throughout its fungal network.
“You’d be surprised what mushrooms are capable of,” said associate professor Yu Fukasawaforest ecologist at Tohoku University.
“They have memory, they learn and they can make decisions. The differences in how they solve problems, compared to humans, are amazing,” continues the researcher, quoted by Futurism.
In a series of experiments described in a study published in the journal Fungal EcologyFukasawa and his colleagues arranged small blocks of wood into different shapes, leaving a mycelium network of P. velutina (which usually feeds on peach and nectarine trees) to explore them.
An obscure fungus makes decisions about how to spread based on its environment
What they discovered about this obscure fungus is surprising: The mycelium seemed to make decisions based on the arrangement of the building blocks, rather than simply spreading from a central point, suggesting a rudimentary level of intelligence, the researchers say. For example, when the blocks were laid out in a cross shape, the mycelium recognized the blocks in the corners and seemed to pass information about the arrangement to the rest of the network.
And when the blocks were placed in a circle, the mycelium no longer extended toward the center, suggesting that it had “inferred” that no block was there.
“These findings suggest that the fungal mycelium can ‘recognise’ differences in the spatial arrangement of wood blocks as part of its wood-degrading activity,” the researchers wrote in the paper. They hope their findings could pave the way for advances in a variety of fields, from the study of other microscopic organisms, such as molds that have also demonstrated rudimentary levels of intelligence, to biological computers powered by cultures of brain organoids.
“The functional significance of the fungal mycelium could provide important insights into studying the primitive intelligence of brainless organisms, understanding its ecological impact, and developing biocomputers,” they added.
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Source: www.descopera.ro
